Through the looking (Google) glass

Mere hours after the revelation by the Glenn Greenwald in the Guardian.uk that Verizon had been handing over data on all its domestic subscribers to secret state police forces in the United States, an even more chilling story on domestic spying was broken. Mirroring the long term coordination between Bletchly Park and Fort Meade, the Washington Post and the Guardian released another story about domestic spying complete with classified documents confirming its existence.

The story detailed how the NSA, with the long term cooperation of the some largest tech giants, had built a database comprising the private internet communications of virtually everyone in America. These communications, including emails, videos, pictures, Skype conversations, Facebook likes, and a list of everyone’s Facebook friends has been slowly assembled and cataloged, to be reviewed as needed with the concurrence of a secret court based on an individual secret policeman's affirmation of a “reasonable suspicion.”

Both the White House and Capitol Hill confirmed that real Americans had nothing to fear. Communications could only actually be viewed if a secret policeman had a 51% or better subjective certainty that a citizen had no foreign ties. Thus the millions of patriotic Americans who have the good sense to never read foreign newspapers online, send emails to relatives in Mexico, never receive spam emails for Canadian pharmaceutical products, have Facebook friends that reside in other countries, send emails while on vacation abroad, or have their YouTube videos viewed by foreigners are more than likely to have never given the government a legal basis to pry into their affairs.

Despite the fact that the slide above has dates of entry into the program, all of the tech companies named in the PRISM slide-show denied participating in the program. The language used in their terse statements to the press was near uniform, suggesting these companies did their patriotic duty in repeating the talking points that they had been previously furnished under unreleased directives of the PRISM program.

Administration officials and members of both the House and Senate select committees on intelligence were quick to point out that any reading of an American’s email would require an order from a secret court. The government is the only entity allowed to present evidence at a secret court. What has not been mentioned is that said eavesdropping can only be used as evidence in court with judicial review. Secret policemen may still read citizens’ emails without judicial review so long as the intercepted communications are used for intelligence rather than law enforcement purposes.

Other sources speculate that PRISM, instead of referring to “back doors” into the cloud computing apparatuses of the most popular service providers on the internet may refer to a splitter installed into various fiber optic backbone facilities that copies all network traffic.

President Obama was quick to dismiss the collection of meta-data from Verizon as inconsequential, even though that meta-data, compiled along a vast trove of social networking information, is of critical practical importance to the secret policemen that protect the American consumer's way of life. Obama dismissed PRISM as unimportant as well, which it may be, as the monitoring of American's internet traffic still only accounts for less than 15% of the President's morning briefings.

Google, a tech company who proudly touts their “Don’t be Evil” motto, recently moved forward with late stage development and deployment of a wearable video camera attached to a cellular device called “Google Glass”. This product allows the patriotic American consumer to assist with the PRISIM program by spending $1500 to bring video recording equipment anywhere the government might need it to be directly integrated with meta-data and the vast database of social networking information the NSA has already collected.

Using the meta-data to locate Americans who have been communicating with foreigners, the NSA can now use direct video surveillance to see who else might be present in any place where helpful citizens have brought their Google Glass devices. These helpful citizens can then assist the NSA in their data collection, which protects us all, by Facebook tagging all the people they know at that location, all through their Google Glass devices. This added functionality helps the secret policemen refine and correct their data, all at small cost to the taxpayer, thanks to the helpful do-gooders at Google and the patriotic American consumers who patronize them.

With the anticipated popularity of Google Glass, state security services can not only confirm that two dissidents were in the same coffee shop at the same time, but they can review video evidence to see that they were plotting together. The audio capabilities of the Google Glass device may even assist our protectors in catching snippets of their conversation, thus leveraging the internet to monitor the face to face meetings of those who mean us all harm.