The release of even more leaked files from Edward Snowden reveals the astonishing scale and scope of surveillance by GCHQ and governments more generally a year after the first revelations.
The recent revelations of the site Intercept mention a program of Britain's GCHQ also known as "Karma Police." With this specific program, service of information gathered more than 1.1 trillionmillions information from UK citizens from August 2007 to March 2009.
This information comes from Internet users' metadata and includes details related to phone calls, emails post officeυ, κωδικούς πρόσβασης, επαφές, αριθμούς τηλεφώνων, διευθύνσεις ηλεκτρονικού ταχυδρομείου, καθώς και τους φακέλους που χρησιμοποιούνται για την organization of e-mail, but not the itself content messages or e-mails.
These metadata can help identify people of interest, build profiles, and help secret services make decisions to start or step up private surveillance.
All this information can be collected at a minimal cost through traditional methods. In other words, metadata are not insignificant as governments want to believe. This is why governments collect and process them.
However, the massive collection of metadata – where the information is collected by all and not by one “face of interest” – is rightly a deep wound to security and human rights.
Does our metadata collection make us safer?
It is not clear that the massive collection of metadata makes society more "safe". Although these elements can be used to investigate crimes, their use in preventing terrorist incidents is controversial.
This does not mean that the services security they can't cite cases where they were helped with information about potential attacks, but it can't justify bulk data collection over targeted one.
Bulk metadata collection relies on algorithmic analysis by computers followed by human analysis crisis.
Here is the main issue. It is not clear whether the information is correctly evaluated, or whether false positives are generated Results, by adopting an approach that focuses on computing power rather than human judgment and experience.
Is monitoring reasonable?
Suppose, however, that mass surveillance does a good job and data collection can be justified. Could this be an excuse?
The answer, in my opinion, should be determined by the supervision and the importance we attach to our political rights.
A player who collects and processes this volume of information needs supervision.
However, we have seen that despite the fact that GCHQ is under the supervision of the Information Service Commissioner and the Secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, we still rely on leaks and informants to have a clear picture of what is happening.
Today, however, the development of mass data collection, computer processing by government agencies, is essentially strengthening a new highly political, operational society and possibly giving us a new popular understanding of what "privacy" is and what it really entails.
What are we entitled to hold for ourselves? What is our private space and is this space common to the state?
According to the Court of Justice of the European Union, in April 2014, metadata "may allow very precise conclusions about privacy". For any conservation regime, appropriate safeguards and restrictions are needed, otherwise the results of surveillance could be corrosive, creating a creepy feeling that "each of us is constantly monitored".
With data from TNW.
