One year of Edward Snowden: Vodafone spying report caps off year of revelations

It’s been one year since the first Edward Snowden revelation about NSA’s widespread and pervasive spying programmes popped up as a report in the Guardian and Washington Post .

At the time, we were still understanding the process of wiretapping in the US on millions of Verizon customers , but we never really imagined the scale and magnitude of what Snowden was about to reveal through the year. In fact, we didn’t even know who leaked the information till a few days later. The water is still rippling from the first stone that fell in.

Yesterday, Vodafone’s transparency report said governments have direct access to most phone communication , be it text messages or phone calls. It also said that some governments have laws that prohibit them from disclosing such capabilities. Are we supposed to believe that governments aren’t fully exploiting this capability under the guise of protection against supposed enemies of the state?

Over the course of the year, we learnt about NSA tapping into undersea cables, keeping an eye on each and every click and tap on the Internet through bugs, rootkits and Trojans. We have seen how the agency posed as Google and Facebook to con visitors , and how it supposedly monitored   over 5 billion cellphones every day . Even porn sites were not safe; the NSA kept an eye on porn surfing habits of suspected radicals to discredit them if the time comes.

Then there were reports about the agency’s offline spying ; by hardcoding off-the-shelf hardware with bugs the spying continues even when the machine is offline. We also heard about the NSA bribing encryption companies such as RSA to open up back doors (which RSA denied ) and saw the diplomatic fallout of the spying and phone tapping of nation heads . Just how pervasive was the atmosphere of fear created by the NSA spying? It brought back typewriters in government offices , briefly.

The year’s worth of whistleblowing by Snowden has put the NSA and much of US law enforcement on the battle path against tech companies . The likes of Google, Microsoft and Facebook have already strengthened up their security and encryption. Google in particular has been making it clear why it’s making changes such as End-to-End . It’s because of the NSA. Rarely has privacy protection and secure browsing been so much in the limeligh t as it has over the last year.

Even as the fallout continues, privacy has become big business. Google thinks NSA spying threatens democracy . In fact, encrypted devices are expected to be one of the biggest growth sectors within niche device segment. Boeing is getting into mobile devices with a self-destructing smartphone . SilentCircle, a company on the forefront of the online privacy movement, has released the Blackphone, running a highly secure fork of Android . Secure messaging apps have cropped by the dozen, each claiming to be more secure than the other.

But if there’s one thing that we have truly come to know is that the spying is not about to stop anytime soon. If anything government requests to companies are on the rise . Despite privacy concerns and surveillance being in the limelight, there’s been very little change in the way governments keep a tab on their citizens. In India for example, the new government could likely allow  wider dragnets for CMS and Netra projects , and any future programmes.

There’s no doubt that the threats of terrorism and online crime are clear and present. But does that  deign wanton, indiscriminate surveillance, everyday Facebook posts to be under the scanner or constant monitoring of emails by the millions. That’s the picture at the moment. All your online activity is neatly segregated for governments by its agencies and the service providers. As Internet penetration increases around the world, and more people get online, we can expect more surveillance, wider nets and even newer techniques.

Snowden’s asylum in Russia is about to expire in the next few weeks, and his whistle-blowing over the past year may have whittled down the options further for the man who may have just changed the course of Internet history. If you ask him, he just wants to go home , but that’s not an option anymore. He has been branded a traitor by all and sundry, including surprisingly by major tech investor Marc Andreessen, who seems to have completely missed the point. But for many, even as his warnings continue , this past year has been the year of Snowden .