Surveillance Blowback: How Spying On Foreigners Could Hurt The US Economy

A series of classified documents leaked by former National Security Administration contractor Edward Snowden put US Government officials on their heels in June, forcing them into an uncomfortable debate about privacy and national security. But the leaks also raised questions about the role of US companies in America’s surveillance operations.

James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, defended the programmes as legal – and indeed, it seems that the NSA’s snooping efforts were conducted with the oversight of Congress and Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) courts. Nevertheless, privacy advocates reacted with outrage. Within days of the disclosures, the American Civil Liberties Union had filed a lawsuit against the NSA.

There is still plenty of mystery surrounding the two programmes, but Snowden’s documents show the outlines of one surveillance operation that collects the metadata about – but not the content of – Americans’ domestic phone calls. Another, known as PRISM, focuses on the actual content of the online communications of foreigners. What’s especially controversial about PRISM is the involvement of nine large American tech companies, including Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Apple, that the NSA uses to gather its information. These companies have worked hard to clear up what they claim are misconceptions about how much access the government has to their users’ data. But the companies are legally barred from disclosing many details of PRISM.

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