It’s been a little over two years since Edward Snowden first let the cat out of the bag and the world found out about the secret mass surveillance of the National Security Agency. The first document revealed to the public was the order for telecom Verizon to release all records of US phone calls to the agency under the Patriot Act’s Section 215. Many others followed, uncovering the secret surveillance of other agencies as well, and two years later the world is still reeling from the effects of the widespread mass spying that we now know has been going on for over a decade.
Winning for the Public Good
Organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation had known for some time about secret government spying before the Snowden revelations. But the sacrifice of this now exiled hero gave them the evidence that they needed to take real steps towards better privacy standards. Many human rights and digital privacy groups have long wanted to improve the legal support for peoples who suffer under governments that do not respect their fundamental rights because there are loopholes and secret laws that allow them to get away with such injustices. Now, after two years of fighting harder than ever before on the issue, the people have won some valuable victories. But there is also still much to be done, and we cannot let ourselves grow weary or let our attention wane.
The US government has been taken to court over some surveillance programs of the NSA, one case relating to the mass collection of phone records. This case ended in victory, forcing the government to order the NSA to discontinue its bulk data gathering activities. It also in part led to the decision to allow the notorious Patriot Act to sunset after having been extended multiple times over the past years. Information was key here, and not only the documents provided by ex NSA analyst Snowden. Pro-privacy groups worked hard to keep the public informed and to correct the purposely generated misinformation that was being fed out by those who had interests in keeping NSA spying alive.
In March last year, thanks to tireless efforts and the Freedom of Information Act, the US government found itself with little choice but to divulge the secret opinions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. This court was empowered under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to secretly approve numerous NSA spying programs, and to keep these secret from the people. Now we can prove that the NSA has done a lot of nasty stuff like sucking traffic from ISPs, and breaking the law against domestic spying. And the government will be hard put to conceal similar activities in the future.
Working on Privacy Standards
For the past two years and running, many of the same groups who took up the banner for privacy rights are still fighting to ensure that the people get due respect under the law. Because of these continued labors, there are also global efforts to codify general principles for surveillance that should be universally accepted and respected. We are all, however, still in danger of new and improved spying programs that will circumvent existing legislation and will be better hidden by the thwarted intelligence community. These groups are well aware of the government’s and spies’ tenacity with regard to their agendas, and this concerted and continuous effort is needed to make sure that we all get protected for real, and that we stay that way over the long term.
A big part of the global effort to protect the public from secret and invasive spying has been the development of better encryption technologies and the advocacy for their widespread use. It has been an educational campaign as well as a legislative and technical battle. Governments are still pushing for laws that will allow them to undermine these endeavors to create a more secure Internet. They want backdoors so that they can continue to spy on everyone, but they cannot guarantee the safety of Internet users when they create these holes that can be manipulated by malicious elements. And they surely cannot protect the privacy of these people when they are the first and most vehement supporters of the move to deny this right.
The people have spoken, and the general consensus the world over is that we do not want the world that we live in to be dominated by governments that have no regard for our fundamental rights to privacy. We want to enjoy our freedoms in the digital world, and our rights to be safe while we do so. The Patriot Act is dead and the USA Freedom Act is one step towards better protection. The next step is taking care of the FISA Amendments Act’s Section 702, which has allowed the NSA to rationalize their decade-long tapping of telecoms’ fiber optic cables to siphon massive amounts of phone calls and emails. The telecoms that cooperated with the agency, effectively destroying their privacy agreements with consumers, are immune from prosecution, but we can still fight to make sure that no one else is victimized the same way again.
Executive Order 12333 must also be dealt with. This shady yet very powerful text has been leveraged by the NSA to justify its global digital surveillance. Without supervision from the courts, this is a very dangerous order that can be used to continue to record any and all communications of foreign countries. And it is all done in secret, of course, without any transparency offered to legislators. There is way too much concealment going on, and the power to keep certain operations and information quiet has been grossly abused by the intelligence community and some parts of the government. This needs to get cleaned up.