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June 22, 2013
The ongoing disclosures about the secret surveillance programs on the citizens of western democracies indicate that the surveillance programs are far more extensive than was first realized. The Australian government has been building a state-of-the art, secret data storage facility just outside Canberra to enable intelligence agencies to deal with a ''data deluge'' siphoned from the internet and global telecommunications networks.
Steve Bell
We now learn, courtesy of the documents shown to The Guardian by the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden that the spy agencies of the Five Eyes electronic eavesdropping alliance, comprising the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, have secretly gained access to the network of cables which carry the world's phone calls and internet traffic and has started to process vast streams of sensitive personal information.
The plan is codenamed MTI, or Mastering the Internet – and it aims to collect a significant amount of the world's communications.
This access to the internet is codenamed Tempora, and it is different from Prism in which the spy agencies secured access to the internal systems of global companies that service the internet. Henry Porter points out that:
It is an alarming fact that over the last two weeks, as details of Prism and the covert acquisition of phone records have been laid bare, politician after politician, on both sides of the Atlantic and from both sides of the left-right divide, has argued that the loss of a little liberty is a small sacrifice to make for security. Most appreciate that no such transaction exists in the real world, for the very reason that those making the argument stand to gain so much from public acquiescence. This is about the unscrutinised power of a deep state and its burgeoning influence on society.
The fear created around the national security state's terrorism agenda has been used to elaborate a huge system of espionage and domestic surveillance. The justification is that citizens can afford to lose a little liberty to make the world safer.
The other line is that the innocent have nothing to fear from disclosure, Cory Doctorow, in response , says that we should care about privacy because:
if the data says you've done something wrong, then the person reading the data will interpret everything else you do through that light....Once a computer ascribes suspiciousness to someone, everything else in that person's life becomes sinister and inexplicable.
What we are witnessing is the the metamorphosis of our democracies into national security states in which the prerogatives of security authorities trump every other consideration and in which critical or sceptical appraisal of them is ruled out of court.
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Remarkable and excellent summary- thanks, GST.