A piece of legislation that permits US agencies to snoop on foreign
nationals by hacking into cloud servers of Google and Apple, has sent
alarm bells ringing among privacy campaigners, a British media report
says.
The renewal of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA),
would grant the US government the right to spy on anyone using the
internet storage facilities provided by Google and Apple.
One of
the most disquieting provisions of the FISA justifies snooping even
without the fig leaf of a threat to national security. Officials could
pry into foreign individuals' cloud data for purely political reasons as
well.
Simply stated, it means that any non-US citizen who stores
data on the cloud services operated by Amazon, Google and Apple, could
open themselves up to a probe by US authorities, the Daily Mail reports.
Google,
responding to media requests, said: "It is possible for the US
government (and European governments) to access certain types of data
via their law enforcement agencies. We think this kind of access to data
merits serious discussion and more transparency."
Cloud computing
allows internet users to store their information and data in an network
server as opposed to a physical memory stick or tangible location on
their hard drive or on their smartphones.
FISA was actually put
into place under President George W. Bush in 2008, and it was quietly
renewed in December 2012 under President Barack Obama's purview.
The
legislation permits organs of the US government, the CIA, the FBI, and
Pentagon's National Security Agency to look at any information they
would like that is saved on cloud servers.
The blogsite Slate
quoted Caspar Bowden, who co-wrote the report which is now being
examined by the European Union, as saying that the legislation has been
so gravely ignored by European government officials.
"It's like putting a mind control drug in the water supply, which only affects non-Americans," he said.