US intelligence agencies are accessing the servers of nine Internet giants as part of a secret data mining program likely to fuel fresh debate about government surveillance, it was reported Thursday.

The Washington Post reported that the National Security Agency (NSA) and the FBI had direct access to servers which allowed them to track an individual’s web presence via audio, video, photographs, emails and connection logs.

Some of the biggest firms in Silicon Valley were involved in the program, including Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Apple, PalTalk, AOL, Skype and YouTube, reports said.

The newspaper cited details of a briefing on the top secret program — known as PRISM — intended for analysts at the NSA’s Signals Intelligence Directorate in April — via redwolf.newsvine.com

The Australian Securities and Investment Commission (ASIC), has told a hearing of the Australian Parliament’s Senate Estimates committee that its attempt to block access to the IP address of one investment scam site could have blocked 250,000 sites in total.

In its opening statement to the committee (Crikey has a copy here), ASIC said that in addition to the blocking of an IP address that took out 1,200 sites hosted at the same address, a similar request in March blocked 250,000 sites. In its defence, the commission said most of the URLs hosted at the target IP appear to contain no substantive content and that fewer than 1,000 active sites had been affected (El Reg presumes that the remaining 249,000 were parked domains) — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Australia’s security agencies are amongst the most secretive on the planet, far more so than their counterparts in the US and UK.

Why is this?

Four Corners journalist Andrew Fowler was told that it’s down to Australia’s junior relationship with its historical allies, the UK and then the US.

“We, the Australians, look after other people’s secrets, and so we have to prove we are more able to look after their secrets than anybody else … It’s a way of explaining in some way this rather, I suppose you could say, closed shop,” he told the BCC World Service program World Have Your Say (MP3).

Whether the explanation Fowler was given is true or not, this culture of extreme secrecy leads to an information vacuum.

Is China trying to hack Australian government agencies? Yes, of course. Everyone is hacking everyone else. That’s how espionage is done these days. But how successful were they? Who knows. Does the government have a valid case for more surveillance? Again, who knows.

Without hard facts, critics and supporters alike are free to assume the worst — either that incompetent security services are riddled with hacks while pursuing a massive power grab, or that Chinese hackers will bring the country to its knees unless we immediately lock down the internet and log everything. The truth is presumably somewhere in the middle, but without facts, a nuanced debate is impossible.

And without facts, we’re free to judge the government’s credibility by the hand-waving cyber language they use. I’ve already given my opinion on all this cybering and the cyberthreat beat-up, but things reached a new low this week with the coining of cybercrisis.

While the government continues to play secret squirrel, the infosec industry is getting into transparency — via redwolf.newsvine.com