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Isdore Guvamombe
Reflections
Social media has become a vital cog in our lives and with it comes a buffet of consequences, positive or negative. For lack of diction, let me call the whole hodgepodge of trickets that host our e-medium, the cyberspace. Very, very critical.
Our lives can no longer be separated from social media and the adjunct technologies that carry the social media portals we use.
Think of e-commerce, e-mails, e-banking, e-governance, e-ticketing and e-everything.
But who and what is behind the hosting of the social media platforms? Which eye is behind the scenes and what does that eye do with our information?
I belong to the old school of journalism and love reading. I always have something to read around me. I enjoy reading anything. The Washington Post and The Guardian are on my list of what I read more often. I love Reuters too.
Recently, I got a shocker when I came across two articles that sent me thinking and re-thinking. I have thought of this again and again. I really had not applied my mind on hodgepodge of electronic gadgets that I use and the portals that are the enablers of the functions to get on social media.
The Washington Post, Reuters and The Guardian aver that our use of Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft Data, etc has actually been manipulated as they in most cases give back door access to the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), and the National Security Agency (NSA) on behalf of the US government.
I read with shock that the five-year programme has given the US government direct access to emails, messages, browser history for people and governments in the developing world, especially in Africa.
So the question is that since social media has become the axis of our life; are we safe?
It is also about our personal, national and global security as we use our gadgets such as cellphones, computers etc.
The cyberspace, which has become the axis of our lives, day in day out, has something in its back room or backyard – the spying capability.
The US National Security Agency and FBI have been harvesting data such as audio, video, photographs, emails, and documents from the internal servers of nine major technology companies, according to a leaked 41-slide security presentation obtained by The Washington Post.
According to the aper, the programme’s slides were provided by a “career intelligence officer” who had “first-hand experience with these systems, and expressed horror at their capabilities”. The oficer wished to expose the programme’s “gross intrusion on privacy.”
The programme, codenamed PRISM, is considered highly classified and has never been made public before.
The list of companies involved include the who’s who of Silicon Valley – Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, and Apple. Dropbox, though not yet an official part of the programme, is said to be joining it soon. These companies have all willingly participated in the programme, says the Post.
According to the leaked presentation, the programme has been in action since 2007, and is considered the biggest contributor to the daily briefings given to the president, providing data in 1 477 articles last year alone.
Allegedly, nearly one in seven intelligence reports from the NSA contains data from the PRISM programme.
The NSA has the ability to pull any data it likes from these companies, but it claims that it does not try to collect it all.
The PRISM programme goes above and beyond the existing laws that state companies must comply with government requests for data, as it gives the NSA direct access to each company’s servers — essentially letting NSA do as it pleases.
The programme was initiated to overcome what the agency saw as constraints within the existing FISA warrant programme that did not allow it to make use of the “home-field advantage” provided by having most of the internet’s biggest companies on US soil.
The gig guns of Silicon Valley are involved in the PRISM programme.
Microsoft was the first company to bow to the government’s wishes and join the PRISM in 2007, while Apple held out for five years before agreeing.
Though Google and Facebook are a part of PRISM, X has not yet joined. Apparently, the only members of Congress that knew about PRISM’s existence were bound by a secrecy oath not to speak of it publicly.
In a statement provided to both The Washington Post and The Guardian, Google denied that the government had any sort of backdoor access to its systems.
“Google cares deeply about the security of our users’ data. We disclose user data to the government in accordance with the law, and we review all such requests carefully. From time to time, people allege that we have created a government ‘backdoor’ into our systems, but Google does not have a ‘backdoor’ for the government to access private user data,” said the internet search giant.
The trail of documents for the programme reveal that the NSA collects a large amount of data on the American public through the PRISM programme.
For example, if a specific target is investigated using PRISM, that target’s complete inbox and outbox are accessed, in addition to anyone who is connected to it.
This high level of access was initially given to the NSA by then president George Bush and was later renewed in 2012 by President Obama.
This report follows the news from earlier this week of the NSA’s involvement in collecting call data and records from Verizon in another massive surveillance partnership.
Online Reporter