What to make of PRISM

The past two weeks have been awash with reactions following revelations that the United State's National Security Agency (NSA) has been involved in massive spying by gaining access to user accounts of the biggest online communication companies among them Google, Facebook, Skype and Yahoo. In a programme called PRISM, the NSA has been able to listen to conversations, follow chats and even view shared images on these platforms.

A former NSA techincal officer Edward Snowden has now been revealed as the source of these leaks. Mr Snowden alerted The Guardian to the NSA's activities. For his part Mr Snowden has since left the USA and is now in Hong Kong and is adamant that he will fight any attempts at extraditing him to go and face charges in the USA. He claims he could not afford to continue being part of such a regime where everything he was doing was monitored and decided to vent out.

Reaction to Mr Snowden has been mixed. Some call him a hero while others accuse him of being a traitor. What is unique though about Mr Snowden's revelations is that it is not one poignant scandal like say Watergate or the Monica Lewinsky affair but rather lifting the lead on an activity. Lifting the lead and revealing the activities of NSA which frankly many had suspected. To me and I suspect to many it doesn't really come as a shock to know that the USA through NSA is involved in such activities. It is just that now the spying is given a face and a name, the aptly named PRISM.

Mr Snowden

There are some who have hailed the emergence of a 'nerd with a conscious'. While others have indicted the faulty recruitment procedures for the NSA claiming they are responsible for letting someone in who has since embarrassed the organisation. I note that Mr Snowden does not in many ways fit your typical intelligence agency recruit. While it is undeniable that he is gifted when it comes to computers, he struggled through tertiary education and was a junior officer in the NSA. By the same token of reasoning I agree that the NSA should take a hard look at itself and analyse how a junior officer was permitted access to such information.

The NSA as expected has gone into damage control mode with NSA head General Keith Alexander testifying before congress that it was necessary that PRISM be carried out. He adds that thousands of attacks have been prevented as a result of information obtained using PRISM.

 I suppose the world should be thanking the NSA for PRISM.

Similar sentiments have been echoed by Barrack Obama and officials from the UK. Mr Obama has even gone further to assert that all activities carried out under PRISM were sanctioned by either congress or the courts and in some cases both. When asked whether the NSA had been collecting private data of millions of Americans (which is illegal), General Alexander's answer was a  clearl "no".

It is difficult not to evoke the lines of George Orwel's classic "1984", "big brother is watching." The book predicts with prophetic accuracy a time when every intrinsic detail of our lives is being watched.

One can look at this issue from a number of angles. Personally I prefer to ask a few questions:

• Did Snowden expose an illegal activity? If he did, then legal redress should be sought. Further if Snowden exposed an illegal activity it would mean that a crime has been committed by an institution. As such the head of the institution needs to own up and resign because their presiding over a criminal organisation makes their position untenable. The other implication is that General Alexander lied to congress (under oath) and should be allowed to be penalised accordingly.
• On the other hand if the NSA has not committed a crime which would relegate Snowden to an over-zealous highly unstable employee who breached protocol, Snowden deserves to be treated as traitor and the due process of the law should take its course. It means his actions are simply acts of indiscipline and breach of confidentiality by an employee. I am sure there are appropriate laws and regulations both within the NSA and in the USA to deal with such.

The Snowden affair raises a number of issues related to national security generally. The extent to which trust should be bestowed in our security agencies and with which power such agencies should be vested, conjures up a debate that is not going to die away quietly. Are we to leave all doors open for those we have entrusted to protect us? What guarantees do we have that the information they collect will not be abused? Is there justification and logic in curtailing freedoms in order to allow the citizenry to better enjoy their freedom? Are we not in a way punishing the same people we seek to protect?

Snowden is neither a hero nor a traitor. He just happens to be someone who got uncomfortable with the work he did. In his own words he "couldn't continue living in such a society". We all know that our intelligence agencies have access to many of our communication platforms and will probably continue doing so. It is one of those things many of us push to the back of our minds, not letting it interfere with our day to day existence. We normally choose to leave the moral debates over the same for some other time, probably in the same way we know death is inevitable but choose to ignore it anyway.

The Snowden leaks remind us of what our intelligence agencies are up to. Not that their activities will come as a rude shock to anyone, but just that we don't like hearing about such. Better to live in the oblivion of selective ignorance than taint the mind with worries about things you can do nothing about. Life is too short for such I suppose.