By Barry Steinhart, director of the ACLU Technology & Liberty Project.
A lot of Americans have gotten pretty steamed as we’ve learned more and more (though not as much as we should be learning) about how our government is engaging in illegal, mass eavesdropping on our communications.
But we’re not the only ones who have reason to be steamed about the spying centered at the National Security Agency.
Europe, too, has a history of getting upset over NSA spying. That is why I have just written this letter to the European Union’s data protection commissioners asking them to look into this issue.
In the 1990s, there was a scandal in Europe over a program called Echelon, which was the codename applied at that time to an international eavesdropping program run by the NSA and security agencies from a few allied nations. Among other things, there was widespread suspicion in Europe that (the Cold War having ended and 9/11 not yet having taken its place as a standing justification for large security agencies) the NSA was engaged in industrial espionage on behalf of American corporations.
Europe, like virtually every other industrialized nation except the United States, has basic privacy laws in place, along with officials with the powers to back them up. The European privacy commissioners (and their collective organization called the Article 29 Working Party) have intervened in a number of trans-Atlantic privacy controversies in the past few years, including the SWIFT scandal (over extrajudicial access by the CIA and other U.S. agencies to international banking data), the Bush Administration’s insistence on broad access to European airline passenger data in violation of European privacy law, and biometric travel documents.
But from what we know about the NSA’s new spying programs, the invasion of privacy of Europeans that they involve must dwarf any of those other programs. So, we decided to share with them what we have learned about what is now going on. Points that I made to them in my letter include:
- The National Security Agency has significantly enhanced its powers in recent years. Its "Terrorist Surveillance Program" (TSP) is the ultimate system of communications surveillance.
- The NSA is now able to tap into major domestic American telecommunications hubs, which permits the NSA to gain direct access to an unprecedented number of communications, and then filter, sift through, analyze, read, or share those communications as it sees fit. Furthermore, the NSA is not just targeting individuals but is also using data mining systems to evaluate the communications of millions of people both inside and outside the United States.
- Because much of the world's communications travel through switching points in the United States, Internet transactions and email between Europeans is increasingly sent through servers in the U.S. This greatly aids the NSA in its surveillance. (This amazing map on Wired News pretty much conveys the situation in a single glance.)
- This surveillance likely violates EU privacy laws.
- We all need to reassess how to protect communications privacy in the modern age, particularly in light of domestic, foreign, and international developments.
At the ACLU, my job is to fight to protect the privacy and other freedoms of Americans. In a world where sending an email or making a phone call from Los Angeles to London is no different than a communication from L.A. to Louisville the privacy of Americans is inextricably tied to those of our global neighbors, That means working with anyone who can help counterbalance the frightening new powers our security agencies are gaining over us. Increasingly, that means European privacy officials.