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12Mar15

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U.S. cyber hypocrisy laid bare again as more secrets revealed

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Thanks to the "multi-year, sustained effort" made by the U.S. government, what we were afraid of has come true: we all now end up under Big Brother's surveillance.

The latest revelation of America's ongoing spy campaign against Apple devices laid bare once again Uncle Sam's hypocrisy on cyber security and its blatant ambitions of seeking cyber dominance.

Investigative news site The Intercept reported Tuesday that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has conducted "a multi-year, sustained effort" to break encryption on Apple devices so as to spy on communications of iPhone and iPad users.

Efforts to break into Apple products by government security researchers began as early as in 2006, a year before Apple introduced its first iPhone, and continued through the launch of the iPad in 2010 and beyond, according to reports.

Apparently, the scale of the U.S. government's surveillance has reached a hair-raising level, and the depth of its secrecy might go beyond people's wildest imagination.

The Intercept's disclosure came after a recent finding by cyber security firm Kaspersky Lab that the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) has mastered the technology know-how to implant spying softwares that are virtually impossible to wipe out.

It also reminded us of what seemed to be an endless series of revelations about an all-pervasive U.S. surveillance network that even includes eavesdropping on leaders of Washington's allies, leaked by former NSA employee Edward Snowden.

Believing that cyber weapons are as crucial to the 21st century warfare as nuclear arms were in the 20th, the United States is sparing no efforts in building a worldwide internet surveillance network where almost no one can escape.

Tapping into computers and accessing users' files, audio files, videos, e-mails or photographs, the United States has been peeping virtually without any limits,

It collects million of mobile phone records and SMS data on a daily basis. A computer can even be spied on via radio wave while being disconnected with the internet.

Granting itself the unprecedented degree of power, expanse of rule and length of reign on the internet, America has indeed become the Big Brother in the cyber world.

However, the biggest cyber bully who forces us into a no-privacy era is an old hand at applying double-standard on the cyber issue as it always portrays itself as the prime victim of hacker attacks and repeatedly makes baseless accusations of cyber espionage against other countries.

One can not always falsify truth. The country, which always claims to hold dear the value of human rights, is verified to be the one that has been continuously and disrespectfully abusing power and trampling freedom and the rights of all people in the world.

[Source: Xinhua, Beijing, 12Mar15]

Privacy and counterintelligence

This document has been published on 13Mar15 by the Equipo Nizkor and Derechos Human Rights. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.