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-# Circumventing Mass surveillance
 
+**
+
+WHAT IS MASS SURVEILLANCE ?
+---------------------------
+
+**Mass surveillance is the pervasive surveillance of an entire or a substantial fraction of a population.The surveillance is usually carried out by governments, often surreptitiously, but may also be done by corporations at the behest of governments or at their own initiative. It may or may not be legal and may or may not require authorization from a court or other independent agency.
+
+Mass surveillance is often claimed by its proponents as necessary to fight terrorism, to prevent social unrest, to protect national security, to fight child pornography and protect children.
+
+Mass surveillance is widely criticized as a violation of privacy rights, for limiting civil and political rights and freedoms, and for being illegal under some legal or constitutional systems. There is a fear that increasing mass surveillance will ultimately lead to a totalitarian state where political dissent is undermined by COINTELPRO-like programs. Such a state may also be referred to as a surveillance state or an electronic police state.
+
+**HOW DO THE COUNTRIES FARE WHEN IT COMES TO MASS SURVEILLANCE ?**
+
+**USA** 
+Historically, mass surveillance was used as part of wartime censorship to control communications that could damage the war effort and aid the enemy. For example, during the world wars, every international telegram from or to the United States sent through companies such as Western Union was reviewed by the US military. After the wars were over, surveillance continued in programs such as the Black Chamber following World War I and project Shamrock following World War II.COINTELPRO projects conducted by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) between 1956 and 1971 targeted various "subversive" organizations, including peaceful anti-war and racial equality activists such as Albert Einstein and Martin Luther King Jr.
+
+Billions of dollars per year are spent, by agencies such as the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), to develop, purchase, implement, and operate systems such as Carnivore, ECHELON, and NarusInsight to intercept and analyze the immense amount of data that traverses the Internet and telephone system every day.
+
+Since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, a vast domestic intelligence apparatus has been built to collect information using NSA, FBI, local police, state homeland security offices and military criminal investigators. The intelligence apparatus collects, analyzes and stores information about millions of (if not all) American citizens, many of whom have not been accused of any wrongdoing.
+
+Under the Mail Isolation Control and Tracking program, the U.S. Postal Service photographs the exterior of every piece of paper mail that is processed in the United States — about 160 billion pieces in 2012. The U.S. Postmaster General stated that the system is primarily used for mail sorting, but the images are available for possible use by law enforcement agencies.Created in 2001 following the anthrax attacks that killed five people, it is a sweeping expansion of a 100 year old program called "mail cover" which targets people suspected of crimes.
+
+The FBI developed the computer programs "Magic Lantern" and CIPAV, which they can remotely install on a computer system, in order to monitor a person's computer activity.
+
+The NSA has been gathering information on financial records, Internet surfing habits, and monitoring e-mails. They have also performed extensive analysis of social networks such as Myspace.
+
+The PRISM special source operation system legally immunized private companies that cooperate voluntarily with U.S. intelligence collection. According to The Register, the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 "specifically authorizes intelligence agencies to monitor the phone, email, and other communications of U.S. citizens for up to a week without obtaining a warrant" when one of the parties is outside the U.S. PRISM was first publicly revealed on 6 June 2013, after classified documents about the program were leaked to The Washington Post and The Guardian by American Edward Snowden.
+
+The Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) requires that all U.S. telecommunications and Internet service providers modify their networks to allow easy wiretapping of telephone, VoIP, and broadband Internet traffic.
+
+In early 2006, USA Today reported that several major telephone companies were providing the telephone call records of U.S. citizens to the National Security Agency (NSA), which is storing them in a large database known as the NSA call database. This report came on the heels of allegations that the U.S. government had been conducting electronic surveillance of domestic telephone calls without warrants.In 2013, the existence of the Hemisphere Project, through which AT&T provides telephone call data to federal agencies, became publicly known.
