Full Text: The United States' Global Surveillance Record
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E-mail Xinhua, May 26, 2014
The Guardian and the New York Times have reported that the NSA targets smartphone apps to fish for users' personal data such as age, nationality and location (based on GPS). The apps under surveillance include the popular game Angry Birds, Google Maps, Facebook, Twitter and the photo-sharing site Flickr.
The NSA has planted backdoor software in around 100,000 computers worldwide since 2008, giving it the capability to monitor them around the clock, as well as launch attacks. The agency can access and control these computers using radio waves even if they are not connected to a network.
Since 2010, the NSA has been snooping on U.S. citizens to "analyze their social connectivity, to identify private information such as the users' associates, their location at a certain point of time, and their travelling companions."
All of the NSA's surveillance activities have been conducted in secrecy, following a secret U.S. government decision to loosen restrictions on surveillance and bypass deliberation or discussion by the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. A memorandum filed by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) in 2006 warned about the possible abuse of surveillance.
The NSA applies sophisticated analytical techniques to identify what it calls "co-travelers," i.e. unknown associates of known targets. This project allows the NSA to explore the social links of known targets. The location and time of their activities can be extracted in under an hour from a vast database of information. Associates of known targets become the NSA's new targets.
U.S. government officials have argued that these massive surveillance operations are legal and do not target U.S. citizens, but U.S. citizens travelling abroad are nevertheless subject to eavesdropping. U.S. media have also reported that the NSA carried out a pilot project to collect huge amounts of mobile phone location data within the United States during 2010 and 2011.
In April 2013, Frank La Rue, UN Special Rapporteur on the Promotion and Protection of the Right to Freedom of Opinion and Expression, said in his report to the Human Rights Council that the United States, by renewing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, had empowered the U.S. government to "conduct surveillance of non-American persons located outside the United States including any foreign individual whose communications are hosted by cloud services located in the United States."
Leaked documents show that many countries, including Germany, South Korea and Japan have been targeted by the NSA's eavesdropping, and that the intelligence agencies of the United States and some European countries have joined hands to launch massive network monitoring and phone-tapping operations that severely undermine the network security of all countries.
Norwegian media have reported that Norway is also a target of U.S. surveillance. The NSA collected data from more than 33 million mobile phone calls made in Norway between December 10, 2012, and January 8, 2013.
The Italian weekly L'Espresso has reported that British and U.S. intelligence agencies have been massively bugging Italian telephone communications and network data.
3. Monitoring international companies
The U.S. government does not just target the Internet, but also key industries such as finance, transport, electricity and education.
Documents leaked by Snowden show that the NSA's eavesdropping not only target overseas government leaders but also international organizations and business leaders.
The German weekly Der Spiegel reported that financial transactions, especially credit card deals, were among the targets of NSA surveillance programs. Visa and the international payments system SWIFT were both monitored.
A surveillance branch known as "Follow the Money," focused on international financial transactions. The NSA claimed that by tracing international financial transfers it could expose terrorist networks. The agency set up a financial database called Tracfin to store information gathered from financial institutions. In 2011, the data bank had 180 million entries, 84 percent of which related to credit cards and their users, who were mainly located in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
Some information in the database came from SWIFT, which began secretly feeding the United States with details of financial transfers after the 9/11 attacks. When this partnership was exposed in 2006, the European Union asked the United States to ensure the security of bank data and respect the privacy of European citizens. After several rounds of talks, the European Union and the United States reached a deal in 2010 that allowed the latter to monitor European bank transfers to combat terrorism, with the precondition that the use and storage of this financial information was consistent with European data protection laws. But Snowden's latest revelations show that the United States never stopped monitoring SWIFT transfers, meaning that the entire negotiation process between the United States and the European Union was just for show.
On December 29, 2013, Der Spiegel claimed the NSA had broken almost all the security architectures designed by major companies, including those of Cisco, Huawei, Juniper and Dell.
Other media reports have revealed that the United States hacked the computer network of Brazilian oil company, Petrobras.
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