US E-Double Standards: Major Producer, Consumer of Censorship Tools
Nour Rida
US hypocrisy has come to light afresh as it provides the world's tyrant regimes with the most sophisticated online suppression tools and software while falsely propagating "Internet freedom."
Falling back on a speech by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in which she declared that "Internet freedom" is a benchmark of US foreign policy, a Foreignpolicy.com article reasoned - with evidence- that most devices for strangling online free speech and silencing dissent around the globe are USA made; "It turns out that many of the most sophisticated tools used to suppress online free speech and dissent around the world are actually Made in the USA," the article read; adding that American corporations are major suppliers of software and hardware used by all sorts of governments to carry out censorship and surveillance including the world's major dictatorships in the Middle East and North Africa."
The article further highlights that more inconveniently is that the USA remains to be the biggest customer of American-made surveillance technology.
"The world's dictators will remain well supplied by a robust global economy as long as the US government continues to support the development of a surveillance-technology industry that clearly lacks concern for the human rights and civil liberties implications of its business -- even rewarding secretive and publicly unaccountable behavior by these companies," the article went on to read.
The US technologies for Internet censorship strongly propped pre-revolution authoritarian rules in Tunisia and Egypt, and have helped uphold similar reigns in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia while Washington admonishes other non-conforming governments for failing to protect their citizens' online liberties, it further added.
On March 15, Wired magazine had published a report in which it said that the United States National Security Agency (NSA) is building the biggest spy center for intercepting and storing electronic communications collected not only from American citizens but from all over the world.
"Under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances, the blandly named Utah Data Center is being built for the National Security Agency. A project of immense secrecy, it is the final piece in a complex puzzle assembled over the past decade. Its purpose: to intercept, decipher, analyze, and store vast swaths of the world's communications as they zap down from satellites and zip through the underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks. The heavily fortified $2 billion center should be up and running in September 2013," the report read.
The center, located in Bluffdale, a remote valley in the state of Utah, can process yottabytes (a million billions of gigabytes) of data.
The report further added that the interception process includes the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails-parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital "pocket litter.
The report quotes a senior intelligence official "the mammoth Bluffdale center will have another important and far more secret role that has gone unrevealed which is breaking codes."
"And code-breaking is crucial, because much of the data that the center will handle-financial information, stock transactions, business deals, foreign military and diplomatic secrets, legal documents, confidential personal communications-will be heavily encrypted," he explained.
Likening the process to the Watergate scandal and others of the Nixon administration, the report also read "the NSA has turned its surveillance apparatus on the US and its citizens. It has established listening posts throughout the nation to collect and sift through billions of email messages and phone calls, whether they originate within the country or overseas."
the facility is "the most covert and potentially most intrusive intelligence agency ever," and it will use 65 megawatts of electricity a year, with an annual bill of USD 40 million.
Most alarming is that the NSA is trying to expand its cyber activity through a new cyber-ops program at selected universities, by that, the students would take part in the intelligence operations. This step comes to increase the NSA's access to intelligence information they need, through carefully recruiting students that need to pass some security requirements during summer seminars.
Source: Foreign Policy,Wired
US hypocrisy has come to light afresh as it provides the world's tyrant regimes with the most sophisticated online suppression tools and software while falsely propagating "Internet freedom."
Falling back on a speech by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in which she declared that "Internet freedom" is a benchmark of US foreign policy, a Foreignpolicy.com article reasoned - with evidence- that most devices for strangling online free speech and silencing dissent around the globe are USA made; "It turns out that many of the most sophisticated tools used to suppress online free speech and dissent around the world are actually Made in the USA," the article read; adding that American corporations are major suppliers of software and hardware used by all sorts of governments to carry out censorship and surveillance including the world's major dictatorships in the Middle East and North Africa." The article further highlights that more inconveniently is that the USA remains to be the biggest customer of American-made surveillance technology.
"The world's dictators will remain well supplied by a robust global economy as long as the US government continues to support the development of a surveillance-technology industry that clearly lacks concern for the human rights and civil liberties implications of its business -- even rewarding secretive and publicly unaccountable behavior by these companies," the article went on to read.
The US technologies for Internet censorship strongly propped pre-revolution authoritarian rules in Tunisia and Egypt, and have helped uphold similar reigns in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia while Washington admonishes other non-conforming governments for failing to protect their citizens' online liberties, it further added.
On March 15, Wired magazine had published a report in which it said that the United States National Security Agency (NSA) is building the biggest spy center for intercepting and storing electronic communications collected not only from American citizens but from all over the world.
| In secret listening rooms nationwide, NSA software examines every email, phone call, and tweet as they zip by. |
The center, located in Bluffdale, a remote valley in the state of Utah, can process yottabytes (a million billions of gigabytes) of data.
The report further added that the interception process includes the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails-parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital "pocket litter.
The report quotes a senior intelligence official "the mammoth Bluffdale center will have another important and far more secret role that has gone unrevealed which is breaking codes."
"And code-breaking is crucial, because much of the data that the center will handle-financial information, stock transactions, business deals, foreign military and diplomatic secrets, legal documents, confidential personal communications-will be heavily encrypted," he explained.
Likening the process to the Watergate scandal and others of the Nixon administration, the report also read "the NSA has turned its surveillance apparatus on the US and its citizens. It has established listening posts throughout the nation to collect and sift through billions of email messages and phone calls, whether they originate within the country or overseas."
the facility is "the most covert and potentially most intrusive intelligence agency ever," and it will use 65 megawatts of electricity a year, with an annual bill of USD 40 million.
Most alarming is that the NSA is trying to expand its cyber activity through a new cyber-ops program at selected universities, by that, the students would take part in the intelligence operations. This step comes to increase the NSA's access to intelligence information they need, through carefully recruiting students that need to pass some security requirements during summer seminars.
Source: Foreign Policy,Wired
