The Young Man of the Rising Sun
Saying that the United States is the Matrix and the king of stealing secrets, I believe that the people of the earth have no objection.
Over the years, the United States has spent huge sums of money to build the world's largest and dirtiest intelligence network, stealing the secrets of opponents and eavesdropping on the phones of allies, forcing Merkel to install security chips worth up to 2500 euros on her mobile phones, forcing European countries to propose a "privacy in the digital age" resolution at the United Nations.
Not long ago, Gell-Mann, a pulitzer prize and Emmy award winner, a former investigative journalist for The Washington Post and a New York Times bestselling author, published a new book, "Black Mirror: Snowden and the Nation of American Surveillance," detailing how the United States extended its black hand into the world's communications networks. In 2013, when Snowden sought to expose the dark curtain of the "Prism Gate" in the United States, Gell-Mann was one of his three preferred reporters. This time, the old reporter unveiled what old bottoms in the United States?
American journalist Gell-Mann publishes a new book, Black Mirror: Snowden and the Nation of American Surveillance
01 U.S. domestic surveillance system: massive information, for my use
Headquartered in Fort Meade, Maryland, the National Security Agency (NSA) is an 11-story building shrouded in blue-black reflective glass. Behind this "black mirror," the U.S. intelligence surveillance system is peering into the world with wide eyes, while the object of surveillance is ignorant.
<h1 toutiao-origin="h1" > the headquarters of the National Security Agency (NSA</h1>).
It's like an intelligence "production line" that collects intelligence and assembles it into a "finished product" and then sends it to the "customer" in the form of a "series of reports." The N.S.A. is said to have "atomic bomb-level signal intelligence information data" that is more than enough to make an already unequal balance of rights between the U.S. government and the people even more unbalanced.
The N.S.A. has all the source material in social, business, political, and religious networks across the United States. In 2012, then-Director Alexander claimed that the agency did not have data on U.S. citizens. But in fact, a 5-year-span telephone account database compiled by the N.S.A. and the FBI alone contains trillions of pieces of data. By analyzing these phone records, the NSA was able to identify the caller's indirect, covert network of connections.
After 9/11, the N.S.A. was able to rightfully launch the Vice President's Special Project, which plans to spend huge sums of money to secretly buy data from the three major U.S. telephone operators. In a subproject code-named Mainway, the N.S.A. kept massive call logs, covering nearly all Americans. Mainway's data can be retained for 5 years, with billions of adjustments made around the clock every day.
In this way, the NSA relied on the Mainway system to establish an updated map of american social life relations at any time, and could even easily retrieve any point in time in the past to re-examine the events that did not attract attention at that time.
The whispers between parents and relatives and friends under the lights of thousands of homes are not only the data that can be called up at will in the NSA system, but also ordinary people are simply naked in front of the NSA intelligence personnel.
02 The United States International Surveillance System: Multi-pronged and pervasive
In addition to its own network of theft, the United States has also cooperated with many allies such as the "Five Eyes Alliance" to establish many secret surveillance systems around the world. The N.S.A. conducts clandestine surveillance primarily under the banner of applying to operators to access the global communication backbone network. When it is impossible to enter the network through the normal means of negotiation with enterprises, the NSA can also use technical means to open a "backdoor" intrusion and achieve "self-service" access.
In this way, the NSA used software vulnerability tools or automated equipment to collect electronic signals and intercept information on global communications equipment. Even if the monitoring object does not use public equipment at all or the public Internet or software vulnerabilities cannot be exploited, the NSA can also collect information "manually".
This method is mostly aimed at foreign embassies and consulates in the United States and foreign targets. The action team has a hardware implant switch that can secretly change the target's phone, web searcher, and mail line. When necessary, these personnel will also secretly go to the target location and sneak into the scene disguised as repairmen, inspectors and other identities to collect information.
Given the dangers of action against the leaders of other countries, the operators may even carry light self-defence weapons when necessary. In addition to this, they often use pseudonyms to hack local wireless networks.
<h1 toutiao-origin="h1" > In 2013, american masses rallied to protest the N.S.A.'s mass surveillance practices. </h1>
03 "Prism" plan: "intelligence agencies + Internet enterprises" go hand in hand
The well-known "Prism" program began in 2007 and submitted three large intelligence reports to the US government in the first month after its launch, which can be described as the first victory and remarkable results.
