Public Comment

NSA Spying

By Jagjit Singh
Friday March 28, 2014 - 05:29:00 PM

Cyber wars and spying have intensified creating greater mistrust amongst our allies and corporate competitors. Classified documents released by Edward Snowden show that the NSA is targeting the Chinese Huawei’s network in Shenzhen and monitored the company’s top executives. The NSA is recording every single phone call made in an undisclosed foreign country. A surveillance system called MYSTIC stores the billions of phone conversations for up to 30 days. According to Ashkan Soltani, who co-wrote the Washington Post exposé on MYSTIC, revealed how the NSA uses Google cookies to pinpoint targets for hacking and how the NSA secretly broke into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers around the world. This is another example of U.S. government overreach.  

Instead of targeting its very powerful surveillance systems on terrorists and spies, they’re doing this bulk collection that sweeps up a lot of data of innocent people. Responding to mounting outrage of their citizens, foreign governments are shunning America’s cloud computer industry deemed to be unsafe to the prying eyes of the NSA. For example, Microsoft has lost customers, including the government of Brazil. IBM is spending more than a billion dollars to build data centers overseas to safeguard data of their foreign customers.  

Former President Jimmy Carter has revealed he limits his own email use out of fear he’s spied on by U.S. intelligence. In an interview with NBC News, Carter says he avoids emails when corresponding with foreign leaders — instead using old-fashioned "snail mail."