Being watched: Surveillance and the Christian community
In recent weeks, revelations about government surveillance have highlighted the size and scope of U.S. intelligence operations in the post-9/11 world. Initial reports from the Washington Post and the Guardian suggested that federal agencies—primarily the National Security Agency—have been using secret programs to collect information on all calls and text messages placed to or from the U.S. through Verizon phone networks (and presumably others). Likewise, the NSA appears to be accumulating information on e-mails, chat sessions and other online communication—with assistance from companies such as Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and Apple.
These tech companies assert that the NSA does not have direct access to their data. Instead, they maintain that they have installed special “lockbox” servers onto which they can load specific information requested through a court order—a far smaller slice of the entire pie. Intelligence agencies can then download the material, along with instructions on how to parse what remain very large data sets. Without this assistance from the companies, the government argues, interpreting the information would take far too long to be useful.
Big tech is eager to reassure customers that the government has only limited access to personal information. Facebook, for example, has released data showing that fewer than 19,000 accounts (out of 1.1 billion total) were accessed by government agencies at any level in the second half of 2012. Closer scrutiny of leaked NSA documents seems to back up the companies’ claims that government spies are able to look only at materials provided to them on the lockbox servers. At the moment, the government doesn’t appear to be able to conduct blanket surveillance of electronic communications.