+
+Traffic cameras, which were meant to help enforce traffic laws at intersections, may be used by law enforcement agencies for purposes unrelated to traffic violations.Some cameras allow for the identification of individuals inside a vehicle and license plate data to be collected and time stamped for cross reference with other data used by police.The Department of Homeland Security is funding networks of surveillance cameras in cities and towns as part of its efforts to combat terrorism.
+
+The New York City Police Department infiltrated and compiled dossiers on protest groups before the 2004 Republican National Convention, leading to over 1,800 arrests
+
+**India**
+
+The Indian parliament passed the Information Technology Act of 2008 with no debate, giving the government fiat power to tap all communications without a court order or a warrant. Section 69 of the act states "Section 69 empowers the Central Government/State Government/ its authorized agency to intercept, monitor or decrypt any information generated, transmitted, received or stored in any computer resource if it is necessary or expedient so to do in the interest of the sovereignty or integrity of India, defence of India, security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States or public order or for preventing incitement to the commission of any cognizable offence or for investigation of any offence."
+
+India is setting up a national intelligence grid called NATGRID,which would be fully set up by May 2011 where each individual's data ranging from land records, internet logs, air and rail PNR, phone records, gun records, driving license, property records, insurance, and income tax records would be available in real time and with no oversight.With a UID from the Unique Identification Authority of India being given to every Indian from February 2011, the government would be able track people in real time. A national population registry of all citizens will be established by the 2011 census, during which fingerprints and iris scans would be taken along with GPS records of each household.
+
+As per the initial plan, access to the combined data will be given to 11 agencies, including the Research and Analysis Wing, the Intelligence Bureau, the Enforcement Directorate, the National Investigation Agency, the Central Bureau of Investigation, the Directorate of Revenue Intelligence and the Narcotics Control Bureau.
+
+[Click here to read more on mass surveillance in India][1] 
+
+**PEOPLE WHO WE SHOULD KNOW :** 
+
+1) **Aaron Swartz** : http://www.aaronsw.com/
+
+In 2008, Swartz founded Watchdog.net, "the good government site with teeth," to aggregate and visualize data about politicians.In the same year, he wrote a widely circulated Guerilla Open Access Manifesto.
+
+In 2009, wanting to learn about effective activism, Swartz helped launch the Progressive Change Campaign Committee.He wrote on his blog, "I spend my days experimenting with new ways to get progressive policies enacted and progressive politicians elected."Swartz led the first activism event of his career with the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, delivering thousands of "Honor Kennedy" petition signatures to Massachusetts legislators asking them to fulfill former Senator Ted Kennedy's last wish by appointing a senator to vote for health care reform.
+
+In 2010,Swartz co-founded Demand Progress,a political advocacy group that organizes people online to "take action by contacting Congress and other leaders, funding pressure tactics, and spreading the word" about civil liberties, government reform, and other issues.
+
+During academic year 2010–11, Swartz conducted research studies on political corruption as a Lab Fellow in Harvard University's Edmond J. Safra Research Lab on Institutional Corruption.
+
+Author Cory Doctorow, in his novel, Homeland, "drew on advice from Swartz in setting out how his protagonist could use the information now available about voters to create a grass-roots anti-establishment political campaign."In an afterword to the novel, Swartz wrote, "these [political hacktivist] tools can be used by anyone motivated and talented enough.... Now it's up to you to change the system.... Let me know if I can help."
+
+**Stop Online Piracy Act**
+
+
+Swartz in 2012 protesting against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA)
+Swartz was instrumental in the campaign to prevent passage of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which sought to combat Internet copyright violations but was criticized on the basis that it would have made it easier for the U.S. government to shut down web sites accused of violating copyright and would have placed intolerable burdens on Internet providers.Following the defeat of the bill, Swartz was the keynote speaker at the F2C:Freedom to Connect 2012 event in Washington, D.C., on May 21, 2012. His speech was titled "How We Stopped SOPA" and he informed the audience:
+
+
+
+> This bill ... shut down whole websites. Essentially, it stopped
+> Americans from communicating entirely with certain groups....
