14 DAY TRIAL // Co-traveler, NSA’s data collection tool that allows the intelligence agency to gather up cellphone location on hundreds of millions of people, adding up to some 5 billion records each day, has sparked quite a bit of concern in the US, given the fact that American citizens’ data also gets collected, albeit “incidentally.”
Three Democratic senators have already introduced, a while back, an amendment to the 2014 defense spending bill. The bill seeks to oblige the US intelligence agency to come out about whether or not they have ever collected or made plans to collect location data of US citizens.
Of course, Co-traveler has just been revealed, but suspicion on what exactly the NSA is capable of doing has been around for a while, especially given the fact that reports based on the Snowden files have been coming for six months now.
And while US politicians are more concerned with what the National Security Agency is doing with data belonging to American citizens, I’m more concerned with how everyone else in the world is completely disregarded by both lawmakers and the intelligence officials.
Several nations have so far shown some indignation over various reports, but the harshest reactions have come from state leaders only when high ranking officials were being the target of the NSA’s spying activities.
The United Nations has expanded the privacy right to the online medium, calling any type of mass surveillance a violation of this right. But that’s a mere slap on the wrist for the United States and it seems unlikely that anything will actually change on a fundamental level because of this ruling.
That being said, between the US lawmakers being concerned only about the 300 million citizens of the United States of America and foreign leaders only being concerned about their own phones getting tapped, who will protect the rights of the billions of innocent people whose data gets collected?