The National Security Agency  and the US government in general is being bombarded with criticism regarding NSAgate. When news of the NSA’s data mining operations surfaced, not many news outlets or people were altogether surprised–having suspected something had been going on all along–however, the extent thereof and the type have been veiled in so much secrecy and had become so much more agressive since 9/11 it’s difficult to know what’s been done or how it’s been done and especially how that affects the very security and privacy of common citizens.

Wiretapping itself (especially the secret type) goes far back, way back, to a time when you or I hadn’t even been born, heck even before our parents or grandparents haven’t been conceived.

Wiretapping Timeline

1861-1865 – During the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln reportedly read wiretapped messages sent from enemy camps’ telegraph lines.

1890s – Years after the telephone was invented by Alexander Graham Bell in 1976, telephone wiretapping officially began in the 1890s.

1928 – Wiretapping was ruled constitutional.

1941 – Ultra–the designation adopted by British military intelligence in June 1941 for wartime signals intelligence obtained by breaking high-level encrypted enemy radio and teleprinter communications at the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park. Eventually, this became the standard designation among the western Allies for all such intelligence.

1956 – COINTELPRO  started with a program designed to “increase factionalism, cause disruption and win defections” inside the Communist Party U.S.A. (CPUSA). Tactics included anonymous phone calls, IRS audits, and the creation of documents that would divide American communists internally.

1960s – ECHELON, a signals intelligence (SIGINT) collection and analysis network signed by five signatories, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States, was created to monitor the military and diplomatic communications of the Soviet Union and its Eastern Bloc allies during the Cold War.

1967 – The Supreme Court ruled wiretapping requires a warrant.

1968 – The Congress passes a law providing for wiretap warrants in criminal investigations

1978 – The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) introduced in 1977 and signed into law the following year. It is a US law which prescribes procedures for the physical and electronic surveillance and collection of “foreign intelligence information” between “foreign powers” and “agents of foreign powers” (which may include American citizens and permanent residents suspected of espionage or terrorism).

1994 – Congress passed the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) which requires telephone companies to be able to install more effective wiretaps.

PRISM Timeline

2001 – After the 9/11 attack, President George W. Bush signed into law the USA Patriot Act of 2001 which is a ten letter bacronym (USA PATRIOT) that stands for Uniting (and) Strengthening America (by) Providing Appropriate Tools Required (to) Intercept (and) Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001.

2003 –  AT&T technician Mark Klein discovered what he believes is an NSA equipment that enables “vacuum-cleaner surveillance of all the data crossing the Internet—whether that be peoples’ email, Web surfing, or any other data.”

2004 – The FBI proposed extending the CALEA requirements to voice-over-Internet-protocol services and Internet traffic.

2006 – New version of Patriot Act was signed into law.  According to a 2006 report from USA Today, the NSA began tapping into people’s lives in 2001, after the 9/11 attack under the Patriot Act of 2011.  It started with collecting phone call records of millions of Americans using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth.  And apparently the mass data collection that was recently unveiled was sanctioned by the FISA court in 2006.

2007 –  President George W. Bush called on Congress to pass legislation to reform FISA in order to ease restrictions on surveillance of terrorist suspects where one party (or both parties) to the communication are located overseas. He asked that Congress pass the legislation before its August 2007 recess. On August 3, 2007, the Senate passed a Republican-sponsored version of FISA in a vote of 60 to 28. The House followed by passing the bill, 227–183. The Protect America Act of 2007 was then signed into law by President Bush on 2007-08-05.

2008 – President George W. Bush signs a national security directive that expands the surveillance of Internet traffic to and from the US government.

2009 – The NSA overcollected data and had gotten ahold of domestic communications probably as a result of “technical problems in the NSA’s ability” to distinguish between domestic and overseas communications.

2011 –  President Barack Obama signed the PATRIOT Sunsets Extension Act of 2011, a four-year extension of three key provisions in the USA PATRIOT Act: roving wiretaps, searches of business records (the “library records provision”), and conducting surveillance of “lone wolves”–individuals suspected of terrorist-related activities not linked to terrorist groups.

2013 – Evidences gathered by news sources such as the Washington Post and the Guardian reveals that PRISM officially started in 2007 when the FBI and NSA started accessing data from Microsoft under a top secret program dubbed as PRISM.

What we know now

Now that everything has been laid out in a neat timeline, let’s look at what has recently unfolded.

Earlier this month, it was revealed that the NSA was secretly tapping phone call metadata from Verizon.  The story quickly developed with new sources claiming that tech giants such as Apple, Facebook, Google and Yahoo, are giving US authorities access to people’s emails, live chats, search history and more.

What’s worse that getting spied on by your government?  It’s storing your data.  And it doesn’t help that the NSA is investing heavily on data centers.  They already have one i Utah and recently broke ground in Maryland.  They plan on keeping as much data as it can for as long as possible.

The government has not denied the existence of data mining or PRISM.  President Obama has washed his hands clean of this scandal stating that everything started under the Bush administration and that Congress was well aware of what was happening.

So if the government did not deny PRISM, why are the tech giants not owning up their parts in this whole debacle?  Some say they might not be aware of the name of the initiative or they are not allowed to talk about it even when they get busted.  Afterall, denying is the first step in getting out of anything.

Though many may believe that privacy is festering six-feet under some are not really bothered by it.  Others believe that wiretapping is needed to prevent future terrorist attacks but the question of people’s right to privacy arises.  If you’re one of those who do not like the government watching your online activities, there are workarounds you can do to protect yourself from the government’s prying eyes.

If you’re not up to date with the whole NSAgate scandal, you’re probably wondering how everything got leaked if this is a super top secret government initiative, right?  So read on.

The Whistleblower

Ed Snowden, an ex-CIA, stepped forward in an interview with the Guardian stating that he is the whistleblower, the person who let the cat out of the bag, and exposed the nasty deeds of the government.  Snowden is currently employed at defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton and stated that he has been working at the NSA for the past four years  as an employee of various outside contractors.

Snowden stated that he was able to access anyone’s e-mails and the NSA was doing more than capturing data fron non-US citizens – they were putting their hands everywhere.  And people should be concerned about this even if they have nothing to hide as something as simple as getting a wrong call could land you in hot waters with the NSA.

News this big usually gets publicized in large publications such as The New York Times but according to Snowden, he was dismayed of how the publication acted upon the knowledge it acquired.  The NYT has a huge scoop in 2004 about the Bush administration’s spying since 2001 but it wasn’t until a year later that the story got published.  He knew then that traditional media could not be trusted so he looked for other sources that can bust this whole thing out in the open.  Snowden reached out to the Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald in January of this year but he did not act upon the leaked documents he received from Snowden as he did not think he was a legitimate source.  It wasn’t until March, after documentary filmmaker and journalist, Laura Poitras, contacted him and urged him to act upon it, that the wheels started turning.

So where is Snowden now?  He was last seen at the Mira Hotel in Hong Kong where the tell-all YouTube video was shot.  When Hong Kong journalists turned to Twitter to help them identify where the video was possibly shot, Snowden was quick to check out and hasn’t been seen since then.  He is believe to be tucked in safehouse somewhere in Hong Kong.

What Happens Next?

Snowden is now being described as “America’s Most Wanted” and the US Congress has denounced him, calling him a defector and a traitor who should be punished to the fullest extent of the law, while others see him as a hero.

If Snowden is now considered an enemy of the state, what has the US government planned for him?  All bets are pointing to extradition back to US soil, where he would most likely face a sentence of more than a lifetime of imprisonment.