[Exceptionally well-written, long, thoughtful piece about the impacts (journalistic and otherwise) of the Snowden leaks, from the editor of The Guardian. -egg]<\/p>\n
We have begun to glimpse how it\u2019s all being done. The NSA and its British counterpart, GCHQ (Government Communication Headquarters), work closely with Internet service providers and telecom companies to amass enormous quantities of data on us. Some of it is done through the front door\u2014formal legal requests. Some of it is done \u201cupstream\u201d of tech companies and phone companies\u2014i.e., intercepting signals in transit. The agencies have attached probes to transatlantic cables, enabling them to vacuum up data on millions of users on both sides of the Atlantic. By last year GCHQ was handling 600 million \u201ctelephone events\u201d each day, had tapped more than two hundred fiber optic cables, and was able to process data from at least forty-six of them at a time.<\/p>\n
We have also learned about how the agencies have spent vast sums of money on subverting the integrity of the Internet itself\u2014weakening its overall security in ways that ought to concern every individual, public body, or company that uses it. A trapdoor that lets the NSA into your messages is, most cryptologists agree, quite exploitable by others. If you\u2019re anxious about your bank details or medical records sitting online, you\u2019re probably right to be.<\/p>\n
If, say, the Chinese had behaved like this toward the Internet and toward social platforms used around the world, there would be barely contained fury in the West. Little wonder that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was not impressed by President Obama\u2019s repeated assurances that \u201cthere is no spying on Americans.\u201d That was, he pointed out, of little comfort to American entrepreneurs trying to build global businesses.<\/p>\n