The Case of Internet Surveillance



The Case of Internet Surveillance

Introduction

Since the 9/11 attacks, US has revised its security measures for safeguarding the national security interests. The National Security Agency uses a number of surveillance programs for protecting American citizens. In today's modern world, the biggest challenge is pertaining to the globally connected world. The era of World Wide Web has transformed the world into a global village. Sensitive information is routed through the internet to various locations. In such a situation, one can observe increasing number of suspicious internet activities. In the year 2007, the US officials implemented an internet surveillance program in order to monitor doubtful internet activity. The surveillance tool is known as PRISM. This paper discusses the US surveillance program, PRISM. Further, the write up explores a software program TOR which helps surf anonymously over the internet.

Discussion

PRISM- A US Tool for Internet Surveillance

In a layman's language, Prism is an internet spy tool. The spy tool is a “data tool” in its core, meaning that it mines, manages and collects internet data. PRISM stands for Planning Tool for Resource Integration, Synchronization, and Management. The abbreviation explains most of the work it does. The tool integrates resources (computers, servers, routers and gateways) and synchronize their functions for managing data. A huge amount of information is transferred through US servers from locations other than US. For instance, a lot of Facebook users do not reside within the United States. The data transfer follows the cheapest route which the US companies provide (Dreyfuss, 2013). Therefore, much of internet communication takes place through US servers. They exchange information in the form of textual communication, images, audio and videos. The spy tool gathers foreign intelligence data whenever it passes through American servers. PRISM works in collaboration with nine leading US Internet companies. These companies facilitate the intelligence ventures. The NSA officials have access to internet data from companies like Microsoft, Yahoo, Facebook, Google, and many others. Also, Skype grants access to the requested data item.

Whenever we request a data communication (email, message or voice), it is first encrypted and then sent through the communication route. For instance, a person writes an email on Gmail, it is first encrypted and then transferred to the sender. PRISM is highly efficient in the sense that it captures data before encryption. For doing so, it needs support from the internet companies which it has acquired already. The spy tool grants access to all kinds of data offered by a specific company. The tool allows surveillance on two domains; live communication streams and stored data. It means that VOIP services are an essential part of it. Further, it permits live surveillance over Google searching. Google traces the IP address of every system that attempts to use the search engine (Whittaker, 2013). The company is based in US, but it has a large base of global users. Google supports varying form of data communication including email, audio, video, Google drive files etc.

The surveillance program gains access to both ...