Is it now 1984?
"The United States has made top-secret deals with more than 30 third-party countries so that the National Security Agency can tap into fiber optic cables carrying internet data in those parts of the world, new leaks reveal.
Documents provided by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and published on Wednesday by journalists at The Intercept and Denmark’s Dagbladet Information show publically for the first time an intelligence gathering operation waged in 33 countries where secret arrangements exist to broaden American surveillance abilities.
The previously unreported NSA operation — a program codenamed RAMPART-A — “sweeps up a vast amount of communications at lightning speed,” according to Ryan Gallagher of The Intercept, by letting the NSA tap into broadband internet cables containing web traffic that might not be otherwise easily obtainable from the originating country.
“It has already been widely reported that the NSA works closely with eavesdropping agencies in the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia as part of the so-called Five Eyes surveillance alliance,” Gallagher wrote. “But the latest Snowden documents show that a number of other countries, described by the NSA as ‘third-party partners,’ are playing an increasingly important role – by secretly allowing the NSA to install surveillance equipment on their fiber-optic cables.”"
rt.com/usa/167132-nsa-snowden-rampart-cable/ There are many ways to look at this situation, across a wide spectrum. At one end there is the view that creating a coalition of benign partners trawling the internet (and other forms of communication) routinely for 'terrorist' activities is sensible and makes the world a safer place - as do other forms of surveillance by the state: it is in everyone's interests and possible invasions of privacy are a small price to pay for security.
At the other end there is the view that such intrusive activity on such a grand scale is a gross breach of personal freedoms: citizens have not asked for this, none of our governments willingly revealed that this was going on, government and its servants have become a separate, elite and extraordinarily powerful body that does what it wants in a wholly undemocratic fashion. There are many eerie echoes of Orwell's 1984 in which the elite pursue power for no other reason than power itself, and collectives of states wage perpetual war against each other:
www.internationalrelations.com/wars-in-progress/; worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/12/29/21984652-world-in-turmoil-seven-countries-to-watch-in-2014... Are we living in 1984 now, or should we sit back and accept that governments will always do what they want and have our interests at heart?