Global surveillance

[1] Its existence was not widely acknowledged by governments and the mainstream media until the global surveillance disclosures by Edward Snowden triggered a debate about the right to privacy in the Digital Age.

Although, to quote H. Akın Ünver "Even when conducted for national security and counterterrorism purposes, the scale and detail of mass citizen data collected, leads to rightfully pessimistic observations about individual freedoms and privacy".

[6][7] In the aftermath of the 1970s Watergate affair and a subsequent congressional inquiry led by Sen. Frank Church,[8] it was revealed that the NSA, in collaboration with Britain's GCHQ, had routinely intercepted the international communications of prominent anti-Vietnam War leaders such as Jane Fonda and Dr. Benjamin Spock.

is building a 1-million-square-foot facility in the Utah desert to store and process it.On 6 June 2013, Britain's The Guardian newspaper began publishing a series of revelations by an as yet unknown American whistleblower, revealed several days later to be ex-CIA and ex-NSA-contracted systems analyst Edward Snowden.

[16][17] In over two subsequent months of publications, it became clear that the NSA had operated a complex web of spying programs that allowed it to intercept Internet and telephone conversations from over a billion users from dozens of countries around the world.

Some of the NSA's programs were directly aided by national and foreign intelligence agencies, Britain's GCHQ and Australia's ASD, as well as by large private telecommunications and Internet corporations, such as Verizon, Telstra,[19] Google, and Facebook.

According to the April 2013 summary of documents leaked by Snowden, other than to combat terrorism, these surveillance programs were employed to assess the foreign policy and economic stability of other countries,[26] and to gather "commercial secrets".

[27] In a statement addressed to the National Congress of Brazil in early August 2013, journalist Glenn Greenwald maintained that the U.S. government had used counter-terrorism as a pretext for clandestine surveillance in order to compete with other countries in the "business, industrial and economic fields".

[33] According to the congressional testimony of Keith B. Alexander, Director of the National Security Agency, one of the purposes of its data collection is to store all the phone records inside a place that can be searched and assessed at all times.

[36] The international surveillance tool XKeyscore allows government analysts to search through vast databases containing emails, online chats and the browsing histories of millions of individuals.

[40] Under the NSA's PRISM surveillance program, data that has already reached its final destination would be directly harvested from the servers of the following U.S. service providers: Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google, Facebook, Paltalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, and Apple Inc.[41][42] Contact chaining is a method that involves utilizing data related to social links among individuals, including call logs that connect phone numbers with each other, in order to pinpoint individuals associated with criminal groups.

[45] The NSA uses the analysis of phone call and e-mail logs of American citizens to create sophisticated graphs of their social connections that can identify their associates, their locations at certain times, their traveling companions and other personal information.

This enables NSA analysts to map cellphone owners' relationships by correlating their patterns of movement over time with thousands or millions of other phone users who cross their paths.

[74] As part of a joint operation with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the NSA deployed secret eavesdropping posts in eighty U.S. embassies and consulates worldwide.

[86] Although the treaty was later revised to include other countries such as Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Norway, Turkey, and the Philippines,[86] most of the information sharing has been performed by the so-called "Five Eyes",[87] a term referring to the following English-speaking western democracies and their respective intelligence agencies:

Singapore, a former British colony in the Asia-Pacific region (blue dot), plays a vital role in intercepting Internet and telecommunications traffic heading from Australia/Japan to Europe, and vice versa.

According to a 2008 Five Eyes document leaked by Snowden, data of Australian citizens shared with foreign countries include "bulk, unselected, unminimised metadata" as well as "medical, legal or religious information".

[97] In addition, the ASD cooperates with the Security and Intelligence Division (SID) of the Republic of Singapore in an international operation to intercept underwater telecommunications cables across the Eastern Hemisphere and the Pacific Ocean.

[102] The Politiets Efterretningstjeneste (PET) of Denmark, a domestic intelligence agency, exchanges data with the NSA on a regular basis, as part of a secret agreement with the United States.

[108] In early 2013, Hans-Georg Maaßen, President of the German domestic security agency Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (BfV), made several visits to the headquarters of the NSA.

[111] Under Project 6, which is jointly operated by the CIA, BfV, and BND, a massive database containing personal information such as photos, license plate numbers, Internet search histories and telephone metadata was developed to gain a better understanding of the social relationships of presumed jihadists.

[116] As stated in a memorandum detailing the rules of data sharing on U.S. citizens, the ISNU is obligated to: Destroy upon recognition any communication contained in raw SIGINT provided by NSA that is either to or from an official of the U.S. government.

[118][119][120][121][122] The Algemene Inlichtingen en Veiligheidsdienst (AIVD) of the Netherlands has been receiving and storing data of Internet users gathered by U.S. intelligence sources such as the NSA's PRISM surveillance program.

[123] During a meeting in February 2013, the AIVD and the MIVD briefed the NSA on their attempts to hack Internet forums and to collect the data of all users using a technology known as Computer Network Exploitation (CNE).

[128] The Defence Ministry of Singapore and its Security and Intelligence Division (SID) have been secretly intercepting much of the fibre optic cable traffic passing through the Asian continent.

[134] The Federal Intelligence Service (NDB) of Switzerland exchanges information with the NSA regularly, on the basis of a secret agreement to circumvent domestic surveillance restrictions.

[142] Projects developed by Booz Allen Hamilton include the Strategic Innovation Group to identify terrorists through social media, on behalf of government agencies.

[157] The British telecommunications company Vodafone (code-named Gerontic[154]) granted Britain's intelligence agency GCHQ "unlimited access" to its network of undersea cables, according to documents leaked by Snowden.

[72] In October 2012, Iran's police chief Esmail Ahmadi Moghaddam alleged that Google is not a search engine but "a spying tool" for Western intelligence agencies.

Fearing the risk of being targeted by government surveillance, 28% of PEN's American members have curbed their usage of social media, and 16% have self-censored themselves by avoiding controversial topics in their writings.