Reprinted from Vice Magazine
On Friday, the world found out about PRISM: a secret tool developed by the United States’ National Security Agency that has been used, since 2007, to directly tap into the servers of companies like Facebook, Google, and Apple without the permission of the corporations themselves. From what has been described by the Guardian and their source Edward Snowden, a former employee of the private security contractor Booz Allen, the NSA has been recording anything and everything they can through the capabilities of a massive surveillance net that is growing exponentially in size.
As Edward Snowden described to the Guardian in a video interview, from an undisclosed location in Hong Kong, anyone who is deemed suspicious by the NSA can be painted as a threat. With so much information being recorded, anyone who falls under the suspicion of the NSA can potentially be portrayed as a “wrongdoer” through archived recordings of their instant messages, phone records, emails, and online activities. If they want to attack you, they can, and the danger of innocent people being portrayed as threatening individuals is a real concern that people need to be discussing. And while this possibility is of little worry to the average citizen, to people like Edward Snowden or Wikileaks’ infamous military source Bradley Manning who have attempted to challenge the institutions of power, the consequences are very grave.
In Canada, some people may not feel too alarmed by the revelations that Edward Snowden has brought to the public eye. For one, this is the work of the US Government, not the Canadian government. But it is crucial to remember that the respective sovereignty of citizens on the internet is blurry at best. For example, here is a map of where your communications go when you visit Facebook from, say, Toronto.