Democratic and authoritarian countries are competing to see which of them can carry out mass surveillance most and best (worst).
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There are two types of mass surveillance. Commercial, which you can read about here. And mass surveillance carried out by states and rulers. Both are reprehensible, and our attitude is well-established: mass surveillance infringes individuals’ human rights, invades the personal privacy free societies are built on, and is also ineffective against the problems it’s claimed to solve. This is the ultimate core of our business. Our company was founded in 2009 because the surveillance laws were going in the wrong direction, and our message to those in power all over the world is the same now as it was then: there’s a difference between surveillance and mass surveillance. Don’t get involved with the latter: don’t carry out mass surveillance on your population or that of other countries. Use targeted surveillance if there’s a suspicion of a crime, in a proportional way and via independent court decisions.<br>We think human rights are worth preserving and defending. And it’s important to remember that they’re there to protect people against the state. They are a landmark to cling to, to prevent the worst parts of human history repeating themselves. They are there because people and those in power take bad decisions. Because governments change. Because no state should have total and uncontrollable power. Ultimately, the state should be there for the people and not the other way round<br>Even if a large part of today’s mass surveillance is global, it originates in different countries and changes depending on what country you live in. You can read about the consequences of mass surveillance here. But in this article, we’re going to take a look at some of the clearest examples of how widespread it has become in large parts of the world.<br>USA: with the capacity and experience of monitoring the entire population of the world.<br>There’s a problem with reporting the mass surveillance carried out by countries like the USA (at least if you want to stick to proven facts): they aren’t very happy about you talking about it. Of course there are exceptions. Like when self-satisfied managers like the CIA’s chief technology officer Ira ‘Gus’ Hunt give presentations and boast to journalists about how “we try to collect everything and hang onto it forever”. Or when a senior Defense Department official explains that not even the Pentagon’s employees can expect to have their privacy respected: “We want our people to understand: they should make no assumptions about anonymity. You are not anonymous on this planet at this point in our existence. Everyone is trackable, traceable, discoverable to some degree”.<br>And sometimes a building says more than a thousand words, like when the NSA constructs enormous server halls out in the Utah desert to store data.<br>But to get mass surveillance down in black-and-white, to produce hard facts and figures, it requires brave whistleblowers like Edward Snowden. It’s only through this type of hero that we get an insight into what’s actually going on. Even now we still don’t have better answers than what Snowden gave us in 2013. We’d hoped for change in the wake of his revelations, but unfortunately they’re still relevant today, so that’s where we’ll start.<br>Snowden's revelations showed that American authorities were monitoring hundreds of millions of people all over the world – every day.
American mass surveillance is possible thanks to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), a law that the USA renews every five years. Section 702 is the key to why American authorities need no court decisions to monitor people. The law came into being on the pretext that terrorists were being tracked after the 9/11 attacks, and would ‘only’ refer to eavesdropping on non-American citizens, but as the law is written and as the internet is constructed, in practice it means surveillance of both foreign and American citizens. When Snowden’s revelations emerged, it also turned out that it wasn’t just being used against people suspected of a crime, but that the American administration was carrying out mass surveillance of millions of people. Other documents that Snowden leaked demonstrated how the National Security Agency (NSA) had the capacity to monitor essentially every person on the planet, and that they weren’t saving their powder: the documents showed, amongst other things that they collected 200 million text messages from different parts of the world – every day.<br>Using the program Xkeyscore, the NSA’s analysts had access to a database covering “nearly everything a typical user does on the internet”. This included both direct data like emails in people’s inboxes, chat conversations and private messages on Facebook. But also things categorized as metadata; search histories and exactly what...