MANILA — The youth group Anakbayan expressed support for the whistleblower who exposed the existence of a U.S ‘Internet spying’ program, and called on Philippine government employees to do the same regarding Internet and communications surveillance likely being done by the Aquino administration.
Edward Snowden, a former employee of the U.S National Security Agency (NSA), revealed last week the existence of PRISM: a computer program which directly accesses the information databases of ‘online service providers’ such as Facebook, Youtube, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple, and Skype. According to the original report from U. K newspaper ‘The Guardian’, among the information collected by PRISM are: “email, video and voice chat, videos, photos, voice-over-IP (Skype, for example) chats, file transfers, social networking details”.
“Snowden is a hero for exposing this ‘act of war’ by the U.S against the peoples of the entire world. There is reason to believe that the U.S will use the data from PRISM to launch more wars of aggression against independent countries like what they did in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. PRISM will most likely be also used against opposition movements in U.S ‘semi-colonies’ like the Philippines,” said Vencer Crisostomo, national chairman of Anakbayan.
“We call on all organizations and individuals who believe in freedom and democracy to protect Snowden from being brought back to the U.S. What he did is not an act of crime but he will certainly be treated as a criminal by the Obama administration and the American military” he added.
Snowden is currently seeking asylum in the city of Hong Kong.
Meanwhile, Anakbayan called on the public to revive the clamor for the junking of the Cybercrime Law, calling it the Philippine version of PRISM.
“While much public attention has been given to the Cybercrime Law’s provisions on ‘online libel’, the truly terrifying provisions are those that allow ‘warrantless surveillance’ or the collecting of any information on the Internet regarding our activities without the permission of the Courts” said Crisostomo. 
