Many countries around the world are still trying to find their feet in the colossal world that is cyberspace, which has become an inseparable part of people's daily lives. Cyberspace also dominates, to a large extent, media like communication and knowledge and their means, and many countries have yet to enact legislature to deal with crime, fraud, breach of privacy, and espionage that takes place in this ever-expanding virtual world. All this is one thing, and states violating the privacy of their own citizens and those of other countries is another. On Friday, new details emerged in the ongoing scandal surrounding the American ‘Big Brother,' as it has now turned out that the U.S. government has the ability to bypass various kinds of encryption systems. This means that any citizen in any country is vulnerable to total exposure, whether this has to do with his personal correspondence, banking transactions, health information, or even reading lists, as long as he uses a computer or a mobile phone. The above does not affect just ordinary citizens, but even heads of states, leaders, and politicians. At the G20 Summit held in St. Petersburg over the past two days, the President of Brazil Dilma Rousseff had to dedicate part of her meeting with U.S. President Barack Obama to discuss allegations that the U.S. had been intercepting her communications, according to documents leaked by fugitive IT expert Edward Snowden. The U.S. also allegedly spied on Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto, as well as other officials in Europe and around the world. Electronic communications devices, which evolve almost daily with new features and capabilities sometimes beyond imagination, competing to entice buyers and arouse their curiosity, have become the equivalent of ‘spies' one carries in his pocket or bag, revealing one's secrets, locations, whom one contacts, and many other details. This is supposed to be known by anyone buying and operating such devices, but there are guarantees offered by telecommunications companies for subscribers to keep all their information confidential and not disclose it except at the request of the judiciary, if crimes ranging anywhere from personal harassment to planning terrorist attacks are involved. But it turns out that these guarantees are flimsy, since U.S. and UK intelligence services can circumvent this, using sophisticated software, in order to hack computers and decrypt their protection to access the subscribers' private information – this if we assume that these companies do not readily cooperate with the intelligence agencies. The U.S. and UK intelligence agencies can also flag any subscriber if he is to access a ‘suspicious' website or use certain keywords that raise alarm in the secret surveillance rooms. The U.S. National Security Agency even spends around $250 million a year to fund a program implemented in collaboration with technology companies to "subtly influence" the design of their programs, to render them easier to infiltrate and more compatible with spying programs. So if you decide, out of curiosity or for the sake of being more informed, to read an article about al-Qaeda, you could be flagged as a suspicious individual and be put under surveillance, just because you accessed a given website. We thought that such things only happened in Hollywood films, until they became a reality that affects our daily lives, and perhaps we shall discover more about this with time, if Snowden continues to leak documents. So will the world one day conclude a treaty to prohibit such violations of freedoms in the name of "combatting crime" or "assisting law enforcement"? If so, then who can guarantee that intelligence agencies will abide by it, since their work is secret and is only supervised by those who are directly in charge in them?
