Public Intelligence Blog

June 13, 2013 | By Katitza Rodriguez

Spies Without Borders I

Using Domestic Networks to Spy on the World

This is the first article of our Spy Without Borders series. This article has been co-authored by Tamir Israel, Staff Lawyer at CIPPIC and Katitza Rodriguez, EFF International Rights Director.  The Spy Without Borders series are looking into how the information disclosed in the NSA leaks affect the international community and how they highlight one part of an international system of surveillance that dissolves what national privacy protections any of us have, whereever we live. You can follow the Spy Without Borders here.

Introduction

Much of the U.S. media coverage of last week’s NSA revelations has concentrated on its impact on the constitutional rights of U.S.-based Internet users. But what about the billions of Internet users around the world whose private information is stored on U.S. servers, or whose data travels across U.S. networks or is otherwise accessible through them?

While the details are still emerging, what is clear is that many of the newly exposed surveillance activities have been shaped by U.S. foreign intelligence surveillance laws. The secret court that rubberstamped the collection of phone records from Verizon came from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), a secret court established under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA); the PRISM requests, the U.S. government has said, were FISA orders intended to target non-American persons outside of the United States.

As U.S. officials have repeated, FISA is designed to protect the rights of “U.S. persons” (citizens, permanent residents, and others on U.S. soil) in the face of operations targeting foreigners. But regardless of their effectiveness (or lack thereof) in achieving this objective, these slim protections offer nothing to the vast majority of Internet users around the world. Privacy expert, Caspar Bowden, has gone so far as to say that U.S. foreign intelligence powers “offer[] zero protection to foreigners’ data in U.S. Clouds.”

In this article, we will look into how the NSA leaks may affect the rest of the world, and how they highlight one part of an international system of surveillance that dissolves what national privacy protections any of us have, where ever we live.

Global Communications Networks & Trans-border Surveillance

Continue reading “John Perry Barlow: Spies Without Borders I — How USA is Capturing Billions of Internet Accounts Around the World”