Posts tagged ‘prism’
What does PRISM mean exactly?
PRISM is a secret government program, and it was initiated by the U.S. Government to secretly collect personal information of internet users. All internet users come under the PRISM program and it may not be restricted only to the U.S. Many people believe that the PRISM program should be stopped, as the personal information of a person should not be given to the government without his/her permission.
In depth information or knowledge about the PRISM program is not available, but we know that big companies take part in it. Currently, we cannot develop any method to counter the surveillance that is being or might be conducted on us.
How PRISM works?
As mentioned previously, it is a very secret program. Tech experts can only guess how they access a person’s personal information. We all know that hackers can collect data, so the government can use their methods as well. The government does not need to hack though, they only need to spy.
Companies such as Google, Apple, Microsoft and Facebook own servers. All of your personal information is stored in those servers. Imagine how easy it is for the government to access your information. The NSA is currently monitoring all online activities and is part of the PRISM program according to reports by the Washington Post. Previously, NSA was only allowed to monitor foreign communications, but with PRISM, they can monitor domestic communications as well.
We have to question the companies that hand over our information. Unfortunately, the government and the companies deny any involvement and this complicates the entire matter. We know that companies are bound by law to hand over our information to the government whenever they ask for it. The problem is that they do it without asking us for permission.
Is my phone being tracked as well?
NSA most probably accesses the Meta data of your phone calls and not the call itself. They might be able to track your location or the location of the person whom you called. For Skype, it is a different story. Since they may have control over Skype servers, they may actually listen to your conversations or view your video chats whenever they require.
Does NSA Track Everyone’s Location?
While Edward Snowden is trying to get used to Russian climate, we are trying to adjust to the new world with no secrets. The conspiracy theorists could not possibly be more satisfied, and the rest of us could not be more worried about the influence that various government and secret agencies had and still have on our privacy.
According to one of the recent Appeal Court’s decisions the police does not need to have a proper warrant or even a probable cause for tracking your phone or iPhone. If this is to be applied to the police, then we should not even ask what are the powers and authorizations of secret government agencies such as NSA in this matter. We can only guess and whatever we think or fear about having a very high possibility of being true. To make things even worse some of the urban legends about this secret agency has gained a completely new meaning and relevancy under the new circumstances of public disclosure of once perfectly guarded top secrets.
For some time it has been speculated that NSA is conducting a series of experiments with revolutionary devices and softwares for phone location tracking. On the other side, some people claim that we are completely unaware about the power and capacities of NSA for phone tracking. The NSA ability to track and locate phone numbers on almost every point in the world is beyond our power of comprehension according to these claims. Therefore, without any exaggeration we can say that NSA can track everyone and everywhere when and how it wants.
As we can see phone tracking has become so much more than just a pure technical issue. In fact, it goes deeply into the ethical and moral sphere. Perhaps, we should leave NSA to do its job. We should examine our own actions and resist temptation of using these phone tracking softwares and solutions for our private reasons. Only in this way, we will have the right to question others such as NSA itself.