Excerpt from 'Permanent Record' by Edward Snowden.

#cybersecgirl #snowden

The Internet is fundamentally American, but I had to leave America to fully understand what that meant. The World Wide Web might have been invented in Geneva, at the CERN research laboratory in 1989, but the ways by which the Web is accessed are as American as baseball, which gives the American Intelligence Community the home field advantage.

The cables and satellites, the servers and towers—so much of the infrastructure of the Internet is under US control that over 90 percent of the world’s Internet traffic passes through technologies developed, owned, and/or operated by the American government and American businesses, most of which are physically located on American territory.

Countries that traditionally worry about such advantages, like China and Russia, have attempted to make alternative systems, such as the Great Firewall, or the state-sponsored censored search engines, or the nationalized satellite constellations that provide selective GPS—but America remains the hegemon, the keeper of the master switches that can turn almost anyone on and off at will.

It’s not just the Internet’s infrastructure that I’m defining as fundamentally American—it’s the computer software (Microsoft, Google, Oracle) and hardware (HP, Apple, Dell), too. It’s everything from the chips (Intel, Qualcomm), to the routers and modems (Cisco, Juniper), to the Web services and platforms that provide email and social networking and cloud storage (Google, Facebook, and the most structurally important but invisible Amazon, which provides cloud services to the US government along with half the Internet).

Though some of these companies might manufacture their devices in, say, China, the companies themselves are American and are subject to American law. The problem is, they’re also subject to classified American policies that pervert law and permit the US government to surveil virtually every man, woman, and child who has ever touched a computer or picked up a phone.

(*paragraph formatting, my own)