In 2013, Edward Snowden, an employee of National Security Agency, revealed that the US govt was running a vast Internet surveillance program and tapping every major Silicon Valley platform and company— Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon including mobile games like Angry Birds.
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The most astonishing program revealed by Snowden’s disclosures is called PRISM, which involves a sophisticated on-demand data tap housed within the datacenters of the biggest and most respected names in Silicon Valley: Google, Apple, Facebook, Yahoo!, and Microsoft.
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These devices allow the National Security Agency (NSA) to extract whatever the agency requires, including emails, attachments, chats, address books, files, photographs, audio files, search activity, and mobile phone location history.
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Edward Snowden also revealed the Mass Metadata Surveillance System of America's National Security Agency (NSA) in his documents. Let's suppose if NSA had found someone dialing number of an al Qaeda member, and assume that this person had phoned 100 other people over the...
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..previous 5 yrs, that would mean NSA could start tracking not only the suspect’s calls but also calls of those 100 other people. If each of those people called 100 people, NSA could track their calls too and that would put (100 times 100) 10,000 people on agency’s screen.
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In the third hop, the analysts could trace the calls of those 10,000 people and the calls that they had made—or (10,000 times 100) 1 million people. In other words, active surveillance of a suspect could put a million people under the agency’s watch.
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Similarly, the British GCHQ gathers data equivalent of all the books in British library, sent 192 times every 24 hrs under the Project "Tempora" by infiltrating the fibre optic cables that transport internet traffic between UK, North America, South America and Europe.
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Elon Musk has urged people to switch from WhatsApp to Signal. Snowden also promoted Tor and Signal in 2017 and his promotion boosted it's users from 1 million to 6 million but he never told us that Tor was developed by US Navy to disguise spies on internet.
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In 2011, Tor was funded $503,706 by Pentagon. Funds doubled to $2.2 million in 2012. Tor signed heavy govt contracts in 2012: $353,000 from the State Department, $876,099 from the US Navy, and $937,800 from the BBG.
Why was the govt pouring in such a humongous amount to...
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...a network which was apparently fighting global surveillance of internet by the US? Reality is no what it seems.
Also, Google, Amazon, Microsoft have been assisting NSA in surveillance programs and have supplied technology to develop weapons. Following are few examples:
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1. In 2008 Google won the contract to run the servers and search technology that powered the CIA’s Intellipedia, an intelligence database modeled after Wikipedia that was collaboratively edited by the NSA, CIA, FBI, and other federal agencies.
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Not long after that, Google contracted with the US Army to equip fifty thousand soldiers with a customized suite of mobile Google services.
2. In 2007, Google partnered with Lockheed Martin to design a visual intelligence system for NGA that displayed US military bases..
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in Iraq and marked out Sunni and Shiite neighborhoods in Baghdad.
3. In 2010, Google won a no-bid exclusive $27 million contract to provide NGA with “geospatial visualization services” effectively making Internet giant the “eyes” of America’s defense and intelligence apparatus.
4. In 2010, Google entered into a secretive agreement with the National Security Agency.
“According to officials who were privy to details of Google’s arrangements with NSA, company agreed to provide information about traffic on its networks in exchange for intelligence...
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..from NSA about what it knew of foreign hackers,” wrote Shane Harris in War, a history of warfare.
6. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos used his wealth to launch Blue Origin, a missile company that partners with Lockheed Martin and Boeing.
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7. Amazon runs cloud computing and storage services for the CIA. The initial contract, signed in 2013, was worth $600 million and was later expanded to include the NSA and a dozen other US intelligence agencies.
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8. Facebook too has links with military. Its secretive “Building 8” research division is involved in everything from artificial intelligence to drone-based wireless Internet networks. Facebook is betting big on virtual reality as the user interface of the future.
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Facebook’s Oculus virtual reality headset has already been integrated into DARPA’s Plan X which is a $110 million project to build an immersive, fully virtual reality environment to fight cyberwars.
DARPA is ‘Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’ of US DoD.
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9. Google's military work, reveals that it has been selling Google Search, Google Earth, and Google Enterprise (G Suite) products to every major US military and intelligence agency: navy, army, air force, Coast Guard, DARPA, NSA, FBI, DEA, CIA, NGA and State Department.
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10. In 2012, as civil war in Syria intensified and American support for rebel forces there increased, Google's ‘JigSaw’ brainstormed ways it could help push Bashar al-Assad from power. Among them: a tool that visually maps high-level defections from Assad’s government.
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It's quite evident that the biggest and most respected Internet companies have been working in secret to funnel data on hundreds of thousands of users to America's NSA, revealing by extension the vast amounts of personal data that these companies collected on their users.
When you are not paying for the product, you are the product.
Reference:
1. “Surveillance valley: the secret military history of the internet” by Yasha Levine
2. “Inside the Enemy's Computer: Identifying Cyber Attackers” by Clement Guitton
