Origins of global surveillance

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The origins of global surveillance can be traced back to the late 1940s, when the UKUSA Agreement was jointly enacted by the United Kingdom and the United States, whose close cooperation eventually culminated in the creation of the global surveillance network, code-named "ECHELON", in 1971.[1][2]

In the aftermath of the 1970s Watergate affair and a subsequent congressional inquiry led by Senator Frank Church,[3] it was revealed that the NSA, in collaboration with Britain's GCHQ, had routinely intercepted the international communications of prominent anti-Vietnam War leaders such as Jane Fonda and Benjamin Spock.[4] Decades later, a multi-year investigation by the European Parliament highlighted the NSA's role in economic espionage in a report entitled "Development of Surveillance Technology and Risk of Abuse of Economic Information", in 1999.[5]

However, for the general public, it was a series of detailed disclosures of internal NSA documents in June 2013 that first revealed the massive extent of the NSA's spying, both foreign and domestic. Most of these were leaked by an ex-contractor, Edward Snowden. Even so, a number of these older global surveillance programs such as PRISM, XKeyscore, and Tempora were referenced in the 2013 release of thousands of documents.[6] As confirmed by the NSA's director Keith B. Alexander in 2013, the NSA collects and stores all phone records of all American citizens.[7] Much of the data is kept in large storage facilities such as the Utah Data Center, a US$1.5 billion megaproject referred to by The Wall Street Journal as a "symbol of the spy agency's surveillance prowess."[8]

  1. ^ "Q&A: What you need to know about Echelon". BBC. 29 May 2001.
  2. ^ Nabbali, Talitha; Perry, Mark (March 2004). "Going for the throat". Computer Law & Security Review. 20 (2): 84–97. doi:10.1016/S0267-3649(04)00018-4. It wasn't until 1971 that the UKUSA allies began ECHELON
  3. ^ Pre-Emption - The Nsa And The Telecoms | Spying On The Home Front | FRONTLINE | PBS
  4. ^ Cohen, Martin (2006). No Holiday. New York: Disinformation Company Ltd. ISBN 978-1-932857-29-0.
  5. ^ Peggy Becker (October 1999). DEVELOPMENT OF SURVEILLANCE TECHNOLOGY AND RISK OF ABUSE OF ECONOMIC INFORMATION (Report). STOA, European Parliament. Retrieved November 3, 2013.
  6. ^ Snowden has ‘thousands’ of damaging NSA documents, says Greenwald
  7. ^ "Senators: Limit NSA snooping into US phone records". Associated Press. Retrieved October 15, 2013. "Is it the goal of the NSA to collect the phone records of all Americans?" Udall asked at Thursday's hearing. "Yes, I believe it is in the nation's best interest to put all the phone records into a lockbox that we could search when the nation needs to do it. Yes," Alexander replied.
  8. ^ Siobhan Gorman. "Meltdowns Hobble NSA Data Center". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved October 19, 2013. The Utah facility, one of the Pentagon's biggest U.S. construction projects, has become a symbol of the spy agency's surveillance prowess, which gained broad attention in the wake of leaks from NSA contractor Edward Snowden.