Last Friday, Facebook confirmed that it has released data related to national security requested by law enforcement agencies.
A statement by Ted Ullyot, Facebook General Counsel revealed that “For the six months ending December 31, 2012, the total number of user-data requests Facebook received from any and all government entities in the U.S. (including local, state, and federal, and including criminal and national security-related requests) – was between 9,000 and 10,000. These requests run the gamut – from things like a local sheriff trying to find a missing child, to a federal marshal tracking a fugitive, to a police department investigating an assault, to a national security official investigating a terrorist threat. The total number of Facebook user accounts for which data was requested pursuant to the entirety of those 9-10 thousand requests was between 18,000 and 19,000 accounts.”
“With more than 1.1 billion monthly active users worldwide, this means that a tiny fraction of one percent of our user accounts were the subject of any kind of U.S. state, local, or federal U.S. government request (including criminal and national security-related requests) in the past six months. “
Facebook said,”Requests from law enforcement entities investigating national security-related cases are by their nature classified and highly sensitive, and the law traditionally has placed significant constraints on the ability of companies like Facebook to even confirm or acknowledge receipt of these requests – let alone provide details of our responses.”
They assured that they don’t release data indiscriminately. “We’ve reiterated in recent days that we scrutinize every government data request that we receive – whether from state, local, federal, or foreign governments. We’ve also made clear that we aggressively protect our users’ data when confronted with such requests: we frequently reject such requests outright, or require the government to substantially scale down its requests, or simply give the government much less data than it has requested. And we respond only as required by law,” the statement said.
For Facebook users, it’s a good reason to be discriminating with one’s posts.
The concern over FB’s release of information about their members comes after the Snowden expose.
Early this month, American Edward Joseph Snowden, 29 years old, shared with the UK-based Guardian and The Washington Post, classified material on top-secret National Security Agency programs including the PRISM surveillance program and orders under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
Snowden had access to those materials as an infrastructure analyst for NSA in Hawaii under Booz Allen Hamilton, a strategy and technology consulting firm.
Before that he was “systems engineer, systems administrator, senior adviser for the Central Intelligence Agency, solutions consultant, and a telecommunications informations system officer.”
PRISM, according to reports that were not denied by the US government, provides the NSA and FBI with the ability to siphon data directly from the servers of major Internet companies such as Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo.
Snowden is currently in Hongkong and is resisting extradition requested by US authorities.
Snowden said his intention in exposing PRISM was not to destroy the US.”If I had just wanted to harm the US? You could shut down the surveillance system in an afternoon,” he said in the interview with The Guardian.
“I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded..The government has granted itself power it is not entitled to. There is no public oversight. The result is people like myself have the latitude to go further than they are allowed to … My sole motive is to inform the public as to that which is done in their name and that which is done against them,” he said.
Snowden fears that “Some new and unpredicted threat, we need more authority, we need more power.’ And there will be nothing the people can do at that point to oppose it. And it will be turnkey tyranny.”
What Snowden revealed was not entirely new and unknown to every one. In fact he did not even pass/leak a single top-secret document that proves his claims. It did confirm, though, that what others before him came out with wasn’t pure fiction.
The first docu I saw on this topic was probably in the mid-90s, where CIA agents being interviewed with their faces miraged and voices synth-scrambled telling how the Defense department employed massive listening stations – humongous computer farms spread throughout the country that scanned phone calls, emails, letters, journals and everything printed and broadcast, and now maybe – texted. Looking out for keywords that earlier have been red-flagged by the security agencies. I think they called it Project Phoenix then.
Then came the Bush era when Americans willfully surrendered their freedoms to government in exchange for security through the Patriot Act. The activists went as far blaming Bush and his cohorts as the real culprits in 911 because they say gov’t needed the people to agree to give up their rights for their own good.
It demolished, however, America’s image as the paragon of freedom and beacon of democracy – everything we’ve been taught about human rights and of a government that feared its own people was a nothing but a whole bunch of bovine excrement.
Just like Bradley Manning, Jules Assange and the rest of the whistleblowers against gov’t, Edward Snowden will suffer the same fate as we are already too familiar with.
Ellen, we were already been told that the intelligence agencies are gathering Metadata of our Electronic Communication, but not the actual contents of communication itself…and it was been going on since the passing of National Security Act after 9/11 but it also assured the citizens that privacy and confidentiality still guaranteed…unless of course. There is also in the act that it is only to be used to gather intelligence for national security…
There is no request for extradition at the moment, because Edward Snowden has not yet been charged. There is a problem, because the extradition treaty with Hong Kong excludes political offenses as basis for extradition. If Snowden is charged for espionage, then he can raise the political offense card. So how should he be charged in order to sidestep the political offense defense?
That conundrum is explained in the article in the link below:
usatoday.com/story/cybertruth/2013/06/19/how-edward-snowden-could-sidestep-extradition/2434335/
Lagyan ng tatlong w sa harap.
Welcome to the nwe wordl ordre!
The US is surprisingly taking too long to arrest Snowden. Are they seriously considering John McCain’s suggestion?
“What Snowden revealed was not entirely new and unknown to every one. In fact he did not even pass/leak a single top-secret document that proves his claims. It did confirm, though, that what others before him came out with wasn’t pure fiction.”
Go read South China Morning Post. Snowden has tons of documents and he already release some of them thru SCMP which proves his claims.
http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1268209/snowden-sought-booz-allen-job-gather-evidence-nsa-surveillance