Everyone should be concerned

Also revealed is a US presidential directive to security agencies to draw up a list of potential overseas targets for US cyber-attacks.

This lays the US open to charges of double standards and hypocrisy: accusing other countries of engaging in Internet snooping or hacking and cyber warfare, when it has itself established systems to do both on a mega scale.

The revelations, based on a leak by a former US intelligence official, include that US security agencies have access to telephone data of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Sprint Nextel, as well as from credit card transactions. They also can access data from major Internet companies – Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Facebook, AOL, Apple, PalTalk, Skype and YouTube – under the Prism surveillance programme. Millions of Internet users around the world use the services of the companies mentioned.

Two US citizen groups, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the New York Civil Liberties Union, have filed a lawsuit against the US administration.

“Those programmes constitute unreasonable intrusions into Americans’ private lives that’s protected by the Fourth Amendment [on search and seizure],” said Brett Kaufman of the ACLU.

Governments and people outside the US are equally upset that they apparently are also covered by the massive surveillance programme. The European Union’s commissioner of justice, Viviane Reding, has written to the US attorney-general asking if European citizens’ personal information had been part of the intelligence gathering, and what avenues are available for Europeans to find out if they had been spied on.

In China, commentators are citing double standards on the part of the US. An article in the China Daily commented that the massive US surveillance programme is certain to stain Washington’s overseas image and test developing China-US ties. An editorial in another Chinese paper, Global Daily, stated: “China needs to seek an explanation from Washington. We are not bystanders. The issue of whether the US as an Internet superpower has abused its powers touches on our vital interests directly.”

In their summit in California, US President Barack Obama reportedly pressed Chinese President Xi Jinpeng to curb cyber-spying by Chinese agencies and companies. The news about the US snooping on Internet users must have caused some discomfort to Obama when bringing up this issue.

A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson last week reiterated that “China is also a victim to the most sophisticated cyber hacking”.

Though less publicised, a part of the leaks was an 18-page directive from President Obama to his security and intelligence officials to draw up a list of potential overseas targets for US cyber-attacks. The October 2012 directive states that what it calls offensive cyber effects operations (OCEO) “can offer unique and unconventional capabilities to advance US national objectives around the world with little or no warning to the adversary or target and with potential effects ranging from subtle to severely damaging”.

The directive says the government will “identify potential targets of national importance where OCEO can offer a favourable balance of effectiveness and risk as compared with other instruments of national power”. The aim of the document was “to put in place tools and a framework to enable government to make decisions” on cyber actions.

Obama’s move to establish a potentially aggressive cyber warfare doctrine will heighten fears over the increasing militarisation of the Internet. The US is understood to have already participated in at least one major cyber attack, the use of the Stuxnet computer worm targeted on Iranian uranium enrichment centrifuges, the legality of which has been the subject of controversy.

In the presidential directive, the criteria for offensive cyber operations in the directive is not limited to retaliatory action but vaguely framed as advancing “US national objectives around the world”.

Obama further authorised the use of offensive cyber attacks in foreign nations without their government’s consent whenever “US national interests and equities” require such non-consensual attacks. It expressly reserves the right to use cyber tactics as part of what it calls “anticipatory action taken against imminent threats”.

Meanwhile, UN Human Rights Council’s Special Rapporteur Frank La Rue issued a report on June 4 on the increasing use of surveillance, warning that unfettered state access to surveillance technologies could compromise rights to privacy and freedom of expression, as protected by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

The report warned too against the use of “an amorphous concept of national security” as a reason to invade people’s rights to privacy and freedom of expression, arguing that such an invasion potentially “threatens the foundations of a democratic society”.