Edward Snowden is a former undercover CIA technical assistant and contractor to the US National Security Agency (NSA). In an interview with the Guardian he described Prism, a secret spying programme used by the US to collect information about people’s internet use. He said that he spoke out to stop the US government destroying privacy. He may well have identified one of the great battlegrounds of the next twenty years.

It isn’t just computer users based in the USA that are targeted in this covert operation. Anyone visiting certain websites is liable to trigger an email message from the NSA. In the Hog’s case it first happened during a visit to a website that tried to present the actual numbers killed in Iraq. It can be a weird experience first time round, but after mouthing obscenities at the screen you move on.
So leaks of this kind about the US (and indeed other) government’s surveillance of phone and internet traffic merely confirm what many people already knew. In the electronic world, everything is recorded and traceable. And accessible to any authorities that are unscrupulous enough to snoop.
The rationale for Prism is the US’s national security. Vast computer capacity is devoted to scanning bazillions of gigabytes of data to identify risks and conspiracies. The surveillance is pretty comprehensive. It’s not just about who visits certain websites, it’s also about what is said, down even to the words used, where anything from ‘wire’ to ‘jihad’ might trigger an alert.
But then, isn’t that what Google also does? Ads and prompts follow your emails. Check the topline and sidebars. Facebook too is ultimately about targeted marketing, not networking.
Not surprisingly, a furore has erupted over the allegations of connivance by major companies – including Google, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft – in this government surveillance. They vehemently deny the claims, insisting that they only release material that’s been mandated by a court order. But this is where Snowden’s testimony is most interesting: he believes that the law is being broken on a routine basis.
It is all part of a much wider issue about the erosion of privacy across the world. Lots of people know or can find out a great deal about you if they want to. Ask Mick Wallace. A Garda recently described to the Hog how, using CCTV and other cameras in public places, a stolen van was tracked from Limerick to an industrial estate in Castlebar. Your bank can tell much about you from your credit card usage. Likewise loyalty cards. The aggregation of these small data into the big data version described by Edward Snowden shouldn’t come as a major surprise. But for many it does.
Where to next?
Well, memory and processing devices are getting smaller and more powerful. Meanwhile, more and more of the world’s activities in all spheres are being digitised. We are, they say, entering the era of big data – basically, entrepreneurs and businnesses are doing for commercial reasons what the US government is doing for security reasons. Minister Richard Bruton has enthusiastically embraced this concept as one of the technological areas in which Ireland should aspire to be a world leader.
In parallel, some technology seers are talking about a time in the near future when people will have implants instead of computers and mobile phones. With the surge in quality of voice recognition, for one, it is heading in that direction.
New eras often begin at a crossroads. Internet enthusiasts have long prophesied a great new era of freedom and information and knowledge. But the advance of technology also contains the seeds of a dystopian future, where freedom is more circumscribed than ever as a result of round-the-clock electronic surveillance. We may be entering an era when a small number of powerful institutions with access to the keys to the digital gates know much more about all of us than they should.
John Naughton in the Observer reported recently on a symposium in Cambridge at which Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt was visiting professor. Schmidt spoke enthusiastically about a more connected planet, as an extra 5 billion people come online.
Schmidt sees this as opening up power, with the State fading away. He was therefore surprised, as Naughton notes, to find that his audience were focused on the threat to privacy and personal identity, and on the nature and potential of corporate power – and ways in which it might be curtailed. Schmidt suggested that in the US people are concerned about the power of the State rather than corporations; in Europe they trust the State more than they do companies. It is a fascinating distinction.
So, do we want weak States and big, strong companies?
Maybe you don’t care. That’s true of many. But if the power is left in the hands of large corporations, then you can be sure of one thing: information will be turned into profit. To engender which, you will be bombarded with every type of advertising, hype and commercial exploitation imaginable.
It may transpire that the questions being asked of the data are behind the curve. And it could be that big data is so big that it overwhelms the capacity for real analysis: for all the surveillance, the US security services hadn’t a clue about the intentions of the Boston bombers.
But for those who care, the best personal response to the revelations about Prism is to be informed about what’s happening, spread the word, use cash as much as possible and leave only those traces that you want to leave ;-)