A fierce debate about internet privacy and the limits of US executive power has erupted in a victory for the young intelligence technician at the centre of a global leak storm.
While 29-year-old Edward Snowden has gone to ground in Hong Kong and may yet face severe legal consequences for blowing the lid on Washington’s vast internet snooping program, he has triggered the public battle he said he wanted.
A bipartisan group of US MPs, civil liberties groups and even one of the web giants accused of collaborating with the intelligence sweep separately urged President Barack Obama’s administration to lift the veil of secrecy.
“We can’t have a serious debate about how much surveillance of Americans’ communications should be permitted without ending secret law,” said Jeff Merkley, one of eight senators proposing a bill to increase transparency.
“Americans deserve to know how much information about their private communications the government believes it’s allowed to take under the law,” he said, arguing this could be done without “tipping our hand to our enemies.”
Snowden’s leaks last week to The Guardian and Washington Post newspapers revealed PRISM, a top secret program of the US National Security Agency to collect and analyse private data from internet users around the world.
US intelligence chiefs insist the sweep has saved American lives by helping agents thwart terror plots, and authorities have opened an investigation that could see the contractor extradited from Hong Kong to face charges.
But many inside and outside the US were outraged by the breadth and secrecy of the operation, which was carried out under the broad brush terms of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and the Patriot Act.
Under these, internet companies like Google, Facebook and Apple have been obliged to secretly provide customer data to the NSA when ordered to do so by the secret FISA court, and last week’s leak embarrassed the web giants.
On Tuesday, Google wrote to the US Justice Department asking for permission to release figures on its surrender of data to surveillance programs in order to head off reports it has given the government a back door to its servers.
Separately, a coalition of internet and rights groups including the Mozilla Foundation, American Civil Liberties Union, Greenpeace USA, the World Wide Web Foundation and more than 80 more also demanded more openness.
But the debate about PRISM — and about Snowden’s actions — is not one sided. Popular daily USA Today summed up the Snowden question neatly in its front page headline: “A hero, or is he a traitor?”
US President Barack Obama’s spy chief, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, has described the leaks as gravely damaging to security.
Snowden, a technician working for the private defence contractor Booz Allen Hamilton subcontracted to the NSA, travelled from Hawaii to Hong Kong on May 20 carrying a cache of secrets harvested from his employer’s servers.
Under PRISM, according to the leaked documents, the NSA can issue directives to internet firms to gain access to private emails, online chats, pictures, files, videos and more, uploaded by foreign users.
