Snowden: Facebook is allowing the government to see your messages

In a lengthy interview with the Guardian, NSA whistle blower Edward Snowden spoke with editor Alan Rusbridger about his extraordinary rise to infamy. Currently in exile in Russia, he talked about how he disseminated documents about the activities of the NSA to numerous countries: "Once you start splitting them over jurisdictions and things like that it becomes much more difficult to subvert their intentions. Nobody could stop it". He remains defiant. He may be an outlaw but "its been vindicating to see the reaction from lawmakers, judges, public bodies around the world, civil liberties activists who have said its true that we have a right to at least know the broad outlines of what our governments doing in our name and what its doing against us".

He explains how during his time working as an NSA analyst, he learned about previous surveillance programs run under George W Bush. Programs that were deemed unconstitutional and, having been closed, forced the US government to assume new executive powers that were then used "against the citizenry of its own country". For Snowden the power of the state is worrying:

So when we think about the nation we think about our country, we think about our home, we think about the people living in it and we think about its values. When we think about the state, were thinking about an institution. The distinction there is that we now have an institution that has become so powerful it feels comfortable granting itself new authorities, without the involvement of the country, without the involvement of the public, without the full involvement of all of our elected representatives and without the full involvement of open courts, and thats a terrifying thing.

The ever shrinking costs of technology is cited as a reason to further fear the surveillance programs. When it becomes cheaper to store data than it is to sift through it and work out what is actually valuable, it is held onto for a long time. The NSA, for instance, is able to hang onto information about individuals for five years before having to apply for an extension. While there has been an outpouring of global disgust at Snowden's revelations, he feels the backlash against the government would be even stronger if the impact of surveillance programs were better understood.

You have a tremendous population of young military enlisted individuals who, while thats not a discredit to them, may not have had the number of life experiences to have felt the sense of being violated. And if we havent been exposed to the dangers and risks of having our privacy violated, having our liberties violated, how can we expect these individuals to reasonably represent our own interests in exercising those authorities?

It has long been alleged that the internet companies who have decried the NSA have actually been willing partners. Snowden says that the financial arrangements that exist between surveillance agencies and internet and telecommunication companies is kept entirely secret -- "at a much greater level than for example the names of human agents operating undercover, embedded with terrorist groups".

Talk about the NSA has become so commonplace that it is easy to forget the huge numbers of entirely innocent people whose privacy has been invaded in recent years -- and Snowden insists that the big names have been (maybe still are being) fully compliant.

Agencies are provided with direct access to the contents of the server at these private companies. What it means is Facebook is allowing the government to get copies of your Facebook messages, your Skype conversations, your Gmail mailboxes, things like that.

It seems there is not really a need to be concerned that the government is hacking into private accounts, rather than access is being openly provided on demand.

Link:
Snowden: Facebook is allowing the government to see your messages