+>     I called all my friends, and we stayed up all night setting up a website for this new group, Demand Progress, with an online petition
+> opposing this noxious bill.... We [got] ... 300,000 signers.... We met
+> with the staff of members of Congress and pleaded with them.... And
+> then it passed unanimously....
+>     And then, suddenly, the process stopped. Senator Ron Wyden ... put a hold on the  bill.
+
+He added, 
+
+> "We won this fight because everyone made themselves the hero of their
+> own story. Everyone took it as their job to save this crucial
+> freedom."
+
+He was referring to a series of protests against the bill by numerous websites that was described by the Electronic Frontier Foundation as the biggest in Internet history, with over 115,000 sites altering their webpages.Swartz also presented on this topic at an event organized by ThoughtWorks.
+
+**2) Edward Snowden :**
+
+Edward Joseph "Ed" Snowden (born June 21, 1983) is an American computer professional. A former systems administrator for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and a counterintelligence trainer at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), he later went to work for the private intelligence contractor Dell, inside a National Security Agency (NSA) outpost in Japan. In March 2013, he joined the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton inside the NSA center in Hawaii.In June 2013, he came to international attention after disclosing to several media outlets thousands of classified documents that he acquired while working as an NSA contractor for Dell and Booz Allen Hamilton. Snowden's release of NSA material was called the most significant leak in U.S. history by Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg.
+
+The ongoing publication of leaked documents has revealed previously unknown details of a global surveillance apparatus run by the United States' NSA in close cooperation with three of its Five Eyes partners: Australia (ASD), the United Kingdom (GCHQ),and Canada (CSEC).
+
+The Guardian's editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger said in November 2013 that only one percent of the documents had been published. Officials warned that "the worst is yet to come," a sentiment echoed by Glenn Greenwald and by Lon Snowden.
+
+Media reports documenting the existence and functions of classified surveillance programs and their scope began on June 5, 2013, and continued throughout the entire year. The first program to be revealed was PRISM, with reports from both The Washington Post and The Guardian published an hour apart. PRISM allows for a court-approved, front-door access to Americans' Google and Yahoo accounts.The Post's Barton Gellman was the first journalist to report on Snowden's documents. He said the U.S. government urged him not to specify by name which companies were involved, but Gellman decided that to name them "would make it real to Americans."Reports also revealed details of Tempora, a British black-ops surveillance program run by the NSA's British partner, GCHQ.The initial reports included details about NSA call database, Boundless Informant, and of a secret court order requiring Verizon to hand the NSA millions of Americans' phone records daily,the surveillance of French citizens' phone and internet records, and those of "high-profile individuals from the world of business or politics."XKeyscore, which allows for the collection of "almost anything done on the internet," was described by The Guardian as a program that "shed light" on one of Snowden's most controversial statements: "I, sitting at my desk could wiretap anyone, from you or your accountant, to a federal judge or even the president, if I had a personal email."
+
+It was revealed that the NSA was harvesting millions of email and instant messaging contact lists,searching email content, tracking and mapping the location of cell phones,undermining attempts at encryption via Bullrun and that the agency was using cookies to "piggyback" on the same tools used by internet advertisers "to pinpoint targets for government hacking and to bolster surveillance."The NSA was shown to be "secretly" tapping into Yahoo and Google data centers to collect information from "hundreds of millions" of account holders worldwide by tapping undersea cables using the MUSCULAR program.
+
+The NSA, the U.S. CIA and GCHQ spied on users of Second Life and World of Warcraft by creating make-believe characters as a way to "hide in plain sight."Leaked documents showed NSA agents spied on their "love interests," a practice NSA employees termed LOVEINT The NSA was also shown to be tracking the online sexual activity of people they termed "radicalizers," in order to discredit them.The NSA was accused of going "beyond its core mission of national security" when articles were published showing the NSA's intelligence-gathering operations had targeted Brazil's largest oil company, Petrobras.The NSA and the GCHQ were also shown to be surveilling charities including UNICEF and Médecins du Monde, as well as allies such as the EU chief and the Israeli Prime Minister.
