Eagle eye

Reports of the expansion of the surveillance state in America could be a cause for concern everywhere

Reports of the expansion of the surveillance state in America could be a cause for concern everywhere

Dystopian fantasies such as Enemy of the State,Minority Report and,of course,1984,are premised on an all-powerful state using the electronic tools at its disposal to place its citizens under constant and near-total surveillance. British newspaper The Guardians report that the USs National Security Agency has been spying not just on Americans,but non-American users of American services as well,is the stuff of paranoid nightmares come to life. One day after the revelation that the NSA had compelled at least one telecom company,Verizon,to hand over customer call records,a top-secret PowerPoint presentation appeared to suggest that the NSA has direct access to the servers of many major internet companies a list that includes Google,Facebook,Yahoo,Microsoft and Apple,though these companies have denied knowledge of such a programme.

The programme,codenamed PRISM,is now reportedly the number one source of raw intelligence used for NSA analytic reports. It can access emails,photos,live chats any online activity conducted via services offered by the nine companies on the list. And because the US houses much of the internets architecture,the NSA can mine data from all over the world even India. Indeed,a senior official from the Obama administration has been quoted as saying that only non-US citizens outside the US are being targeted by the programme,to combat the threat of foreign terror. In defence of this apparent encroachment on the civil liberties of citizens and non-citizens,the government,including the president,has trotted out the old chestnut about the murkiness of the fight against terrorism,and the importance of using such tools to prevent attacks. People have also been exhorted to trust the governments internal mechanisms to ensure that their rights are not violated.

The legal basis for both the order and PRISM seems to derive from the findings of a court set up under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act,which operates in secret. That the expansion of the surveillance state in America and the overreach of executive power has occurred under the oversight of a president who once campaigned on reversing his predecessors excesses,makes Americas civil liberties challenge even more pressing.