

Now, even as it becomes feasible for foreign intelligence agencies to capture all data on all individuals everywhere, states are moving to impose this troubling carte blanche foreign intelligence paradigm to digital networks. This is especially true with foreign intelligence activities, where agencies have historically been granted close to carte blanche legal capacity to surveill foreigners, while incentives to adopt a “capture everything” approach to information gathering have been high. While not an entirely new problem, states have met this increase in practical capacity to conduct sweeping extra-territorial surveillance has not been matched with an increase in extra-territorial protections. Global Communications Networks & Trans-border Surveillanceīefore looking at the specifics of the NSA’s surveillance program, it is worth noting that these programs are part of a broader trend: as greater use of cloud computing and other web-based services entails more global data routing and storage, many states gain the practical ability to capture, access and in many cases spy on data passing through their territory or accessible remotely through terminals based in their territory.

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.


foreign intelligence powers “offer zero protection to foreigners’ data in U.S. One privacy expert, Caspar Bowden, has gone so far as to say that U.S. 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. soil) in the face of operations targeting foreigners. persons” (citizens, permanent residents, and others on U.S. officials have repeated, FISA is designed to protect the rights of “U.S. government has said, were FISA orders intended to target non-American persons outside of the United States.Īs U.S. 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. While the details are still emerging, what is clear is that many of the newly exposed surveillance activities have been shaped by U.S. networks or is otherwise accessible through them? servers, or whose data travels across U.S. But what about the billions of Internet users around the world whose private information is stored on 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.
RUNNING A SPY NETWORK SERIES
The article is part of the EFF's Spy Without Borders series of blogs looking into how the information disclosed in the U.S National Security Agency (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, wherever we live. The following article is cross-posted with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and was co-authored by Tamir Israel, Staff Lawyer at CIPPIC and Katitza Rodriguez, EFF International Rights Director. Spies Without Borders I: Using Domestic Networks to Spy on the World
