End of the American Internet

http://watchingamerica.com/News/226735/end-of-the-american-internet/



In reality, the damage reaches much further. From now on, it is the whole premise of American control of the Internet that is being questioned.

End of the American Internet
Le Monde, France
By Sylvie Kauffmann
Translated By Stuart Taylor
18 November 2013
Edited by Lau­rence Bouvard

Richard Allan was more than a little proud of having found a way to counter the storm when he introduced himself on Monday, Nov. 11 in front of the European Parliament’s Civil Liberties Committee. The regional director of public relations at Facebook was invited to it as part of the hearings on the vast American electronic surveillance program revealed by the Snowden affair, and he brought out his secret weapon: The American authorities are not the only ones to use Facebook to obtain personal data from its users, he announced. European countries are just as curious.

Or almost. During the first six months of 2013, Facebook, the number one social network in America, received between 11,000 and 12,000 requests from the American government, pertaining to 20,000 to 21,000 individual accounts. At the same time, EU countries generated 8,500 requests, concerning around 10,000 accounts.

By revealing these figures, Richard Allan not only wanted to show that these legal intrusions, motivated mainly by judiciary inquiries, only affect “a tiny fraction of one percent” of the 1.2 billion social network users in the world; he also intended to defend these actions, because “everyone does it.” This has been Washington’s sledgehammer argument since former National Security Agency agent Edward Snowden leaked information highlighting the extent of spying and electronic data theft by American intelligence.

~snip~

It is a close call for American champions of the Internet. These desperate efforts to turn the attention away from the heart of the problem are a sign of it because if we speak a great deal about the political and diplomatic repercussions of the Snowden case, another dimension of the scandal concerns these high-tech giants much more: the disastrous consequences to their image and credibility in light of the theft of hundreds of millions of pieces of private data by the NSA and other big fish, well beyond the thousands of requests wisely made out of respect for procedure. Not forgetting the revelation by The New York Times that American telecoms operator AT&T receives $7.4 million per year to provide the authorities with telephone data, its venture to acquire Vodafone in Europe risks being compromised.