Week 11: Giants of the Internet.

In class, we discussed about Google, Microsoft and Apples, being the innovators of Internet. We then went through different financial status of these companies, and also other companies such as Blackberry (who lost a lot for the past years) and also Facebook. There are many giants of the internet now and it's no surprise, it's probably the one you're visiting daily ;)

Anyway, I found out that the companies, Google, Microsoft and Apple were actually involved a controversy!!!!

More specifically, it was the NSA Prism Controversy.

What exactly is this NSA Prism Controversy? Ok, before moving on, NSA is the communications monitoring agency in the US. Although it has been in existence for about 20 years, it was only recently publicly known. It was tasked to monitor foreign communications BUT there are several accusations that the NSA was also involved on domestic communications as well.

The PRISM program is a US goverment Surveillance program for collecting internet data. It is able to access a wide range of private online information and no surprises here but these data can come from the internet giants. US had allegedly spend a total of 20M$ USD each year to fund this program.

Earlier this year, Edward Snowden, a former employee of NSA leaked out about this program to the journalists at The Guardian and The Washington Post. It was the most significant leak in US history up to date. Here comes the interesting part. On a few of the information that he leaked, it shows how different tech companies signed up to the programme over a five year period. This meant that the US govt had direct access to the systems of major tech giants. This included Microsoft who signed in 2007 and Apple appears to have held out until October 2012. (Shubber, 2013)

(they know what you're searching for.)

However, all these allegations were denied by Google, Facebook and the other major tech giants. According to them, private data was and can only be given based on specific court orders relating to specific individuals which is within the US law.

So what happened to Edward Snowden? He is currently living in Russia under a temporary political asylum and considered a fugitive by American authorities. Some called him a hero, others a traitor.

What's your take on this my friends?

"Individuals have a civic responsibility to fight the suppression of info regarding matters of critical public importance. Telling the truth is not a crime." - Edward Snowden

Well, we sure hope the giants of the internet are telling the truth. We sure don't wanna our privacy being breached unknowingly...(or has it already been breached...hmmmmm)

Hope y'all learnt something for today's post!

Till then,

A.