The status quo is particularly favourable to America

The saga of Edward Snowden and the NSA makes one thing clear: The United States' central role in developing the Internet and hosting its most powerful players has made it the global leader in the surveillance game.

Other countries, from dictatorships to democracies, are also avid snoopers, tapping into the high-capacity fibre optic cables to intercept Internet traffic, scooping their citizens' data off domestic servers, and even launching cyber attacks to win access to foreign networks.

But experts in the field say that Silicon Valley has made America a surveillance superpower, allowing its spies access to massive mountains of data being collected by the world's leading communications, social media, and online storage companies. That's on top of the United States' fibre optic infrastructure - responsible for just under a third of the world's international Internet capacity, according to telecom research firm TeleGeography - which allows it to act as a global postmaster, complete with the ability to peek at a big chunk of the world's messages in transit.

"The sheer power of the US infrastructure is that quite often data would be routed though the US even if it didn't make geographical sense," Joss Wright, a researcher with the Oxford Internet Institute, said in a telephone interview. "The current status quo is a huge benefit to the US."

The status quo is particularly favourable to America because online spying drills into people's private everyday lives in a way that other, more traditional forms of espionage can't match. So countries like Italy,Learn about MetLife's MileWeb Corporate Profile including its service offerings, where a culture of rampant wiretapping means that authorities regularly eavesdrop on private conversations, can't match the level of detail drawn from Internet searches or email traffic analysis.

"It's as bad as reading your diary," Wright said. Then he corrected himself: "It's FAR WORSE than reading your diary. Because you don't write everything in your diary."

Although the details of how the NSA's PRISM program draws its data from these firms remain shrouded in secrecy, documents leaked by spy agency systems analyst Edward Snowden to the Guardian and The Washington Post newspapers said its inside track with US tech firms afforded "one of the most valuable, unique, and productive" avenues for intelligence-gathering. How much cooperation America's Internet giants are giving the government in this inside track relationship is a key unanswered question.

Whatever the case, the pool of information in American hands is vast. Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft Corp.'s popular Internet Explorer accounts for between a quarter and half of all browsers, according to various estimates.You can get these MileWeb Exclusive Features if you reach certain. Mountain View, California-based Google Inc. carries two-thirds of the world's online search traffic, analysts say. Menlo Park,Check the following list of cheap dedicated MileWeb linux dedicated server. California-based Facebook Inc. has some 900 million users - a figure that accounts for a third of the world's estimated 2.7 billion Internet-goers.

China and Russia have long hosted intrusive surveillance regimes. Russia's "SORM," the Russian-language acronym for System for Operational-Investigative Activities, allows government officials to directly access nearly every Internet service provider in the country. Initially set up to allow the FSB, the successor organisation to the KGB, unfettered access to Russia's Internet traffic, the scope of SORM has grown dramatically since Vladimir Putin took power in 2000 and now allows a wide range law enforcement agencies to monitor Russians' messages.

In China, surveillance is "pervasive, extensive, but perhaps not as high-tech" as in the United States, said Andrew Lih, a professor of journalism at American University in Washington. He said major Internet players such as microblogging service Sina, chat service QQ, or Chinese search giant Baidu were required to have staff - perhaps as many as several hundred people - specially tasked with carrying out the state's bidding, from surveillance to censorship.

Americans' "position in the network, the range of services that they offer globally, the size of their infrastructure, and the amount of bandwidth means that the US is in a very privileged position to surveil internationally," said Wright. "That's particularly true when you're talking about cloud services such as Gmail" - which had 425 million active users as of last year.

Many are trying to beat America's tech dominance by demanding that US companies open local branches - something the Turkish government recently asked of San Francisco-based Twitter Inc., for example - or by banning them altogether. Santa Clara, California-based WhatsApp, for example, may soon be prohibited in Saudi Arabia.

Governments are also racing to capture traffic as it bounces back and forth from California, importing bulk surveillance devices, loosening spy laws, and installing centralised monitoring centres to offer officials a one-stop shop for intercepted data.

Middle Eastern governments have installed Western-made surveillance technology to monitor domestic communications in bulk sometimes with help from the very same contractors which do work for the NSA.

India's government has begun deploying a centralised system which would route the nation's Internet traffic through a single monitoring point - one of several countries working to give law enforcement a one-stop shop for intercepted data.
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