Through the Looking Glass

In the early 1990's, as a junior U.S. Foreign Service Officer detailed to the U.S. Uruguay Round market access trade negotiations team, I had some limited exposure to intelligence - commercial intelligence - gathered, I was led to believe (I cannot confirm), by ECHELON (link to Wikipedia).

While ECHELON was originally established to monitor Cold War nemesis communications, it graduated, seemingly - as early as the 1990's - to far broader communications interception.

Our digital world has come a long, long way since then.

Our real world has evolved as well.

Our's has become, indeed, a frightening age.

And, sadly, fear is being used as an excuse for all manners of abuse, and by our own Government, and not just abroad, but at home...

Today, the Washington Post posted an article titled: "U.S. intelligence mining data from nine U.S. Internet companies in broad secret program" (linked).

Per the Post, in a program labelled "PRISM," "the National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. internet companies, extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs..."

Private sector "taps" to PRISM reportedly include Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google, Facebook, Paltalk (which is said to have "hosted significant traffic during the Arab Spring and in the ongoing Syrian civil war"), AOL, Skype, YouTube and Apple.

Ours is a brave new world.

As an American, I am profoundly disturbed, and deeply offended, and, well, in the spirit of our age, I am fearful.

As an employee of a China-based multinational (Huawei) that U.S. Government representatives have regularly labelled - unfairly and without substance - as somehow vulnerable to Chinese Government influence or penetration, I now fully understand why...

...As I have long surmised, the U.S. Government has been looking in a mirror.  And it is not limited to Huawei, China or otherwise.  Of late, we hear more and more about Iran and North Korea (the latter somewhat stretching incredulity).

I am not surprised.

And, excepting my brief mention immediately above, this is not a Huawei-related rant.

The U.S. Government is right to be concerned about Chinese or other Government or non-State entities tapping our networks for espionage or intellectual property rights theft purposes.  But our protestations that we would not engage in such practices are hollow, all the more so given that we are doing so within the homeland, against our own countrymen, which borders on abomination.

We, Americans, cannot - should not - be ruled in, because or by fear.  We risk everything that we have stood for over the last two-and-a-half plus centuries.