Five and a half years later, the Prism program has become the "main engine" of the US surveillance system. The logo of the NSA Special Clue Operations, the executive unit of Prism, is very intuitive — a bald eagle standing on a planet covered with network cables, firmly grasping the Internet and the international telephone network, as if the whole world were its claws prey.
< h1 toutiao-origin="h1" > the logo of the "Prism" executive unit, the NSA Special Leads Operations</h1> Division
Prism's surveillance targets include not only human language and pictures, but also machine information, which can monitor all electromagnetic data, such as missile electronic signals. In 2012, of the 8,233 confidential Daily Briefings presented to the president of the United States, a whopping 1,477 were from Project Prism.
At the same time, the large American Internet companies that claim to be "independent" are also inseparable from "prism". They dominate the global market for search engines, text messaging, email, and cloud storage, providing the N.S.A. and FBI with a vast source of data and becoming a hotbed of "prism."
Judging from the information that has been disclosed, the partners of "Prism" include Google, Facebook, Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, Skype, Palitalk, Youtube, Apple and other well-known enterprises, which have long covered all aspects of modern people's lives.
According to Snowden, the N.S.A. shares far more information with Internet companies than other sources. In less than half a year from the end of 2012 to April 5, 2013, the number of targets monitored by Prism increased from 45,000 to 118,000, with the number of targeted targets on Facebook doubling and Skype quadrupling.
04 National Intelligence Agencies: Expanding Surveillance Authority
Under U.S. law and regulations, only 22 senior officials have the authority to order "contact chain" surveillance. The government needs permission from the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA Court) to conduct surveillance.
But in reality, the rules are dead, people are alive, and abuses of surveillance are not uncommon in the United States, such as the New York Police system spying on mosques, and some government departments monitoring poor communities, minority communities, immigrant communities, and religious groups.
After 9/11, the George W. Bush administration used the name of counterterrorism to authorize intelligence agencies to bypass the White House, Congress, and the FISA court to conduct Internet surveillance and cyber eavesdropping.
Although the Justice Department has since ruled that some of its actions were illegal, Then Vice President Dick Cheney insisted that intelligence gathering was essentially an act of war, a privilege exclusive to the president as commander-in-chief of the three services, and that other agencies had no authority to limit the president's war powers.
In 2006, the FISA court secretly authorized the government to collect and store all phone records in the United States. In 2007 and 2008, Congress passed the Protection of the United States Act and the FISA Amendment, respectively, giving the N.S.A. and the FBI the right to selectively monitor accounts and simplifying procedures for obtaining information about U.S. citizens, resident residents, and companies with green cards. The NSA is authorized to apply for a one-time court license to monitor an unlimited number of accounts. Later, the NSA began to arbitrarily choose surveillance targets.
After reading "Black Mirror", do you feel that Hollywood spy blockbusters are not completely fictional, but "documentaries" that are really staged in the United States every day? But reality is often more magical than movies. "Big Brother is watching you!" What the United States is doing today dwarfs even george Orwell's famous dystopian novel 1984 as the surveillance empire "Oceania."
Behind the "global surveillance" is the naked logic of American hegemony: only the United States can control the world, and only the United States is worthy of controlling the world. As WikiLeaks founder Assange put it, "Don't expect a surveillance super-big congress to behave with dignity and respect." There is only one rule, and that is no rule."
In 1984, "Oceania" is a veritable black-and-white upside-down nation—the tyranny of war in the name of peace, the greed of exploitation in the name of wealth, the hypocrisy of deception in the name of truth, and the darkness of surveillance in the name of fraternity. What is the difference between usa today and the United States?
For many years, the United States has been trying to put the hat of "1984" on the head of the socialist countries, but the United States, sitting on the "prism", has not only lived into a "brave new world", but also truly lived into the appearance of "1984", reduced to a real dystopia.
At that time, Orwell never explained in the novel how long "Oceania" could exist. Today, the real United States may be able to give "1984" a big ending. The "city on the top of the mountain" built with "prism" must be just a "glass castle". In the face of the ups and downs of the century-old changes, where can this castle go? Do it yourself!
This issue is edited by Zhou Yuhua