WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has slammed a recently exposed NSA mass-surveillance scheme as a "calamitous collapse in the rule of law." Google, Facebook and other tech giants apparently involved have denied giving the NSA access to their servers.
Assange accused the US government of trying to "launder" its
activities concerning the large-scale spying program PRISM. The
system was made public after a leaked classified
National Security Agency (NSA) document was revealed earlier this
week.
"The US administration has the phone records of everyone in
the United States and is receiving them daily from carriers to
the National Security Agency under secret agreements. That's
what's come out," he said.
President Barack Obama earlier defended PRISM, saying it was a key part of
the country’s counterterrorism efforts and that privacy was a
necessary sacrifice for the sake of security. He also lashed out
at the media, and those who leaked information on the massive
spying program.
“If every step that we are taking to try to prevent a
terrorist act is on the front page of the newspapers or any
television, then presumably the people that are trying to do us
harm are going to be able to get around our preventative
measures,” Obama said.
Critics of the Obama Administration have accused it of an
unprecedented crackdown on whistleblowers – more government
officials are being prosecuted for leaks under Obama than all
previous administrations combined. News of PRISM comes just after
reports that the Justice Department secretly obtained two months
of AP reporters' telephone records and tapped Fox News reporter James
Rosen’s private email.
"Over the last 10 years, the US justice system has suffered
from a collapse, a calamitous collapse, in the rule of law,”
Assange said.
The US tech giants apparently involved in PRISM have rushed to
deny they participated in the program; their logos were visible
on each the 41 PowerPoint slides of the leaked NSA document.
“Indeed, the US government does not have direct access or a
'back door' to the information stored in our data centers. We had
not heard of a program called PRISM until yesterday,” Google
CEO Larry Page and Chief Legal Officer David Drummond said in a
statement.
Google's remarks mirrored those by Apple, Facebook, Microsoft,
Yahoo. All have claimed they have no knowledge of whether the NSA
had direct access to their servers, and that only upon legal
orders do they provide the government with data on specific
persons.
While activists debate the legality and ethics of online
espionage and high-tech firms try to distance themselves from the
revelations, a former NSA official believes PRISM is largely
ineffective, as the amount of data it collects cannot be
effectively digested by a surveillance system.
“In fact it adds more of a problem because what that means,
quite simply, is that if you go into a larger database, you get
more data back no matter what the query is. It’s like making a
query with Google. If you go in with a Google query you can get
tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands or even a million
returns. Well, there’s no way you can go through that, all of
that, to see what you’re really interested in. So what that does
is make them less proficient at doing their jobs,” former NSA
analyst William Binney told RT.