The Star Wednesday Date: 14.08.2013 Page 23 Article size: 329 cm2 ColumnCM: 73.11 AVE: 128675.55
US SPYING MAY HURT COUNTRY'S INDUSTRY Edward Snowden is safe from American "jus tice" for the moment,
protocol sends messages not by the shortest route, but by whichever route is fastest and
people ever spoke to some body abroad with a Muslim name (or somebody who works for Siemens, or Sam
and he will certainly go down as the most effective whistleblower in history. His revelations are going to cause
least congested. That means, in most cases, through the US, and therefore straight into the
a wholesale restructuring of the world's most important
If you're an American who have told us about two major has never had direct phone NSA surveillance programmes, contact with anybody abroad, both probably illegal even they may then apply to ac under American law. The first cess the content of your calls and emails under the Prism collects the mobile phone
hands of the NSA. Snowden's revelations so far
communications system, the Internet. And that, rather than his whereabouts and fate, is now the real story. On 8 August, Lavabit, a US records of more than 200 mil
based email service provider that promised to keep its cli
lion Americans.
closed down. The US National
Senator Dianne Feinstein,
Don't worry your pretty ents' communications private, head about that, darling, said Security Agency approached it chair of the Senate Intelligence about six weeks ago demand Committee: "This is just iii" the same access to its metadata, there is no content customers' emails that it has
involved." The NSA isn't actu
already extorted from big ally listening to your calls. Well, OF COURSE it isn't American Internet companies like Google, Facebook, Yahoo, listening to billions of calls, Amazon and Microsoft.
The company's owner, La dar Levison, is under an NSA
gag order, but he wrote to his clients: "I have been forced to
"^chines can't listen to calls,
cal ties to the United States."
The mass surveillance being carried out by the NSA not only gives the US govern ment access to everything Americans say to one another. It also destroys everybody else's privacy, because the standard Internet routing
programme.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court which
reviews such applications has refused precisely 10 of them (out of 20,919) since 2001,
terrorism" is more important
than worrying about personal privacy.
But if you belong to the great majority of Internet users who are not American, are not in a perpetual sweaty panic about "terrorism", and have no protection whatever under American law from the
NSA's spying, then you will want ways to avoid it. So the
market, or other governments, will such create ways. Americans* messages can What's needed is a big in probably be examined without vestment in Internet switching recourse to the judges under capacity in countries where one of the blanket authorisa the spies are not completely tions issued by FISC. And if out of control. Then non Besides, the content of most
you're not American, or an
and Win, has the manpower to American resident who once do it with huiMn beings? But spoke to somebody abroad by machines can quickly use the
phone, then you're in a free call logs (metadata) to identify fire zone.
everybody you ever talked to, and everybody they ever become complicit in crimes talked to, and so on out to the against the American people, fourth or fifth generation. o> "alk away from nearly 10 If one of those thousands of years of Wd work by shut ting down Lava'tir. J would strongly recommend ag^nst anyone trusting their privatt data to a company with physi make a difficult decision: to
sung, or some other industrial competitor of the US), they may take an interest in you.
security barons use to justify the endless expansion of their empire (now almost a million employees). A recent opinion poll by the Pew Research Centre found that 62 per cenr of Americans think "fighting
If you are American, you probably don't care about
that, because you are mes merised by the guff about a huge terrorist threat that the
Americans can just join one of the many servers that will spring up to meet an explod ing demand for secure Internet services.
As Jennifer Granick, direc tor of civil liberties at the Stanford Law School's Center
for Internet and Society, put it recently: "America invented the Internet, and our Inter net companies are dominant around the world. But the US
government, in its rush to spy on everybody, may end up
killing our most productive industry."
Ipsos Synovate Kenya Acorn House,97 James Gichuru Road Lavington Nairobi Kenya
The Star Wednesday Date: 14.08.2013 Page 23 Article size: 329 cm2 ColumnCM: 73.11 AVE: 128675.55
What's needed is a big investment in Internet
switching capacity in countries where spies are not out of control
Ipsos Synovate Kenya Acorn House,97 James Gichuru Road Lavington Nairobi Kenya