PRISM Program: How Many More Hidden Secrets?

A few days ago, a U.S. intelligence damage assessment indicated that Snowden did not gain access to the top secret “crown jewels” of the National Security Agency. Although he possesses confidential NSA information that could bring “serious” harm, revealing it would not be “fatal” — PRISM would just be badly bruised.

In other words, although Snowden leaking the U.S. PRISM program shocked the world, this was just the tip of the iceberg — nobody knows just how many dirty secrets Washington really has.

According to the U.S. National Security Agency, these “crown jewels” are “extremely compartmentalized information,” secrets that the NSA uses to intercept and monitor communications around the world. The NSA’s damage assessment reveals that Snowden indeed may have confidential materials, subjected to restricted access, but these do not include the PRISM program’s core secrets like sensitive counterterrorism files. Figuratively, it means that just having a blueprint would not allow him to understand an actual operating manual. Without this operating manual, this so-called plan would merely be a piece of paper.

Despite skepticism that the NSA is escaping responsibility and brushing off the problem as nothing by trivializing and downplaying the impact of Snowden’s leaks, the NSA is extremely organized and has clear divisions of its intelligence agencies. Even the highest ranking individual could not possibly have all of the secrets. In this sense, Snowden bursting out about only the PRISM program seems more believable.

Snowden made enough of an impact that the whole world stared. In this “supremacy of human rights” country, ordinary people were also included in the intelligence agency’s monitoring, meaning that personal privacy was completely gone. This country, a self-proclaimed “defender of international human rights,” is monitoring the whole world — not only countries like China, Russia, Latin America and other “adversaries,” but also Great Britain, France, Germany, Japan and other allies. The world’s most famous network operators have become the United States’ accomplices. In the pervasive PRISM program, millions of computers have been invaded, with countless amounts of personal information stolen and countless other countries’ secrets put into the U.S. intelligence database.

But this is far from everything that the United States is monitoring. According to media that understand the situation, besides the PRISM project, the United States also has at least three other secret surveillance projects. Stellar Wind, a surveillance program that was never made public, is split into four projects: PRISM, “TRUNK,” “DOCK” and “NUCLEAR.” As for what state secrets these code names for strange projects contain, the outside world does not know. However, these projects do have hundreds of billions of dollars of “metadata” storage capacity for communications and the Internet, as well as the government investing hundreds of billions in capital; practically all the countries of the world could be under surveillance by the United States. Even with the PRISM program, Snowden disclosing certain documents has by no means revealed them all, nor even the main parts, which the risk assessment by the NSA has confirmed. Whether by a domestic political struggle or by an externally instigated “color revolution” there will come a time when Washington is knocked out in a single blow.

The United States will not change or else it would lose dominance in the world. The United States will not apologize because, in its eyes, it did not make any mistakes. Thus, for the people inside the United States’ enormous “spy network,” I fear that besides taking additional precautions and being careful, there is not much to do but leave it to fate. After understanding this truth, it is probably better to never offend the United States, since everything you do is all stored within the NSA’s database.