Prism plan, big data and other people's lives

The Prism program (PRISM) is a top-secret electronic surveillance program launched by the National Security Agency (NSA) since 2007, the program covers a wide range of eavesdropping and monitoring of foreign users of American internet companies, and allows listeners to include any customer who participates in the project company's services outside the United States, Or any American citizen who communicates with a foreign person. The plan was recently exposed by former CIA employees.

Edward Snowden, a 29-year-old former CIA employee, has revealed to the world in Hong Kong two of the government's secret surveillance programs: Phone surveillance programs for U.S. citizens and Internet surveillance programs for foreigners, The Washington Post reported. The former allows authorities to acquire and store vast amounts of communications from American telephone users: when and where to communicate with whom, the frequency of communications and the length of time, and so on. Although these ordinary Americans may have no connection with terrorism, they are likely to be monitored in the long run without discrimination. These controls are carried out in secret, and users will not receive any prompts, and will not see the legal license documents signed by the judge. The PRISM program has enabled the NSA to eavesdrop and monitor overseas users of American internet companies, including Microsoft (Hotmail), Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Skype and Apple. According to the secret-level slides provided by The Washington Post, the NSA has access to all the information stored by users ' emails, chats, videos, photos, and even the details of the user's social network.

The disclosure of the two secret surveillance programs has sparked intense debate in the spotlight. The NSA officials said the controls avoided a lot of terrorist attacks, and Edward's announcement that he had to be judged by the public for his intelligence work in the United States, and that his absolute privacy and absolute security were not at all necessary to defend the project. And I was standing on the side of Edward Snowden. You can say that Edward is too young, too simple, and even naïve, but he wakes the world up by shouting, giving up 200,000 of dollars in annual salary and choosing to exile with the United States Government to Hong Kong, just to save us from living under the electricity curtain. He's a hero!

The author believes that the prism plan is inseparable from the development of the large data age. The behavior of each individual may be different, but it is regular. By acquiring and analyzing massive data, we can obtain the effective information of people's behavior habits, and then speculate on individual behavior habits, and provide personalized and customized service. Advertisers and dealers through the analysis of the vast volume of customer purchase behavior can understand customers, to carry out targeted marketing to enhance business; Los Angeles police force is targeted by analyzing decades of criminal records, predicting patterns and frequencies of criminal behavior. It is clear that the U.S. government has shown great interest in not only the companies and local police stations that are eyeing the big data. Monitoring plans for the general public telephone and the Internet may not involve specific phone calls, the interception and interpretation of an email, but the U.S. government may be able to find clues to the "terrorist attacks" through keyword screening, contact frequencies and the possible links between locations and terrorist attacks, and abnormal cash flow. Although the US government now claims that these covert surveillance measures are only for counter-terrorism purposes, they are extremely vulnerable to abuses by unregulated authorities. The secret agency, which is not publicly available, has access to your geographic location, communications records, social networking, videos, photos, and so on, and can analyze and interpret your data without court permission. (under the Patriot Act, the government can obtain any citizen's personal data, financial transaction information and medical information at any time without the supervision and permission of the judge. "If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, sounds like a duck, it may be a duck," the American journalist Wallace once said. "It can also be used in these clandestine institutions, where the NSA looks like an Internet-monitoring agency, setting up large data-storage and computing centers, and admitting to internet censorship," he said. Its only shield is "to thwart the terrorist attacks, for your safety." However, counterterrorism is a basket and everything can be put into it. Who can guarantee that "counter-terrorism" will not become an American-style stability?

With the development of cloud computing, more and more data will be stored on the Internet: Mail, personal files, credit card information, geographic location, personal schedule, ebook, photos, etc. Apple's icloud service makes it easy to sync music, mail, photos, personal documents, and more. In the past, we believed that Google, Amazon and Apple could provide enough protection for our privacy, enjoy the convenience of cloud technology, and look forward to a better data age. Today, Edward sounded the alarm of privacy for the world! If one day in the future, the United States Government believes that the purchase of pressure cooker, people who have often contacted foreigners (especially Muslims) and read "How to make bombs in your grandmother's kitchen" have a tendency to carry out terrorist attacks, focusing on surveillance and fishing enforcement (I suspect the NSA has similar data mining methods) , the scene described in the novel "1984" is finally coming. This is much smarter than the real-name system of a kitchen knife: quiet, extremely low cost and very accurate. Behind the development of big data, perhaps not only the internet giants, but also those who are eager to the ambitious. The acquisition and analysis of large data allows the aspirant to effectively and accurately remove dissent and control ideas. The Obama administration has taken the first dangerous step in the name of "counter-terrorism".

In a 2006 German film "The Lives of others", there was a scene that impressed the author: In the gloomy basement sits countless letter, who use the seal of the vapor-smoked letter to invalidate the glue so that the contents of the letter are subject to scrutiny. Now, the film has become a reality, the NSA's giant high-performance computers are running efficiently, intelligence experts in the big data is digging in the joy. An ever bigger brother are watching you.

(Responsible editor: The good of the Legacy)