America 's Justification For Surveillance And Spy Activity

The Patriot Act was hastily passed just a month later October and it severely limited the privacy of Americans and gave unprecedented power to the government and private agencies to track innocent Americans, turning regular citizens into suspects.5 In addition, the great technological evolution and emerged of social media that occurred round the same time, and shortly thereafter, created the perfect storm for the emergence of the largely unregulated surveillance society that we live in today.6 The result is digitization of people’s personal and professional lives so that every single digital trace that people leave can be identified, stored, and aggregated to constitute a composite sketch of ourselves and its only getting worse. In 2008, passed the FISA Amendments Act, which expands the government’s authority to monitor Americans’ international communications, in addition to domestic communications.7 In short, after 9/11 the U.S is left with a national surveillance state, in which “the proliferation of government technology and bureaucracies that are able to acquire vast and detailed amounts of digital information about individuals with minimal or no judicial supervision and often in complete secrecy,” giving the government and corporations with access to the data that the government compiles the ability to single

The NSA, or National Security Agency, is an American government intelligence agency responsible for collecting data on other countries and sometimes on American citizens in order to protect the country from outside risks. They can collect anything from the people’s phone data to their browser history and use it against them in the court of law. Since the catastrophes of September 11 attacks, the NSA’s surveillance capabilities have grown with the benefit of George W. Bush and the Executive Branch (Haugen 153). This decision has left a country divided for fifteen years, with people who agree that the NSA should be strengthened and others who think their powers should be limited or terminated. Although strengthening NSA surveillance may help the

Over the past few years, government surveillance in the United States has become a widely debated issue with two completely different sides. The National Security Agency, a government agency known for it’s efforts in spying and surveillance, has been at the center of this issue since it’s founding in the 1950’s. The Cold War had just begun and the United States government was doing anything they could to find potential terrorists and communists. In fact, many famous people including Einstein were being spied on by the government to find citizens with potential ties to the Soviet Union. (New York Times - New Details Emerge from the Einstein Files; How the FBI Tracked His Phone Calls and His Trash) As the cold war came to an end in the early 90’s, NSA spying seemed to come to an end as well.

The quest for privacy and security has always been a long and arduous one, as America’s citizens “no longer care” about the lack of integrity which the American government is showing towards its citizens (Sullivan). “When you have it, you don’t notice it. Only when it’s gone do you wish you’d done more to protect it.” Sullivan explains in Privacy under attack, but does anybody care?. After the National Security Agency was accused of “systematically collecting information” on citizens’ phone calls, emails, and countless other sources, “the news media treated it as a complete revelation” (Whitehead). People throughout the country protested and condemned the government—all while they failed to realize that we have consciously permitted the government to collect and secure our private information by “giving our personal information” to companies who ask for it, and by “allowing our personal lives to be posted on media sources such as Facebook and Twitter” (Washington). Ironically enough, we ourselves have

Ever since the American public was made aware of the United States government’s surveillance policies, it has been a hotly debated issue across the nation. In 2013, it was revealed that the NSA had, for some time, been collecting data on American citizens, in terms of everything from their Internet history to their phone records. When the story broke, it was a huge talking point, not only across the country, but also throughout the world. The man who introduced Americans to this idea was Edward Snowden.

Dingwen Zhang English 3 12 August 2016 NSA Surveillance NSA Surveillance: Is safety worth losing freedom? Recently there is debate about if it is okay for the United States government to spy on citizens using NSA and FBI. This became common knowledge when Edward Snowden leaked millions of documents that show the government is spying on the public. The United States government should not keep the NSA surveillance going because it hurts the public more than it keeps the public safe.

Spying on American citizens is now a common method employed by the government striving to protect the nation from terrorist attacks. Nonetheless, since its incorporation, the Act has been controversial as politicians and citizens alike have argued between the need to keep society safe and abusive powers of the government over its citizens. Although, mandated to serve as

In “How the NSA’s Domestic Spying Program Works,” the author reveals that many of “aspects of the (NSA) Program were aimed not just at targeted individuals, but perhaps millions of innocent Americans never suspected of a crime.” The author develops his thesis by detailing a few examples of major telecommunication companies that share customer’s call records to the NSA (AT&T, Sprint) and explaining that programs were implemented to monitor the emails of citizens (“amounted to at least 1.7 billion emails a day”). The author uses examples of how NSA decisions were made without a “warrant or any judicial oversight,” in order to increase citizen awareness of how the NSA functions. The author uses a erudite tone to address the audience of Americans

Post September 11, 2001, the United States learned that the Bush administration repeatedly authorized the NSA to monitor phones calls and electronic-mail (email) of people within the United States who were suspected of terrorist activities within the homeland. The monitoring activities were conducted without a warrant and in violation of the U.S. Constitution. The program became more of a topic after the September 11th attacks, and was part of a broad pattern of the executive branch using “national security” as an excuse for encroaching on the privacy rights of Americans with minimum to no oversight.

