A former security officer at Facebook was hired by the National Security Agency (NSA) in 2010, US media are reporting in a revelation that further blurs the line between social media and intelligence-gathering networks.
The controversy surrounding user privacy in the nebulous world of
social media became more pronounced after it was revealed this
week that Max Kelly, former chief security officer for Facebook,
resigned from the social-media site to work for the NSA.
While some consider Kelly’s quiet job change a conflict of
interest and a breach of trust, others say it is part of the
“Neuland” (virgin territory), as German Chancellor Angela Merkel
described the Internet, being mapped out by lightning advances in
technology, and, by extension, intelligence-gathering
requirements.
Kelly’s switch to the agency, which was first reported by The New
York Times just this week, highlights the increasingly cozy
relationship between Silicon Valley and the NSA. It also presents
a deep dilemma for social media subscribers who enjoy all the
advantages of on-line free assembly, yet must submit to the
understanding that all of their personal information is free game
for intelligence data-mining.
“Both hunt for ways to collect, analyse, and exploit large
pools of data about millions of Americans,” The New York
Times explained. “The only difference is that the NSA does it
for intelligence, and Silicon Valley does it to make money.”
Although rumors have long persisted of some sort of unseemly
relationship between Facebook, Yahoo, and other social media
sites and the US intelligence community, the truth of the matter
came home with a vengeance when CIA whistleblower Edward Snowden,
29, handed over hundreds of NSA documents to The Guardian and The
Washington Post early this month.
Snowden, who fled to Hong Kong shortly after divulging his
information, blew the whistle on an NSA program called Prism that
collects correspondence and video conversations of foreigners
using Internet services like Google, Skype, Yahoo, and Facebook.
The former CIA employee also provided documents showing the
intelligence agency collects data on phone calls handled by the
major US telephone companies. The Guardian reported of a
top-secret court order telling telecoms provider Verizon to hand
over the phone records of millions of US customers.
Snowden was charged with espionage by US federal prosecutors on
Friday.
President Barack Obama defended the intelligence gathering work,
saying his primary concern has always been accountability to the
American people.
"To say there’s a tradeoff doesn’t mean somehow that we’ve
abandoned freedom," Obama told Charlie Rose, a talk show
host. "My concern has always been not that we shouldn’t do
intelligence gathering to prevent terrorism, but rather, are we
setting up a system of checks and balances?"
James R. Clapper Jr., the director of national intelligence, said
that the surveillance programs had helped thwart “dozens” of
terrorist plots in the US and more than 20 other countries.
While the NSA collects and stores the phone records of millions
of US citizens annually, it only pries into the contents when
there is suspicion of a connection to terrorism, the letter said,
adding that in 2012, fewer than 300 phone records were
examined.
Despite such assurances, the major social media sites were forced
to respond to a wave of public nausea following the revelations.
Facebook, with the government’s blessing, this month became the
first social media provider to release aggregate numbers of
requests by intelligence agents. The site devoted to connecting
friends and family revealed in a blog that it received between
9,000 and 10,000 US requests for user data information in the
second half of 2012, canvassing up to 19,000 of its users'
accounts.
Facebook has more than 1 billion users worldwide.
According to The Times, quoting an anonymous source, the majority
of the requests were “routine police inquiries.”
Facebook, however, is prohibited from revealing how many were
orders issued under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act,
which determines procedures for the surveillance and collection
of "foreign intelligence information" between "foreign
powers" and "agents of foreign powers" on US
territory.
Some of the world's internet powerhouses have allegedly been part
of the information-sharing program since its introduction in
2007. Microsoft jumped on board first, with collection beginning
in December 2007, The Guardian reported. It was followed by Yahoo
in 2008; Google, Facebook, and PalTalk in 2009; YouTube in 2010;
Skype and AOL in 2011; then Apple in 2012.
Taming the internet beast
Technology analysts and intelligence officials seem generally
unanimous in the opinion that the relationship between Silicon
Valley and the US intelligence community will only continue to
grow, albeit, they say, with an appropriate set of checks and
balances, as Obama has recommended.
That is because Silicon Valley produces the goods – mountains of
social media pages, as well as the sophisticated tools to sift
through them – that intelligence agencies need in their endless
fight against the handful of evildoers in the world.
The NSA is “one of Silicon Valley’s largest customers for what
is known as data analytics, one of the valley’s fastest-growing
markets,” The Times reported. In an effort to acquire the
latest software technology, “US intelligence agencies invest
in Silicon Valley start-ups, award classified contracts, and
recruit technology experts like Mr. Kelly,” it continued.
In other words, the US intelligence community is investing into
the very industries that can be later turned around and spied on.
“We are all in these Big Data business models,” Ray Wang,
a technology analyst and chief executive of Constellation
Research, based in San Francisco, told the paper. “There are a
lot of connections now because the data scientists and the folks
who are building these systems have a lot of common
interests.”
Naturally, this level of collaboration between two seemingly
incongruent industries – the intelligence agencies on the one
hand, and the freedom-loving social media sites on the other – is
bound to raise many eyebrows among watchdog groups, especially
since more fruit may yet fall from the intelligence cart that
Snowden hauled away with him.
The most recent fallout from Snowden’s shenanigans involved
Skype, the Internet-based calling service. According to
information acquired by The New York Times, the company had its
own secret program, dubbed Project Chess, “to explore the
legal and technical issues in making Skype calls readily
available to intelligence agencies and law enforcement
officials.”
One of the documents made public by Edward Snowden says that
Skype joined Prism on Feb. 6, 2011.
In light of such revelations, it is going to take some time for
the major Internet companies to prove that, despite the damaging
information provided by Snowden, social media providers, like
Facebook, Yahoo, and Skype really are working on behalf of the
public rather than the intelligence agencies.