Your internet is a spy!
By Anjum Niaz

Beware of Google, Skype, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, and Apple. Instead of being your cyber buddies they have become your ‘Big Brother’ snooping on you. The fault lies not in them but their ‘Big Daddy’ who has entered their servers to scour, spy and scoop up the congested universe of cyberspace.

Pakistanis would never have known that their privacy was being violated but for one young man who stepped forward to say, ‘I am the whistleblower.’ We owe a whopping thanks to the 29-year-old former CIA technical assistant, Edward Snowden. He is the source who leaked highly classified information to the British newspaper Guardian that America’s National Security Agency (NSA) collected 13.5 billion intelligence reports from Pakistan in the month of March this year.

We are the second-highest country on the list of nations the US spied on.

Will there be a fall out? Will our Foreign Office call in Deputy Ambassador Hoagland yet again and hand him a demarche? Yeah, yeah...whatever will be his muted response.

America spies on ordinary Pakistanis, penetrates their internet communication, listens to their phone calls and there’s no outcry? How bizarre. Let’s for once stop grumbling about drone strikes which has been like talking to a brick wall. Before Nawaz Sharif, we had Gilani and Zardari and before them we had Musharraf moan to the Americans to stop killing Pakistanis. These oxymoron mumblings were meant for the cuckolded citizens. Their protests were phony. Because these two-timing leaders were in bed with the ‘enemy.’

The latest entrant on the throne too got snubbed when only two days after he took oath of office as prime minister, there was yet one more drone attack killing seven people in North Waziristan.

Nawaz Sharif hoped Pakistan could have friendly relations with the US. President Obama made the right noises and dialled the PM-to-be twice with greetings, congratulations and vows of a new beginning. A buoyed prime minister confident of American support told the nation that “we respect the sovereignty of others and they should also respect our sovereignty and independence. This campaign should come to an end.”

Pious hopes indeed. Drone strikes have been around for years. To expect the US to halt them on the polite request of a newly instituted democratic leader is naive. Surely Nawaz Sharif, who retains the portfolios of foreign affairs and defence, is smart enough to know that the US will do what it has to do. Surely his calm, suave and astute foreign affairs and national security adviser Sartaj Aziz, 84, knows Pakistan cannot order America to end the drone strikes.

Moving beyond the drone hoopla, the cyber-spying on Pakistan is equally alarming. It should not only give Nawaz Sharif sleepless nights but every Pakistani who uses the internet.

On the flip side, can the US be blamed for snooping on Pakistanis? North Waziristan is the hatchery for terrorists who swear they will destroy the sole superpower. Our establishment has done nothing to clean out the terrorist-infested tribal areas. It sits on the fence and watches as the Taliban roam the land freely and fearlessly killing, bombing, maiming, executing anyone against their ‘Islamic ideology.’

The state of Pakistan is impotent against this feral enemy, indigenously raised and fostered by our security agencies.

Americans correctly fret that our nuclear arsenal can fall in the hands of these militants? They are justified in their suspicion. Our intelligence agencies failed to smoke out Osama bin Laden, living just a stone’s throw from our elite military academy in Kakul, Abbottabad. The architect who planned the murderous attack on the World Trade Centre conducted his business as usual for full five years. He continued to plot against the US, planned more terrorist attacks on it and produced more babies from his various wives all living under the same the roof as one very happy family.

Codenamed Prism, the NSA’s spy programme spotlights Pakistan as the number two on its list of countries where the US government computer system scoops up data collected from the internet and other electronic service providers in our country.

Meanwhile, liberal America is scandalised by this revelation brought in the open by just one man – Edward Snowden. The Obama administration is hard put defending its action. The president is telling the American public that the data collected from wiretapping and emails by his National Security Agency is to secure the Americans from future terrorist attacks. The president shields his government’s secret surveillance, saying Congress has repeatedly authorised the collection of America’s phone records and internet use. He assures the Americans saying, “Nobody is listening to your telephone calls.”

The liberals won’t buy any of this. Leading the attack on the Obama administration’s intrusion on civil liberties is the influential 18-member editorial board of The New York Times. In an unusually long editorial, the Times writes that “the administration has now lost all credibility on this issue...Mr Obama is proving the truism that the executive branch will use any power it is given and very likely abuse it.” It is not often that the Times editorial board comes out with such a strong censure.

“Americans want to be protected, but not at the cost of vitiating the values that make us Americans,” writes another Obama critic Maureen Dowd in NYT. Her widely read columns assailing President Bush’s and his vice-president Cheney’s mishandling of the Iraq war were effective in showing his opponent Obama with a golden halo around his head. Today Dowd has turned hostile to Obama and never leaves an opportunity to bash him in her still very popular columns.

Coincidentally, the American establishment presently carries out a 12-week court martial trial of Bradley Manning, the army intelligence analyst accused of hacking into 700,000 of the State Department’s top-secret cables.

So why did Private Manning, Snowden and the NSA feel the need to delve deep in the dark world of cyberspace crawling with classified state department cables, trite emails, inane phone conversations, mindless Googling and harmless Facebooking with friends for a tête-à-tête?

Let’s first give the floor to ‘Big Daddy’ NSA. It says it wants to protect Americans from future terror attacks. It therefore needs to track the movements of terrorists, especially those hunkered down in Pakistan’s hinterlands.

Moving on to Bradley Manning, 22, who shovelled truckloads of confidential cables to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange . He told the court that the release of Iraq and Afghanistan war logs to WikiLeaks was an “act of conscience, justified by the urgent need to reveal to the world the atrocities committed by the US military in the ostensible cause of freedom.”

Finally, we have Edward Snowden, a former technical assistant for the CIA and current employee of defence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. The private contractor has earned billions from the American government for selling expertise, technology and manpower to the NSA and other federal intelligence agencies. Snowden is presently holed up in a hotel in Hong Kong. In his interview with the Guardian, which broke the story, Snowden said he knows there will be punishment for exposing the classified information, “but said he could not in good conscience ‘allow the US government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they’re secretly building.’”

Two young Americans who had access to classified intelligence data thus broke away from ‘Big Daddy’ to tell the world that the US was acting as the world’s policeman.

While our American friends are quick to find faults with Pakistan’s intelligence gathering apparatus and its security agencies, the proverb ‘Physician heal thyself’ applies to the United States of America. What good is offering advice to Pakistan when you are not following it yourself?

Leaks like these can prove America’s Achilles heel.

Email: anjumniaz@rocketmail.com