The National Security Agency (NSA) is an United States intelligence organization that is responsible for global monitoring and collecting foreign data intelligence. Within the NSA, existed what was called the “PRISM”. PRISM was created to collect private electronic data belonging to users of major internet services like Gmail, Facebook, Yahoo, and so on(Stroud). A successful example of the NSA’s efforts with government surveillance was present in the case of Najibullah Zazi. Zazi’s plan to bomb Times Square and New York’s subway systems, was arguably the most serious threat on American soil since the September 11th, 2001 attacks. The NSA had helped to disrupt Najibullah Zazi’s plot to bomb New York’s Times Square and subways in 2009. Thanks to PRISM, law enforcement were monitoring an e-mail address known to belong to an existing member of Al Qaeda. Zazi e-mailed that email address and unintentionally revealed himself and his plans to the authorities. He was arrested and faced a life sentence in prison. Without this type of surveillance, Zazi could have successfully murdered thousands of American citizens(Sullivan). The NSA proved to the United States that without monitoring, America would have encountered another national catastrophe. Subsequently, government surveillance was immeasurably acknowledged among U.S

On September 11, 2001, tragedy struck in the United States; 2,977 people died in the iconic terrorist attacks (“September 11th Fast Facts”). In New York, New York, two planes crashed into the World Trade Center towers, and another crashed into the Pentagon, which is the military command center located in Washington D.C. Along with those three planes, there was a fourth plane that was hijacked, but the passengers overthrew the terrorist, and downed the plane in Pennsylvania. These attacks resulted in racism against the Muslim community and government agencies that changed their goal to preventing another terrorist attack on the United States and its allies (Gould, Eric D., and Klor). One of these agencies is the NSA; NSA employee, Edward Snowden leaked top-secret information in 2013, regarding their spying program (Greenwald, Glenn). This caused great commotion all across the United States about people’s rights. However, the NSA is here to protect the United States and other countries from potential terrorist attacks. The NSA should be allowed to collect people’s communication records to bring home more troops and prevent terrorist attacks.

Its purpose, as most Americans understand, is to stop any potential terrorist attacks in domestic America. However, people’s fear of terrorism has been exploited by the American leaders to allow them to eavesdrop on every innocent America. It is shockingly similar to that in 1984, except the massive surveillance in America today is larger and more dangerous because it’s on the internet - “where virtually everything is done”. The internet, where every human interaction is made and the most private data is created and stored, has become the very tool for American government to spy on its own citizens. In just thirty days at the beginning of this massive surveillance in 2013, the National Security Agency (NSA) had collected data on more than 97 billion emails and 127 billion phone calls around the

Officially given its name on the fourth of November 1952, the National Security Agency was developed to ensure the safety of American citizens (Howe 11). In an effort to prevent any unauthorized spying on innocent civilians a court known as FISA was created in 1978 to regulate the NSA. Up until the events of September 11th, 2001, the NSA was used strictly as a tool for foreign investigation to decipher international communications (“Frequently Asked Questions About NSA” 1). Twenty-three days after the Twin Towers fell, President Bush passed the Patriot Act (“Timeline of NSA Domestic Spying” 16). This act ushered the NSA into a position of limitless capability. Millions of Americans are having their personal lives followed, tracked, and recorded into mass data pools. This unethical acquisition of personal information is in strict violation of the Fourth Amendment. Immediate action must be taken by the Government to return the rights assured by our Founding Fathers and the Constitution.

With the release of the NSA secret documents by Edward Snowden in 2013, a once dystopian concept came to the forefront of American politics: government surveillance. Snowden unveiled the existence of PRISM, a program which allowed the US government to read massive volumes of private information shared between citizens. The government exploited legislation meant to combat terrorism in the post-September 11th era. The media’s immediate reaction in discussing the National Security Agency was to compare it with 1984’s “Big Brother.” This term, originates from the 1949 novel by George Orwell. 1984, his most well read novel has a similar system in place in which the government of Oceania knows every moment of its citizens’ lives: “‘Smith!’

“The consciousness of being at war, and therefore in danger, makes the handing-over of all power to a small caste seem the natural, unavoidable condition of survival” (Orwell). The world today is full of many dangers domestic and abroad. It has become a routine in the news to report on the daily mass shooting or update with the war on terror. We live in a world where being worried is justified; however, we should not give up our constitutional rights in the face of fear. The NSA’s dragnet surveillance programs, such as PRISM, are both ineffective and are surpassed by less questionable national security programs. The FISA court's’ approval of NSA actions are not only illegal, but exist as an embarrassing formality. Surveillance is a necessary