Talking about the Global Government Surveillance System

July 19, "Earth Hacking" Conference held in New York , during which the United States surveillance scandal exposed Edward Snowden through the video accident "appeared", making the venue is very sensational. Even though Snowden is "trapped in shame", his "old" bank has not yet been dropped , calling on colleagues in the industry to develop new technologies to better withstand the global government monitoring and control system.

At the first anniversary of the "Monitor Gate" incident, a book called "No Place to Hidden" (English name NO PLACE TO HIDE) may give us an idea of ​​what happened. The book's author Glenn Greenwald was one of the first to meet Snowden and cover the incident. So, he won this year's Pulitzer Prize for News. For the first time, the book discloses the full story of the author's meeting with Snowden and the details of the NSS surveillance program.

In May 2013, Glenn Greenwald traveled to Hong Kong to meet with an anonymous insider who claimed to have evidence of the U.S. government's monitoring program. Prior to that, the insider had been in contact with Greenwald over a highly encrypted communication channel. Two people meet the scene like the movie has been staged numerous times in the bridge section, frequent replacement of the meeting place, acquaintance of joint people, the unobtrusive joint secret. To be on the safe side, he also insisted that journalists remove the phone's battery or put the phone in the fridge because he knew monitoring was ubiquitous. The insider is the famous Snowden in the future.

Snowden, 29, was an infrastructure analyst at the U.S. National Security Agency. With technical talent, Snowden dropped out of high school in 2005 to become the CIA's technical experts. According to Snowden himself, his main task was to use hacking techniques to invade military and civilian computer systems in other countries to steal information or prepare for an attack. Because of his work, Snowden has access to top-secret information at the vast U.S. control system. In Snowden's view, the purpose of exposing the "surveillance gate" is simply to stimulate a major debate about privacy, Internet freedom and the dangers of state surveillance.

In fact, however, the "Monitor Gate" incident has gone far beyond the imagination of Snowden and Greenwald, causing a great uproar around the world. It opened a door to the outside world, through which we can understand the many details of this monitoring system. We are nowhere to hide in this door. As the "Ocean Kingdom" written by British writer George Orwell has a "electronic screen" in all the places, "Big Brother" is watching you all the time on the other side of the screen.

Surveillance networks sown by the United States are pervasive, including Internet servers, satellites, underwater fiber-optic cables, telephone systems, and personal computer devices. One of the "non-border people" is one of the representatives. As the name of this project refers to, this project distinguishes itself by automatically collecting phone and email worldwide. According to information provided by Snowden, the project collected as many as 97 billion e-mails and 124 billion calls from all over the world in a month from March 8, 2013. And "collecting everything" is the mantra of Alexander, the former director of the U.S. National Security Bureau.

When we click "agree" on the Internet privacy policy without thinking, we may have fallen into the trap of Internet companies. In the "Prism Door" project, the U.S. National Security Bureau has signed clandestine agreements with nine Internet companies including Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, YouTube, Skype, AOL and Apple. In most cases, data is transmitted electronically to the government through the servers of these companies, and sometimes intelligence personnel can even gain direct access to the company's servers and databases for data. In addition, the NSA has been capturing personal information from mobile device applications for years, including Angry Birds, Google Maps, Facebook, Twitter and Flickr, a web-based album.

Most of the U.S. government will supervise the project under a beautiful name, but privately, it will do nothing. For example, the "Benniu" plan to crack cybersecurity; the "wayward giraffe" to anonymous browsers; the "muscularity" plan to invade Google and Yahoo's private network. Statistics show that the U.S. and British intelligence agencies monitor the population of EU officials, foreign leaders and their families, heads of the UN and other aid programs such as UNICEF, and others. One well-known incident is that the U.S. National Security Bureau has long intercepted the phone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel. It even changed the rules of conduct of some national institutions in Europe. According to reports, to prevent eavesdropping by Americans, the German parliamentary intelligence commission now deliberately formulates a new set of rules: At the meeting, participants were asked to put their cell phones and computers in metal boxes and play German classical music.

The United States is also accustomed to "pouring a rake". The U.S. government, on the pretext of "security," warned U.S. companies not to buy the routers of Huawei and ZTE, the Chinese Internet equipment manufacturers, while organizing hackers to infiltrate the companies' networks to steal confidential information. A June 2010 report shows that the NSA regularly receives or intercepts routers, servers and other computer network equipment before shipment, installs back-door monitoring tools, and then repacks manufacturers' labels goods.

The well-known pretext for the U.S. government to implement large-scale surveillance is to "fight terrorism." In fact, however, the United States achieved its own political and economic goals with the help of the advantages of cyber technology under the pretext of fighting terrorism. In 2006, the U.S. government re-amended the Patriot Act, and the government can issue data requests to major phone companies every three months. In 2012, Obama signed the Presidential Directive on U.S. Cyber ​​Operations Policy, which can be launched without any prior warning. The U.S. government has repeatedly argued that most monitoring situations involve only "metadata" (eg, the sender, subject, location, etc.) rather than the content itself. But those with a little internet knowledge will know that these "metadata" can delineate a wealth of information about one's habits and social relationships, sometimes even more important than the data content.

For some, the United States surveillance does not have a negative impact on the individual. They even think that a well-behaved citizen has no reason to fear a government under control. For this idea, Greenwald gave a response in the book. In his view, turning the Internet into a surveillance system would undermine its most central potential. Worse, it turns it into a tool of oppression that threatens to create the most extreme and the most abusive weapon. Snowden's fears are coming true, "the public just shrugged his shoulders when they saw the documents." We know about it, but we do not care about it. "