Analysis: The Spying Terrorism

The NSA PRISM program allowed US Intelligence Services to collect private information of users utilising services such as Facebook and Gmail in order to guard its countries interests.

It has been discovered that the major cellular provider Verizon, has made a contract with the NSA stating that at the end of each day the company Verizon must give all cellular records collected that day to the NSA. This transaction however is not expressed to the customers of Verizon. This is a breach in trust between the customers of Version and the company itself.

Without a warrant, searching through a person’s intimate records is considered illegal and unconstitutional according to the U.S Fourth Amendment. However, these infractions are still being committed today, some are even being committed by the U.S government. When the government agreed upon the Patriot Act, after the law was signed, confidential agencies were formed, such as, the NSA. The NSA was assembled by the government to collect and store data secretly, this information is received from popular internet companies and phone companies. The NSA derives information from a total of nine American Internet companies, and tracks millions of Americans using data from Verizon, AT&T, and BellSouth. By court order, Verizon is forced to provide

He revealed through this program, telecommunication companies like Verizon and AT&T would hand over information to the government to analyze phone calls. They would analyze things like the duration and location of the calls, telephone numbers, and serial numbers on the phone. Through the PRISM program, Internet programs would hand over information to the government who would then have access to emails, videos, photos, and chat services (Clobes). Since his release of the information, Edward Snowden fled to Russia and is currently living there. He faces two counts of violating the Espionage Act and theft of government property (Finn and Horwitz). Many people think these surveillance programs are unconstitutional and are breaking the Fourth Amendment, which says people have the right to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and

On June 6, 2013, The Guardian published a story about the National Security Agency's (NSA) secret Internet surveillance program, PRISM (Greenwald and MacAskill 2013). The story was based on documents leaked by one of the most successful whistle-blowers in American history, former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. The documents that Snowden has released up to this time have shown the NSA to be heavily engaged in the collection of personal Internet activity, bulk collection of telephone "metadata," and other forms of surveillance that have brought U.S. intelligence practices into question.

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.

The Uniting and Strengthening America Act by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act: this is the acronym of the generally known USA Patriot Act. The Patriot act was presented on October 26, 2001 by George W. Bush after the terrorist attack of September 11. This act was implemented with the intended end goal that by giving power to the Justice Department regarding domestic and international surveillance of electronic communications, it would help prevent incidents like September 11 from occurring again (WhatisUSApatriotAct). The Patriot Act was intended to help government agencies fight against terrorism by catching it before it happens.

Disturbingly the National Security Agency (NSA) has been collecting metadata on Americans personal telephones and electronics devices for several years. This collection was happening before the NSA Analyst Edward Snowden leaked these facts to the world in late 2013. The NSA was formed in the 1950’s, and during this time frame the NSA disseminated intelligence information from electronic signals for foreign and counter intelligence purposes, which supported the American military needs. Currently the NSA has refocused their spying tactics to technology driven devices. The NSA has an extensive “telephone-metadata program, since 2001, and they collect phone records of virtually all Americans” (Lizza, 2013).

Our argument is that the government should be able to wiretap and spy without warrant. My partner brought up our first main contention which was how wiretapping and spying stop terrorism. Our other contentions are is it helps speed up trials and brings a more accurate verdict, and there wouldn't be as much paperwork if it was warrantless. Our next main contention that I will be discussing is how wiretapping and spying stops organized crimes. The organized crimes that it would be able to stop is murder, robbery, drug distribution, human trafficking, and many other crimes. Think about all the lives that would be saved by spying on suspected people who would commit the crimes… How warrantless wiretapping and spying will work is they will be able to listen on conversations and read emails. After that they will be able to apprehend the suspect if they are suspected of committing a crime. With crime and terrorism on the rise our country can seriously benefit from warrantless wiretapping. The law enforcement and government officials using wiretaps are not spying random but instead suspect criminals. Also when they collect information by using wiretaps it does interfere with innocent U.S citizens. This is some of the reasoning behind our argument.

While the PRISM program which stands for personal Record information system Methodology targets suspicious foreigners using sites like Google and facebook, it is only supposed to pull Americans into the surveillance web if they are linked to those targets. A public interest research group that recently petitioned the supreme court to stop NSA collection of domestic telephone call data, hope to see the programs examined and struck down by the high court, which could consider the challenge as soon as the fall. A secret court, which “operates without anyone representing the other side,” sanctions the NSA programs, says Goitein. “There’s really no appeal”.

The NSA monitors people in the U.S. and abroad, usually without a warrant, and keeps the information

Under the instructions of these laws, FBA and NSA launched several programs for surveilling suspected people, among those programs the most notorious one is PRISM. This program

PRISM was started in 2007, as a product of the Protect America Act under the Bush Administration. PRISM accounts for over 90% of the NSA’s data records, by far the largest program (“NSA slides explain the PRISM data-collection program”). Bullrun, also a classified encryption program, focused on the access of the medical files, emails and online bank accounts of American citizens. Bullrun has been the most costly program run by the NSA, as of 2011, totaling to approximately 800 million US dollars (Neal). Carnivore was an FBI-run program that audited email and online communication.

From the massive amount of information Snowden leaked to the world came three revelations regarding the specifics of three surveillance programs: Prism, more insight into FISA, and XkeyScore. In simple terms, Prism is an example of the US government using its corporate power to force major communications companies, including Google and Apple, to create a backdoor that could be opened regardless of whether those companies were ever notified. A constant point of access such as Prism facilitates the free collection of everything from emails, internet searches, or documents shared using those mediums, thereby making nearly all internet activity subject to the scrutiny of the government. As for the case of FISA, the public learned that the court had used its power to extend their capability in terms of cellular surveillance. During one of his first interviews after the leak, Snowden described the Verizon document, which detailed the FISA court ruling which forces Verizon Mobility, among other providers, to share all of their data with the NSA, as an example of the NSA “using an authority that was intended to be used to seek warrants against individuals, and applying it to the whole of society.” And finally, there’s XkeyScore: a program best described as a search engine for intelligence community. Frequently described as the NSA’s “widest-reaching” program, XkeyScore is a “program [which] allows analysts to search with no prior authorization through vast databases containing

The information Snowden leaked goes beyond your average Facebook or Yahoo phishing hack from a curious hacker behind his computer in his mom and dad’s basement. In the 2013 scandal, Snowden reveal that the NSA was collecting “the telephone records of tens of millions of Americans” (BBC News, 2014, para. 1). Additionally, BBC News (2014) reports that “the NSA tapped directly into the servers of nine internet firms, including Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, to track online communication in a surveillance programme known as Prism” (para. 3). According to Dreyfuss, B. and Dreyfuss, E. (2013), the NSA’s program Prism stands for the “Planning Tool for Resource Integration, Synchronization, and Management” (para. 2). Not only does Prism collect data from the U.S., it also collects data internationally. Furthermore, Dreyfuss, B. and Dreyfuss, E. (2013) report that Snowden provides examples of the kind of data that was being collected such as, ‘“e-mail, chat, videos, photos, stored data, VoIP, file transfers, video conferencing, notifications of target activity...”’ (para. 17). Essentially, this data and metadata were being analyzed by the NSA and other government agencies for tracking and security purposes. Metadata, according to Pfleeger, C., Pfleeger, S., and Margulies (2015), is data tracking that “can occur with data the user or owner does not even know [exists]” (p. 529). This is exactly what Snowden believed needed to be shared with the world, or the users and