The internet lost its collective mind a few months ago when it emerged that the US government is possibly reading the flirty Facebook messages you’re sending that barista.
So what exactly is Prism, and why should you care?
Jen Zajac is a web developer for Catalyst IT. That means, basically, she bridges the divide between the tech people and design people. So she understands the internet. “Prism is the latest revelation about what we suspected all along,” she says. “The government really is listening to us.”
Prism is a tool developed by the United States National Security Agency. It’s complicated, and the revelation by Edward Snowden of its existence has led to all kinds of fallout. Basically, The Verge reports, Prism allows the US to collect private electronic data belonging to users of major internet services like Google, Facebook, Outlook, and others.
The Washington Post reported Google’s offerings to Prism include Gmail, voice and video chat, Google Drive files, photo libraries, and live surveillance of search terms. So, everything.
President Obama told reporters at the time that the NSA isn’t rifling through the emails of private citizens. He said it was a “narrow system” designed to save lives.
Jen Zajac says the digital age has transformed the way think about privacy, especially with respect to how much information about ourselves we put online on a daily basis – not to mention who we want to see that information.
Journalist Patrick Gray, speaking at the hackers’ conference Kiwicon last weekend, showed the audience a map with thousands of connected dots spread across the globe (as pictured below). If one of those dots is a person the NSA is interested in, each dot represents a person connected to them, through content on platforms like Google, Outlook, Yahoo, and metadata on phone carriers.
Photo: Foreign Policy
Gray asked the audience where it draws the line. Is a person’s privacy being violated if they are a dot on that map, but no one knows who they are? What if an analyst knows who they are, but never uses that information? What if it’s known who they are, and someone is listening to their phone calls? What level of privacy are people willing to give up for the sake of catching criminals?
Jen Zajac says governments are catching up on what advertisers have been doing for years now – collecting data from people’s activities, and using it. She says she absolutely supports the government being able to be able to prosecute criminals and to get warrants to search for information. “But what I am very in favour of is more due process around that, and better oversight of it.”
Of course, to avoid programmes like Prism, it is possible to opt out of all those services. That means removing all Google products from your life, quitting Facebook, and ultimately, probably, throwing out your smartphone. *shudder*
It doesn’t really matter what we as individuals do to try and lock down data, there are ways to get around that.
“It’s easy to be a big scaremonger, like ‘OMG, you need to pay attention to every single thing you do online’,” says Jen Zajac. “But what I am really trying to get at is that it doesn’t really matter what we as individuals do to try and lock down data, there are ways to get around that.
“It’s more that we as a society need to sit up and pay attention to the fact that our privacy is being eroded, and we need to push back,” she says. “Not just against the governments, but also against large corporations, and what they’re doing with our data, and what their responsibility is to us as users.”
But Prism is an American programme, so why should you care? Well, other than the fact that you might be a far-flung dot on Patrick Gray’s map, it’s not clear whether New Zealand has cooperated with the spying programme.
And Zajac says it gets worse. “It turns out that prism is just internal marketing within the NSA – there’s a bunch of other programs we should be more scared about, like XKEYSCORE… But [Prism] was a clarion call that we all needed to sit up and pay attention.”