America on the Phone

America’s hard work in pursuit of [Edward] Snowden was not understood. Rather, it has increased uncertainty after nearly causing a diplomatic crisis with a number of countries, including Russia, before the curtains fell, revealing what Washington had endeavored to hide.

Snowden owned the key that opened the box of wonders filled with serious and important secrets. It was the box of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). That agency engaged in a large-scale telephone and personal computer monitoring process throughout the world.

Snowden’s possessing this key was the result of his working in the information field, which was the backbone of the biggest spy program in history. In a memorandum, this agent [Snowden] released to the Indian newspaper The Hindu, he indicated that the NSA was using two technical systems to gather the information. The first program was [called] Boundless Informant, which followed any number of telephone calls and emails that it wanted to monitor. The second was PRISM, which undertook to download and gather the contents of calls and emails from mobile [phone] networks and the Internet.

If we were looking for an explanation for that information, the sole and most frank explanation is that America can access any mobile phone network or Internet connection in the world and monitor all participants simply under the pretext of national security. This process might seem logical from the American perspective, but the possession of values and ethical, social and political norms by the ruling elite in Washington did not keep pace with the possession of modern technology.

Politicians, businessmen and influential social and economic figures were being targeted by the spying process. They were ordinary people going about their daily lives, which more and more rely on Internet and mobile phone technologies.

They were routinely spying on politicians and important people. The countries were used to it in their intelligence work. However, significant monitoring of the general population’s telephones is certainly unjustified, however you think about it.

What Snowden opened did not stop the increasing spread of greater and greater surprises. It started with German Chancellor Merkel — the Americans listened to everything she said on her telephone over a period of 10 years and she did not know — extended to important men in Spanish society and ended with about 61 million calls being breached in the period of one month in that country.

The situation may have reached its peak when documents published by the website Krebtom said that the NSA had spied on 125 billion calls around the world in January of this year. The number may seem tremendous and frightening, but it was not sufficiently scary in comparison to its details. They were spying on more than 3 billion calls in the United States, 70 million calls in France and 361 million calls in Germany.

The level of spying in Europe and America did not reach the level in Asia and the Middle East. Afghanistan gained a bigger share of wiretapping with 22 billion calls, which have been breached at a rate of 709 calls for each Afghan per month. Saudi [Arabia] was exposed to eavesdropping on 7.8 billion calls, at a rate of 289 calls per Saudi each month.

The country that came third in the list was our country, Iraq, where America spied on 7.8 billion calls in one month, at a rate of 252 calls per Iraqi per month or 19 calls a day. If we take into account that there are 10 million mobile phones in Iraq, the number will reach 780 calls spied on in a month per Iraqi, at a rate of 26 calls per day.

Those numbers clearly indicate the extent of the penetration to which we are exposed daily and the amount of information about us that is available to others as a result of employing mobile phones or the Internet in our daily lives, even those related to our work in state departments.

Reporting on official communications, financial transactions, security issues, administrative actions and popular orders by phone is a very common practice in our working society. Thus, it is necessary to stop this practice immediately and to adopt closed-circuit connections, encoded messages, written messages, hard copy and oral communications between units of state until we see what becomes of this program.

The state is claiming to address the American side to find out the truth of the numbers and to work immediately to discover the extent of the damage done to Iraqi national security, as well as to the security of the citizen and his privacy: [all this] in order to proceed with legal and diplomatic steps that will ensure appropriate compensation for its citizenry for the magnitude of the damage done to them, as well as to protect the state’s security against any future penetration.