+
+By October 2013, Snowden's disclosures had created tensions between the U.S. and some of its close allies after they revealed that the U.S. had spied on Brazil, France, Mexico,Britain,China,Germany, and Spain,as well as 35 world leaders,[191] most notably German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who said "spying among friends" was "unacceptable"and compared the NSA with the Stasi. Leaked documents published by Der Spiegel in 2014 appeared to show that the NSA had targeted 122 "high ranking" leaders.
+
+The NSA's top-secret "black budget," obtained from Snowden by The Washington Post, exposed the "successes and failures" of the 16 spy agencies comprising the U.S. intelligence community,and revealed that the NSA was paying U.S. private tech companies for "clandestine access" to their communications networks. The agencies were allotted $52 billion for the 2013 fiscal year.
+
+An NSA mission statement titled "SIGINT Strategy 2012-2016" affirmed that the NSA plans for continued expansion of surveillance activities. Their stated goal was to "dramatically increase mastery of the global network" and "acquire the capabilities to gather intelligence on anyone, anytime, anywhere."Leaked slides revealed in Greenwald's book No Place to Hide, released in May 2014, showed that the NSA's stated objective was to "Collect it All," "Process it All," "Exploit it All," "Partner it All," "Sniff it All" and "Know it All."
+
+In a December 2013 letter to the people of Brazil, Snowden wrote:
+
+There is a huge difference between legal programs, legitimate spying ... and these programs of dragnet mass surveillance that put entire populations under an all-seeing eye and save copies forever ... These programs were never about terrorism: they're about economic spying, social control, and diplomatic manipulation. They're about power.
+
+Snowden stated in a January 2014 interview with German television that the NSA does not limit its data collection to national security issues, accusing the agency of conducting industrial espionage. He used the example of Siemens, a German company, and stated "If there's information at Siemens that's beneficial to US national interests—even if it doesn't have anything to do with national security—then they'll take that information nevertheless."
+
+In February 2014, during testimony to the European Union, Snowden said of the remaining "undisclosed programs": "I will leave the public interest determinations as to which of these may be safely disclosed to responsible journalists in coordination with government stakeholders."
+
+In March 2014, documents disclosed by Glenn Greenwald writing for The Intercept showed the NSA, in cooperation with the GCHQ, has plans to infect millions of computers with malware using a program called "Turbine." Revelations included information about "QUANTUMHAND," a program through which the NSA set up a fake Facebook server to intercept connections.
+
+According to a report in The Washington Post in July 2014, relying on information furnished by Snowden, 90% of those placed under surveillance in the U.S. are ordinary Americans, and are not the intended targets. The newspaper said it had examined documents including emails, message texts, and online accounts, that support the claim.
+
+**Julian Assagne**
+Julian Paul Assange (born 3 July 1971, Townsville, Queensland) is an Australian publisher and journalist, best known as the editor-in-chief of the whistleblower website WikiLeaks, which he co-founded in 2006 after an earlier career in hacking and programming. WikiLeaks achieved particular prominence in 2010 when it published U.S. military and diplomatic documents leaked by Chelsea Manning. Assange has been under investigation in the United States since that time. In the same year, the Swedish Director of Public Prosecution opened a preliminary investigation into sexual offences that Assange is alleged to have committed.In 2012, facing extradition to Sweden, he took refuge at the Embassy of Ecuador in London. He was granted political asylum by Ecuador and currently lives in the Embassy.
+
+Here are some other references that you can go through to get a clearer idea about mass surviellance.
+
+http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/jan/08/surveillance-security-review-lib-dems-gchq-snowden
+
+
+
+  [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance_in_India