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The Imminent Problem of Surveillance and the Dilemma That It

Raises

By Ali Raza, Editor, SecurityGladiators

Edward Snowden has been an eye-opener for the public, bringing to light a plethora of
surveillance projects and tactics of the NSA and its British counterpart, GCHQ. The privacy of
the citizens has been severely damaged, due to the invasive methods that the agencies make
use of towards collecting information to fight crime – or so they tell us. Over time, the agencies
of both the United States and the United Kingdom have penetrated personal information and
collected data to use without any limitation. PRISM is the surveillance program used by the US
since 2007 for Internet communications, if you recall.

According to the defensive line that these agencies have structured, there are two distinctive
details that allow them to act as they please and justify their methods; the first detail has to do
with the correlation of the data collected with the fight against terrorism. Terrorists have always
posed a threat to the US and Europe, after all. So, it is truly persuasive to use this as a punch
line and proceed with the collection of data towards getting your way and obstructing terrorists.
The second detail emerges a different aspect, which is none other than the acknowledgement of
innocence. If you are innocent, you have nothing to fear of and thus surveillance is not going to
harm you.

Nevertheless, these acts of surveillance have placed the citizens in an awkward position.
Although the presumption of innocence is fundamental for every other aspect of legislation, in
this case the citizens are all presumed guilty and the collection of data aims to disprove the
guilt. So, this is a vicious circle that we enter and the freedom of privacy is ruled out by threats
that are either non-existent or non-proven to begin with.

Besides the lack of privacy, there is another difficulty that the agencies have to tackle with; the
mass volume of data collected not only disorientates from the target, but also leads to great
effort required for storage and analysis. If you get data from everyone without hesitation and
without any filter that narrows down your target, it is only fair to assume that the data will
overflow and make your life a lot more difficult and challenging. So, even if real threats are
among the massive amount of data collected by the agencies, nobody can be too optimistic that
they will be addressed in time.

Returning to the grave issue of privacy and personal rights, the American Civil Liberties Union
has filed a lawsuit against the NSA and the US Department of Justice on behalf of Wikipedia
and other organizations. The reason is of course the mass surveillance which does not comply
with the First Amendment of the US Constitution. The EFF has been highlighting cases of the
NSA spying over people without any just cause, trying to raise awareness over people. As they
state on their official website: “The US government, with assistance from major
telecommunications carriers including AT&T, has engaged in massive, illegal dragnet

58 Cyber Warnings E-Magazine – March 2015 Edition
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