Espionage

1. Oct 2013 : National Security Agency boss General Keith Alexander conceded that the Agency recently ran a programme that entailed the collection of Americans’ mobile phone location data.
2. The U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) has obtained direct access to the systems of Google, Facebook, Apple and other U.S. internet giants, according to a top secret document obtained by The Guardian.
3. The NSA access is part of a previously undisclosed programme called PRISM, which allows officials to collect material including search history, the content of emails, file transfers and live chats.
4. If these allegations are true, then the U.S. has violated Article 22 of the 1961 Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, of which it is a signatory. That article notes, “The premises of a diplomatic mission, such as an embassy, are inviolate and must not be entered by the host country except by permission of the head of the mission. Furthermore, the host country must protect the mission from intrusion or damage. The host country must never search the premises, nor seize its documents or property.” The nature of the spying, with bugs on crypto-fax machines and on communications cables, clearly breaches the protections enshrined in the convention.
5. The Guardian has verified the authenticity of the document, a 41-slide PowerPoint presentation — classified as top secret with no distribution to foreign allies — which was apparently used to train intelligence operatives on the capabilities of the programme.
6. The NSA access was enabled by changes to U.S. surveillance law introduced under President Bush and renewed under President Obama in December 2012.
7. The programme facilitates extensive, in-depth surveillance on live communications and stored information. The law allows for the targeting of any customers of participating firms who live outside the U.S., or those Americans whose communications include people outside the U.S.
8. The participation of the internet companies in PRISM will add to the debate, ignited by the Verizon revelation, about the scale of surveillance by the intelligence services. Unlike the collection of those call records, this surveillance can include the content of communications and not just the metadata.
9. Since its introduction in 2007. Microsoft — which is currently running an advertising campaign with the slogan “Your privacy is our priority” — was the first, with collection beginning in December 2007.It was followed by Yahoo in 2008; Google, Facebook and PalTalk in 2009; YouTube in 2010; Skype and AOL in 2011; and finally Apple, which joined the programme in 2012.
10. The PRISM programme allows the NSA, the world’s largest surveillance organisation, to obtain targeted communications without having to request them from the service providers and without having to obtain individual court orders.
11. Newly disclosed budget documents for America’s intelligence agencies show how aggressively the United States is conducting offensive cyber-operations against other states, even while the Obama administration protests attacks on U.S. computer networks by China, Iran and Russia.
12. The Post talked of a parallel effort, code-named GENIE, which it described as an effort by U.S. intelligence officials working for the NSA and the military’s Cyber Command to insert surreptitious controls into foreign computer networks. That computer code, a form of malware, allows U.S. officials to hijack the computers or route some of their data to servers that enable U.S. espionage.

Global surveillance Program  : 

1. U.S Government has been tracking global electronic communication traffic, The Guardian newspaper has published new documents that reveal details on an international programme that siphons data directly from Internet networks without judicial oversight or authorisation.
2. Code-named XKeyscore, the programme, the U.S National Security Agency claims, is the “widest-reaching” system for developing intelligence from the Internet. In one 30-day period in 2012, around 41 billion records were retrieved and stored in XKeyscore.
3. One server is in India.

India’s Shocking Response : 

1. Union Minister for External Affairs, Salman Khurshid, said, “It is not snooping. It is only computer study and computer analysis of patterns of calls.”