Surveillance

Edward Snowden has no regrets five years on from leaking the biggest cache of top-secret documents in history. He is wanted by the US. He is in exile in Russia. But he is satisfied with the way his revelations of mass surveillance have rocked governments, intelligence agencies and major internet companies.

In June 2013, news organizations broke stories about federal government surveillance of phone calls and electronic communications of US and foreign citizens, based on classified documents leaked by then-National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. Here are some key findings about Americans’ views of government information-gathering and surveillance, drawn from Pew Research Center surveys since the NSA revelations:

Surveillance systems that track the locations of cellphone users and spy on their calls, texts and data streams are being turned against Americans as they roam the country and the world, security experts and US officials say.  Federal officials acknowledged the privacy risk to Americans in a previously undisclosed letter from the Department of Homeland Security to Sen Ron Wyden (D-OR), saying they had received reports that "nefarious actors may have exploited" global cellular networks "to target the communications of American citizens." The letter, dated May 22, described surveillance syste

In June 2013, halfway through the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) negotiations, a National Security Agency contractor named Edward Snowden leaked documents on America’s global surveillance. The documents showed that the National Security Agency had backdoor deals with major Silicon Valley companies, allowing them to use consumer data as the basis of their counterintelligence operations.

Police departments pay Amazon to use facial-recognition technology the company says can “identify persons of interest against a collection of millions of faces in real-time.”  More than two dozen nonprofits wrote to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to ask that he stop selling the technology to police, after the ACLU of Northern California revealed documents to shine light on the sales.

The National Security Agency vacuumed up more than 534 million records of phone calls and text messages from American telecommunications providers like AT&T and Verizon in 2017 — more than three times what it collected in 2016. Intelligence analysts are also more frequently searching for information about Americans within the agency’s expanding collection of so-called call detail records — telecom metadata logging who contacted whom and when, but not the contents of what they said.

Founded in 2004 by Peter Thiel and some fellow PayPal alumni, Palantir cut its teeth working for the Pentagon and the CIA in Afghanistan and Iraq. The company’s engineers and products don’t do any spying themselves; they’re more like a spy’s brain, collecting and analyzing information that’s fed in from the hands, eyes, nose, and ears. The software combs through disparate data sources—financial documents, airline reservations, cellphone records, social media postings—and searches for connections that human analysts might miss.

More than 30 high-tech companies, led by Microsoft and Facebook, announced a set of principles that included a declaration that they would not help any government — including that of the United States — mount cyberattacks against “innocent civilians and enterprises from anywhere, reflecting Silicon Valley’s effort to separate itself from government cyberwarfare.

The Supreme Court announced that it would not decide whether federal prosecutors can force Microsoft to turn over digital data stored outside the United States. The move followed arguments in the case in February and the enactment of a new federal law that both sides said made the case moot.

The United States and the European Union are aligning rules to help crime-fighters access suspects’ emails, text messages, photos and other data, despite simmering trans-Atlantic tensions.