The leak of information on the US government’s secret Prism surveillance programme by ex-National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden has exposed one part of a sprawling system of phone and internet tapping of whole populations as part of the ‘War on Terror’. The revelations have caused uproar in Congress among ruling class figures who were in the dark about what is going on; they may be even more shocked to realise that this may all be legal. It is clear that Prism is the tip of the iceberg as the imperialist states build a global network, controlled by an elite of government, corporate and military interests. Details of Britain’s surveillance operations are beginning to leak out. The targets include rival capitalist powers, ‘rogue’ states, Islamic fundamentalists, anti-imperialist resistance groups, revolutionaries and working class people hit by rising austerity.
Snowden’s leak shows that the NSA programmes gather phone data in the US and internet traffic overseas. The Prism programme ‘targets the internet communications of foreigners’, according to a briefing sent to Congress on 15 June. Its checks and procedures are approved by a secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The briefing says that it monitors phone call locations but not the content of the calls. New York Congressman Jerrold Nadler was ‘stunned’ to hear that phone calls could be listened to simply based on an analyst’s decision. NSA officers require ‘reasonable suspicion’ that their target is associated with specific foreign terrorist organisations. Of course, the groups the US state sees as terrorist include anyone opposed to US foreign policy including national liberation organisations in oppressed countries such as Palestine, Colombia, Kurdistan, the Philippines and elsewhere.
The US intelligence community claims that both the internet and phone tap programmes were authorised by Congress under section 215 of the Patriot Act and section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act – a claim disputed by a number of senators and congressmen. They may well be wrong. The FISA Act does not require a court to approve a US phone records database query. This monstrous collection of data from internet companies under the Prism programme is only the tip of a much bigger digital surveillance programme, with the NSA on direct line to the world’s raw internet traffic data. Prism is only one component of a network of similar operations and legal acts which tap into global internet network cables, growing in number and reach as the ruling classes of the US and Britain alike capitalise on incidents like 9/11 or the Woolwich attack.
President Obama and his representatives repeat the mantra about ‘terrorism’ and ‘freedoms’. FBI boss Robert Mueller says that surveillance programmes are ‘designed to address a seam between foreign and domestic counterterrorism efforts exposed in the 9/11 attacks’. But the NSA has been tapping foreign phone calls since the 1970s. Now it tells Congress that it doesn’t even need a warrant. Not that getting one would be a problem – between 1978 to 2012, the courts turned down just 11 of 34,000 FBI requests for warrants to monitor particular phone numbers and email accounts.
After the 11 September attacks the Bush administration tapped phone and internet cables as part of the Terrorist Surveillance Programme. The 2007 Protect America Act continued to ensure that wire taps did not need warrants and overseen only by secret courts in Washington. The then Senator Obama voted against it, saying ‘This administration also puts forward a false choice between the liberties we cherish and the security we provide.’ Prism came out of this Act and the Obama government has maintained and strengthened it, following in the footsteps of Bush and co.
The Act is approved yearly by the Attorney General, the director of national intelligence and a federal judge in ‘classified’ documents, secret plans and ‘directives’ to internet companies. These include Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, AOL and Facebook – which said it received up to 10,000 requests for data in six months in 2012. Wolf Ruzicka, chief executive of Washington-based EastBanc software company said, ‘I cannot think of anything, outside of a face-to-face conversation, that they could not have access to.’
Some inside Microsoft call the process ‘Hoovering’, after the first head of the FBI, J Edgar Hoover, who created COINTELPRO, the undercover operation aimed at destroying the Black Panthers and other left opposition groups. Through Prism, the NSA gathers files and information from internet companies to spy on those it sees as a potential threat to the imperialist state. For this purpose, $1.7bn is being ploughed into the Utah Data Center, a fortress for NSA’s expanding labyrinth of data, equipped with supercomputers storing an astronomical amount of email, phone and other data. It will consume the amount of energy produced by a small power station and employ 200 contractors.
The uproar from sections of the US political establishment is partly motivated by ruling class attitudes about protecting the private lives of (usually very rich) individuals. Critics like Senator Mark Udall complain that this data collection should not be ‘all or nothing’, and speak of tabling a bill to limit the scope of the Patriot Act to protect US citizens. But these revelations of widespread surveillance represent more than this. They represent a privileged ruling elite’s moves towards totalitarian control over the vast majority, in the name of the War on Terror, the capitalist crisis and stamping out opposition.
High-tech intelligence gathering and digital counter-surveillance techniques have a very real impact in the real world, where US imperialism wages war abroad and pushes austerity and repression at home to protect its system. There is growing evidence of British links to Prism and other programmes, supporting US terror around the world. The GCHQ (Britain’s equivalent of the NSA) is reported to provide intelligence for CIA drone strikes in Pakistan, which have killed up to 3,325 people between June 2004 and September 2012, including 176 children: 49 civilians for every one known ‘terrorist’.
Foreign Secretary William Hague would not ‘confirm or deny’ whether the British government knew about Prism. It was then revealed that GCHQ had been involved in spying on foreign delegations at the G20 summit in 2009, with the governments of Russia, Turkey and South Africa furious over the revelations. An ex-aide to Gordon Brown, the Labour prime minister at the time, said, ‘We always assumed that everyone else did it at such meetings.’ The new leak came as Cameron was meeting the G8 heads of state in the North of Ireland, creating a diplomatic crisis at a time when Britain and the US are gunning for increased military intervention against Assad in Syria. Turkey is a key ally of the imperialists and the ‘rebels’ they support, but Russia, aware of its own interests, continues to back the Assad government.
In an attempt to assure British citizens, Hague told the BBC, ‘If you are a law abiding citizen of this country … you have nothing to fear about the British state or intelligence agencies listening to your phone calls or anything like that. Indeed, you’ll never be aware of all the things those agencies are doing to stop your identity being stolen and stop a terrorist blowing you up tomorrow.’ What a shameless statement from an imperialist government that has exported murderous terror to Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria. It has also imprisoned working class people on the basis of comments made on social media supporting the 2011 uprising in Britain. This is what ‘surveillance’ means for oppressed people. We need to rage against this terrorist system.
Louis Brehony
