US govt looking at your FB, Skype, Gmail data

US govt looking at your FB, Skype, Gmail data TIMES NEWS NETWORK  Washington/New Delhi: The world woke on Friday morning to news that the US government’s surveillance of people is much wider than initially thought and extends beyond America.     For the last six years, the US National Security Agency (NSA) has been able to access e-mails, videos, pictures, social networking details, and connection logs from the servers of Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Apple, Facebook, Skype and other leading US tech companies.     According to classified documents leaked by an insider in the government, a top-secret electronic surveillance US program named PRISM allows targeting of customers of major US tech companies outside the US. This pretty much means the entire world, since most of the world’s Internet infrastructure is based in US and most electronic communications also pass through the US.      While companies named in the leaks have denied the existence of PRISM or their cooperation with the program, Indian users would have no way to defend themselves if US agencies were to compel the firms to allow access to their data. Each message you send through Gmail or your iPhone in India, each call you make from Skype, each post you make on Facebook can be stored and monitored because they are routed through servers in the US.     Pavan Duggal, a cyber law specialist, said, “Indian users don’t have protection against US authorities seeking data from US companies. If a company is based in US, it can be made to share its data with US authorities even if the data belongs to a non-US user who doesn’t stay in the