Big Brother. The entity that allegedly keeps tabs on every one of us, even on the people who are it. The mysterious entity that apparently knows everything about us. It is an eerie feeling to be under constant surveillance, having your actions tracked, your secrets spied on.
You could say governments exceed their privileges by spying on its citizens. Espionage has been a formidable weapon against opposing nations, a tool that simplifies negotiations and an excuse to initiate hostilities for a very long time. It is an accepted practice that has been around for as long as we can remember. Even Sun Tzu wrote that half of winning a battle is knowing your enemy. The other half is knowing thyself, thus knowing what is going on in your own backyard. That means counterintelligence, spying on your own people to reveal threats from within. It is necessary to refrain your enemies the knowledge of your strength as ignorance can only mean guessing. Guessing means uncertainty, and it is generally an unwise decision to be the aggressor unless you know that it is a slam dunk, a certain victory. A wise man only goes to battle when the war has already been won.
Then again, Big Brother can only know what we give out, what we tell it. The details we share on Facebook, the thoughts we write to our blogs, the comments we make on forums, the transactions we do in banks. We are the ones who create the information trail that can be traced back to us. By openly revealing it to the world we are making it easily accessible to those that we want knowing about our private lives as well as we do not. Writing a blog inherently includes the desire to share it, otherwise it would not be up on some server that we have no control of and used by millions of other people. Otherwise it would not be online. A lot of people lack this understanding.
PRISM is a program that is run by the NSA and its task is to collect, store and comb through massive amounts of data from both passing packets as well as online information. It gains a lot of its current information from so-called network traffic crossroads, places where more information goes through. Data on the internet does not necessarily take the quickest or the most direct path, but it generally takes the cheapest. This is why these crossroads have been built, to enable huge quantities of packets run through as cheaply as possible as efficiently as possible. They are also perfect places for information gathering, every packet can be read as it goes through, on its way from the user to the server and vice versa. Many crossroads are located in the United States, which is why PRISM has an impressive field where to hunt for information. It is also known that some of these crossroads reside in the UK as well as elsewhere in Europe, and it has become known that the people who maintain these crossroads not only keep an eye on the traffic themselves (hunting for keywords as one example), also cooperate with CIA. The extent of the cooperation is not known, but there is no doubt in that some information is definitely shared. In fact, the EU is currently complaining about the US having spied on the EU while EU was giving the US the information and wherewithal to do it.
Officially, PRISM was created to detect terrorist threat online and if found, be able to show a trace of the possible terrorists' activities in the past. This means keeping logs on every person that becomes part of the system being observed, and as anyone is a possible terrorist, it can contain anybody. Officially, it is not collecting information about foreign citizens, and if it is, it is not its main goal but rather collateral action. When you are looking at internet traffic, it is difficult to say whose citizen is sending out the information gathered. Often all you get is an IP of the user, just a location where the user is currently situated. But the IP could be anyone's. The IP also only shows up if it has a reason to, packets to send, information to share and request.
In essence, PRISM is Big Brother's way of collecting information from users who have expressed the will to share information with the rest of the world, including the PRISM program. Allegedly this information has been thus far used to foil terrorist plots, and probably detect some espionage aimed at the United States. After all, it is a counterintelligence program, and it has to be used as such. As far as the users' privacy goes, think about what the information actually is that can be obtained by such surveillance. It is the users' own shared information, users' public activities, web searches, stuff people do by communicating with dozens of other machines. What's a couple more in the mix?
The good part of counterintelligence programs that survey information flow created by those surveyed is exactly that - the user controls what is surveyed. If you do not wish PRISM to know your date of birth, do not post it on some random server. If you do not want PRISM to know you have a keen interest in Justin Bieber, use more than one device to keep up with the latest news on him. PRISM might be able to connect a data flow to a device, but probably not a device to a specific user. With so much information going through it is probably searching for keywords that raise red flags, something suspicious to look at more closely, the rest goes by as if it were noise. Using multiple devices masks your identity because they might be able to profile the user of a single device, the users using multiple devices will undoubtedly create pockets of information impossible to be gleaned through a single device. Security through obscurity.
When user privacy is a problem, it is more of a problem about things that the user cannot control. These include but are not limited to security cameras, actions of other people, satellite footage. We can hardly influence what other people share with everybody else, and we can change the placement or existence of security cameras and public webcams. Yet they record our activities without our direct consent. But they are necessary for out safety, as is counterintelligence. We accept being recorded wherever we go, we've long accepted the United States' role as the world police that acts first and asks questions later, why should this be any different? I am not saying 'deal with it', I'm saying this is an inevitable situation, what matters is how we react to it. Surely it is no surprise that with all the information floating around on the interwebs, someone gets the idea of observing it. I could care less.
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