Barack Obama

Two huge revelations in the last 24 hours have laid bare the extent to which the Obama administration is engaged in population-wide surveillance of Americans. The United States is, truly, now a surveillance state, and its government is the biggest spy and hacker on the planet.

First came the leak to The Guardian of a secret court order for phone company Verizon to hand telecommunications data for all calls to and from its business network services division to the National Security Agency, at the request of the FBI. The order is almost certainly merely one of many requiring routine retention of all phone call data for all phone companies.

This is data retention of the kind that law enforcement and intelligence agencies here want to impose on Australians, and it is currently the subject of a parliamentary committee inquiry. The difference is, in the United States authorisation for it is provided by a secret court established under the draconian Patriot Act; under the terms of the order, Verizon is not permitted to reveal the mass retention of data.

The White House defended the order as merely being “telecommunications data” (call number, time and duration, location of mobile phones, etc) — the same excuse that then-attorney-general Nicola Roxon and her department used about the Australian proposal, despite the fact that telecommunications data can be used to monitor an individual’s movements and activities. By the way, due to a perverse piece of casuistry, the US government insists it is not actually “collecting” the data until an individual actually looks at it.

Far from eliciting outrage, incredibly, it was the leak of the order that prompted calls for Congressional action. Democratc Congresswoman Dianne Feinstein demanded an inquiry into the revelation and complained of “a culture of leaks”. The vast majority of leaks in Washington are authorised leaks by the Obama administration to favoured media outlets and journalists; non-official leaks are pursued and prosecuted more aggressively by the Obama administration than by all previous administrations.

But this revelation of secret, mass surveillance was dwarfed this morning by the revelation of secret program, called PRISM, begun under the Bush Administration and dramatically expanded under the Obama administration, under which the FBI and the NSA are being allowed to tap directly into the servers of the world’s biggest internet companies.

Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, AOL, Skype, YouTube, and Apple all allow the FBI backdoor access to their servers to monitor all traffic going through them — traffic from individuals, traffic from businesses, traffic from other governments. Another, smaller company, PalTalk, also provides access as well. The storage service Dropbox is identified as “coming soon”.

The only prominent omission from the list is Twitter.

This means every Google request, every Gmail, every Facebook post, every Skype chat, everything going to and from Apple and Microsoft, no matter where or who it’s from, is being monitored by the FBI and NSA, in real time, via software.

The Washington Post has a leaked NSA slide show from April demonstrating PRISM, which costs just $20 million a year to run. Microsoft was the first company to join PRISM, in 2007. Google joined in 2009. Apple only joined late in 2012. The program is reported to be widely known about in Congress.

The revelations further confirm what many have been pointing out for some time, that despite the constant claims about Chinese hacking, the United States government is the world’s most aggressive and successful hacker and spy on the planet, devoting billions of dollars to accessing, storing and monitoring internet communications in the United States and around the world as well as storing all telecommunications data for phone calls made using US companies.