As Beijing moves to impose a national security law and mainland security agencies prepare to enter Hong Kong in larger numbers, people struggling to understand the peril they may face should read Edward Snowden’s new book. Permanent Record, published last year, gives a full picture of the mass surveillance the U.S. has set up of your every email, website browse, social media interaction and phone call. The Chinese Communist Party is hoovering up similar information through its agencies.
First what is coming from our compatriots in Beijing. “When needed, relevant national security organs of the Central People’s Government will set up agencies in (Hong Kong) to fullfil relevant duties to safeguard national security,” Chinese official Wang Zhen told the National People’s Congress. The new law being imposed by Beijing empowers this. Residents can expect to see the Party’s tough organisations such as the Ministry for State Security, the main domestic and external intelligence service, operating openly in the city, according to the Financial Times. This ministry, modeled on the Soviet Union’s KGB, has been accused of arbitrary arrests and detentions as well as torture. Soon no resident of Hong Kong will be immune from the 3:00 am knock on the door and extraordinary rendition to a mainland court and jail.
Turning to Snowden’s book we learn what the intelligence agencies of the USA and doubtlessly the Chinese Community Party are doing right now. For the somewhat less than tech-savvy the book is daunting. To simplify we turn to Pages 224 and 225 to give you an insight into what is being done to you and yours every day.
“Imagine you are sitting in front of a computer, about to visit a website. You open a web browser, type in a URL, and hit Enter. The URL is, in effect, a request, and this request goes out in search of its destination server. Somewhere in the midst of its travels, however, before your request gets to that server, it will have to pass through TURBULENCE, one of the NSA’s (National Security Agency) most powerful weapons.”
Snowden, who worked for the CIA and NSA in several countries, writes that your request passes through black servers stacked one on top of another, together about the size of a four-shelf bookcase. These are installed at private telecommunications buildings throughout allied countries, as well as US embassies and military bases. They contain two critical tools. TURMOIL handles “passive collection”, copying data coming through. TURBINE is in charge of “active collection”– actively tampering with the users.
“You can think of TURMOIL as a guard positioned at an invisible firewall through which Internet traffic must pass,” Snowden writes. “Seeing your request, it checks its metadata for selectors, or criteria, that mark it as deserving of more scrutiny.” These selectors can be whatever NSA (or the Communist Party) chooses, whatever they find suspicious: a particular email address, credit card or phone number; the geographic origin or destination of your Internet activity; or just certain keywords such as “democracy” or “protest”.
“If TURMOIL flags your traffic as suspicious, it tips it over to TURBINE, which diverts your request to NSA’s servers. There, algorithms decide which of the agency’s exploits — malware programmes — to use against you. This choice is based on the type of website you’re trying to visit as much as on your computer’s software and Internet connection. These chosen exploits are sent back to TURBINE, which injects them into the traffic channel and delivers them to whatever website you requested.”
Snowden said the end result is, you get the content you want, along with all the surveillance you don’t, and it all happens in less than 686 milliseconds. “Completely unbeknownst to you.”
“Once the exploits are in your computer, the NSA can access not just your metadata, but your data as well. Your entire digital life now belongs to them.”
China’s Great Firewall, operated by the Cyberspace Administration of China, is the entity charged with translating the Communist Party’s policies into technical specifications. Carrie Lam’s Government insists it does not affect Hong Kong. Only the naive will believe, given the new security law, the rising number of Party agencies that will set up in Hong Kong and Ms Lam and her ministers’ prostrate posture before their Party bosses, that this will be true for much longer and likely isn’t even now.
Seven years ago, Edward Snowden shocked the world by busting out of the American intelligence establishment, where he worked as a brilliant young systems analyst and administrator. He revealed the USA was secretly pursuing the means to collect and store every phone call, text message, email and internet browse made by everyone on the planet. As Permanent Record explains all your personal data is now stored by American intelligence agencies and they will have it forever. Soon the Communist Party will have similar data that it can potentially use against you, if it doesn’t already.
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