US government is spying on every single bit passing through the fiber cables of US and data stored in the data centers of US. For this, US government is taking the help of FBI and National Security Agency. Both organisations are tapping in the servers of 9 top internet companies located in US to extract various kind of user data and logs. This program is code-names are PRISM.
NSA program was enabled by the changes in US surveillance law under President Bush. This was again renewed under Barak Obama. This progam can do in-depth surveillance on live communications and stored information.
Popular news website Washington Post managed to get the top secret documents of this top secret programs. These documents reveals how US government is accessing servers of Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple.
London based The Guardian also reported that GCHQ, Britain’s equivalent of the NSA, also gathering user information from the same internet companies through this operation.
Washington post has a 41 pages slide that clearly describes how the program works and collect data from servers of popular tech companies.
According to Slides, the program was started back in 2007 with Microsoft and then it added other tech giants. It also states that PRISM program costs $20 million per year.
Slide has the name of all tech giants but no companies accepted either knowledge about PRISM program, or providing any user information to government agency. In past few days all companies denied the claims.
After the leak of the PRISM program in media, Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper issued a statement about the program. He said, “information collected under this program is among the most important and valuable foreign intelligence information we collect, and is used to protect our nation from a wide variety of threats. The unauthorized disclosure of information about this important and entirely legal program is reprehensible and risks important protections for the security of Americans.”
He also added that reports in media contains inaccuracies but he did not want make anything clear.
The Guardian has also published a heat map to show the snapshot of data collected from different countries. Till 2013, the agency has collected 97 billion pieces of data from computers world wide. Iran is at top from where they collected large amount of data that is 14 billion. Other countries are Pakistan, Jordan, Arab Allies, Egypt and then India.
All these reports show how American Spy agencies are logging data of Internet users. They give a security reason for this program. If you are thinking that it is illegal, I want to note that the program is legal in US. It was authorized in the FISA Amendments Act.
Are Companies Giving Access to their Database?
There is no clear evidence that companies have given access to user data. But the slide has the name of top 9 tech giants which we use daily. So, there may a case the agencies are intercepting the data. But there is another issue of encryption because most of the websites now use HTTPS secure connection that provides end to end connection to avoid data intercept. The intercepted data will be useless and completely unreadable. One needs to have proper mechanism to decrypt the data. So, there is a possibility that NSA is intercepting the traffic and decrypting it. Decryption of SSL encrypted data is not an easy task. It needs large computational resources that will be extremely expensive because both public key and symmetric keys would have to be cracked.
There is another possibility that US agencies can get the SSL certificate’s private key from the certificate authorities. If these things are true, then those tech giants would not have any information that their data is being intercepted by government agencies.
NSA Prism is affecting all people living outside US and using the services of these popular tech giants. The only way to protect yourself from this is to leave internet and delete all your web accounts. But you should not forget that you have already been monitored for almost 6 years. US agencies have enough data about you.
We are trying to get more information about PRISM and involvement of tech giants. If you have any information which you want to share with us, contact us. Share your views with us via comments.
