The Snowden Disclosures and Intelligence in Cyberspace

On June 5, 2013, the Guardian began publishing reports on confidential documents supplied to them by Edward Snowden, a private contractor for the National Security Agency.

Throughout his career in the NSA, he became aware that the NSA’s bulk monitoring violated US and international law, with the transgressions hidden from public scrutiny by secrecy restrictions imposed and enforced by the US government (Lyon, 2015). His revelations revealed a secret universe. They caused controversies and unending debates in the US and other countries regarding the NSA’s monitoring, cooperation between other national intelligence agencies and the NSA, and spying of other government agencies, notably the UK.

The initial publication focused on the “Verizon Order.” The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court ordered Verizon to supply the NSA with daily recordings of telephone conversations between the United States and foreign countries, as well as calls made solely within the United States (Lyon, 2014). Every day, the NSA obtained metadata on millions of phone calls made by Americans through Verizon.

The next day, another revelation disclosed that, under Section 702 of FISA, the US government was authorized to conduct electronic surveillance within the US for national security purposes against foreign nationals thought to be based outside the US. This disclosure shed light on two NSA programs: the PRISM and UPSTREAM activities. Under PRISM, the NSA compelled US firms (Facebook, Google, Apple, Yahoo, and others) to disclose data they handled to or from its overseas targets, and it used UPSTREAM to gather intelligence on overseas targets by tapping into privately owned fiber-optic cables delivering information to and from the US (Bausardo, 2014). Both PRISM and UPSTREAM provided the NSA with communications metadata and content.

Snowden also disclosed evidence of US government surveillance and eavesdropping on Brazilian politicians and the state oil company, Petrobas. Snowden’s papers also revealed that the US government collected data on international organizations and their activities, such as the European Union, the United Nations, and the World Bank, and that NSA actions include encryption of cyber communications and the deployment of software vulnerabilities against foreign surveillance entities (Fidler & Ganguly, 2015). These acts raised concerns that the NSA was concentrating on signal intelligence at the expense of overall cyber security.

Finally, Snowden revealed material on the United Kingdom. By getting access to fiber optic cables that transmit a significant portion of the world’s Internet and telephone traffic, TEMPORA enabled the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) to collect massive volumes of metadata and communication content. The data was subsequently analyzed by GCHQ analysts using XKEYSCORE, a sophisticated NSA software for analyzing surveillance data received from different sources and stored in multiple databases (Fidler & Ganguly, 2015).

Now that we know what the Snowden revelations were, we will use this example and the literature around it to show how they demonstrate how cyberspace has revolutionized intelligence.

The revelations demonstrated the use of Big Data in cyberspace intelligence, which is the capacity to explore, integrate, and cross-reference massive data sets. Lyon and Reilly both illustrate in their publications that the disclosures reveal that data in cyberspace is not only gathered in a fundamentally different way, but it is also processed, integrated, and appraised using unique approaches. Social media platforms are now a source of a vast quantity of data.

Furthermore, Big Data reverses prior intelligence efforts, which would have normally targeted a certain suspect and then searched for data on him. Massive amounts of data are now collected and integrated from a variety of sources before analyzing the full spectrum of their actual and potential applications. Algorithms and analytics are utilized not just to assess prior events, but also to predict and respond before new actions are initiated. In other words, cyberspace and the amount of data it creates have allowed Big Data practices’ that boost surveillance through the development of connected databases and analytic procedures.

Additionally, the findings have showed that governments are partnering with commercial corporations to obtain data. Indeed, firms have provided their own data in order to secure government contracts. Aside from corporations that were not always aware of government operations, there are individuals who have voluntarily participated in data collection by sharing growing quantities of personal information on the internet. The Snowden revelations shown that, with the advent of internet, everything is possible, and that data harvesting has never been easier for unscrupulous states.

Finally, one of the most current challenges raised by the Snowden disclosures is the abolition of surveillance secrecy. According to the literature, citizens should have the right to know how their data is used because they contribute to its development.

Sources:

Bausardo, T. (2014). Quel passé pour Prism et Snowden ? Vacarme, 66(1), 142–157. https://doi.org/10.3917/vaca.066.0142

Fidler, D. P., & Ganguly, S. (2015). The Snowden reader. Indiana University Press.

Lyon, D. (2014). Surveillance, Snowden, and Big Data: Capacities, consequences, critique. Big Data & Society, 1(2), 205395171454186–. https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951714541861

Lyon, D. (2015). Surveillance after Snowden.

Murakami W, & Wright, S. (2015). Before and After Snowden. Surveillance & Society, 13(2), 132–138. https://doi.org/10.24908/ss.v13i2.5710

National Security Agency. (2013, August 9). The National Security Agency: Missions, Authorities, Oversight and Partnerships. https://irp.fas.org/nsa/nsa-story.pdf

Reilly, B. C. (2015). Doing More with More: The Efficacy of Big Data in the Intelligence Community. American Intelligence Journal, 32(1), 18–24. http://www.jstor.org/stable/26202099