Preface

Summary

A series of events have led to the idea for this book and the first one is more than obvious: the Edward Snowden affaire On 6 June 2013 Glenn Greenwald published in The Guardian the first in a series of articles – and later co-authored a few other – on global mass surveillance practices led by the United States ‘National Security Agency (NSA) On the first day, the worldwide public learned that the NSA has obtained a clandestine court order from a secretly operating court of law, called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC), and on its basis the Agency has been collecting metadata on telephone calls of millions customers of a major private telecommunications provider, Verizon This provider was forbidden from disclosing both the order itself and its compliance with it On the second day (7 June), the worldwide public learned further that these practices had not been limited to a single provider and that the NSA was allegedly’ tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S Internet companies ‘: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, and Apple The worldwide public also learned that the NSA has been ‘listening’ to anything about anybody whose data merely flew throughservers located on US soil, even when sent from one overseas location to another Finally, the NSA has shared these data with its fellow agencies in the US, such as with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) These practices were variously codenamed – labels of surveillance programmes such as PRISM, Xkeyscore, Upstream, Quantuminsert, Bullrun or Dishfir have since entered the public debate– and their aim was to procure national security with the help of surveillance (These practises were not a novelty for the NSA has operated domestic surveillance programmes since the Agency's establishment in 1952 It is also true that surveillance practices are as old as humanity and over time have became an integral part of modernity, but these have intensified in the aft ermath of the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks.)