Domestic Surveillance Research Paper

Domestic Surveillance in the Unites States has been going on for decades without the public 's knowledge. Domestic Surveillance didn 't seem important in the eye of the American government. After the September attacks (9/11) congress started to treat Domestic Surveillance as a number one priority. After September 11th Congress passed a law to use military force for those responsible for the attacks in New York, NY. The go ahead with using military force did not give the President to use surveillance without a warrant. Congress started to pass legislation against counterterrorism efforts. The most controversial measures, including the 2001 USA Patriot Act that gave the US federal government the ability to collect and analyze private information that has identified itself with the United States of America.

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

Surveillance is not a new thing. In fact, espionage, tracking, and sleuthing were part of society ever since 5000 B.C. But in the rise of the modern era, the idea of surveillance in the public eye serves as a controversial topic of discussion. People everywhere complain about the existence of security cameras, government tracking, and the right to privacy. Such problems, however, are not due to the sudden discovery of surveillance, but the modern abuse of it. Seeing the disastrous effects of over surveillance from George Orwell’s 1984, the public rightfully fears societal deterioration through modern surveillance abuse portrayed in Matthew Hutson’s “Even Bugs Will Be Bugged” and the effects of such in Jennifer Golbeck’s “All Eyes On You”. The abuse of surveillance induces the fear of discovery through the invasion of privacy, and ensures the omnipresence of one’s past that haunt future endeavors, to ultimately obstruct human development and the progress of society overall.

During the past decade, an issue has arisen from the minds of people, on which is more important? Privacy or national security? The problem with the privacy is that people do not feel they have enough of it and national security is increasing causing the government to be less worried about the people. National security is growing out of control which has led to the decrease in people’s privacy and has created fear in the eyes of U.S. citizens. “Twelve years after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and amid a summer of revelations about the extent of the surveillance state built up to prevent others, leaders, experts and average Americans alike are searching for the right balance between security and privacy” (Noble). Americans should be able to live their daily lives without fear of an overpowered government or a “big brother” figure taking over. “According to a CBS News poll released Tuesday evening, nearly 6 in 10 Americans said they disapproved of the federal government’s collecting phone records of ordinary Americans in order to reduce terrorism” (Gonchar). While it is good to keep our country safe with security, American’s privacy should be more important because there is a substantial amount of national security, the people 's rights should matter first.

Many Americans do not realize that at any time of the day the government could be observing their “private” lives. On the other hand, some individuals have predicted the government would develop a form of constant surveillance, like George Orwell who forecasted a futuristic government, which used technology as a relentless eye on the members of the society in the novel 1984. 1984 was correct, to an extent, in predicting that the government would increase their usage of technology to constantly observe their people, whether in public or their private homes.

Although technology has provided tools to enhance our capabilities in things such as finding a missing person, solving murder cases based on technological assets etc.., this technology also leaves us vulnerable in many ways to slowly losing our privacy (Burten, C., 2012).

It has been more than seventy years since the release of George Orwell’s 1984, a novel that imparts a lesson on the consequences of government overreach. However, today that novel reads like an exposé of government surveillance. Privacy and national security are two ideas competing for value on a balance; if one is more highly valued, the other carries less weight. Government desire to bolster national security by spying on its own citizens-- even the law abiding ones-- is what leads to the inverse relationship between civil liberties and security. In times of a perceived threat to the nation, national security becomes highly prized and people lose privacy. One case is terrorist attacks. 9/11 caused an understandable kneejerk reaction in Americans to bolster protection. Some of the the measures taken were observable, like greater security at airports, but others attempted to increase national security in a more intrusive way. Privacy should be more highly valued than national security, and America has reached a point where that is no longer true.

The government offered the domestic surveillance programs to reinstate a feeling of safety. Although comforting shell shocked citizens, current programs are becoming unnecessarily invasive, financially costly, and controversially uneffective. Many people believe that these programs undermine the fourth amendment of the Constitution of our nation. It is certain that we need domestic surveillance with jihadist groups continually growing but it is obvious that systems in place today are not working.

Technology has come a long way since the early 90’s. With modern advances, technology is just about incorporated in everything we do in our day-to-day lives. Since technology has been incorporated into our everyday lives, it may raise some concerns about what may be happening in the background. One of these concerns would be privacy, we all may take it for granted but it is our constitutional rights as Americans. But this all changed after the September 2001 attack on the twin towers.

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.

Technology has given us the power to change society and the way society works. In chapter 3 of William G. Staples writing “Everyday Surveillance”, technology has not only given society the power to peer into the lives of others, but has also granted society new opportunities. With it begs the question, where have we as a society gone in the field of monitoring and surveillance? With the advent of monitoring and surveillance technology came with it new opportunities and alternate options that individuals, in this case “convicts”, could not have previously taken It is thanks to technology that house arrest is now an option for non-violent convicts, where in the past a prison sentence was the only option. .

Government surveillance in the past was not a big threat due to the limitations on technology; however, in the current day, it has become an immense power for the government. Taylor, author of a book on Electronic Surveillance supports, "A generation ago, when records were tucked away on paper in manila folders, there was some assurance that such information wouldn 't be spread everywhere. Now, however, our life stories are available at the push of a button" (Taylor 111). With more and more Americans logging into social media cites and using text-messaging devices, the more providers of metadata the government has. In her journal “The Virtuous Spy: Privacy as an Ethical Limit”, Anita L. Allen, an expert on privacy law, writes, “Contemporary technologies of data collection make secret, privacy invading surveillance easy and nearly irresistible. For every technology of confidential personal communication…there are one or more counter-technologies of eavesdropping” (Allen 1). Being in the middle of the Digital Age, we have to be much more careful of the kinds of information we put in our digital devices.

The first and most recent spectacular round of surveillance came during the First World War and what became of it after all was said and done. Fearing subversion by German-Americans after declaring war on Germany in 1917, the FBI and Military Intelligence expanded from insignificant bureaucrats into agencies, with god-like abilities, tasked with extinguishing any flame of disloyalty at any place in America, whether by words or action. Only 9 percent of the country’s population then had telephones, so this made monitoring the loyalties of around 10 million German-Americans show to be extremely focused on labor, requiring a gratuitous of postal workers to examine around 30 million first-class letters and 350,000 badge-carrying vigilantes to examine immigrants, unions, and every other socialist a person could think of by means of shoe-leather snooping. In the 1920s, right wing conservatives were completely caught off guard by this threat to privacy which was slowly beginning to diminish the power of Washington’s security apparatus. This change wound up in Secretary of State Henry Stimson’s nullification, in 1929, of our government’s

Privacy has become a very important issue, especially when

Technology has become very effective for a thriving generation, but it also possesses a handful of flaws that counter the benefits. Technologies help people post and deliver a message in a matter of seconds in order to get a message spread quickly. It also gives individuals the power to be the person they want to be by only showing one side of themselves. But sometimes information that had intentions of remaining protected gets out. That information is now open for all human eyes to see. This information, quite frankly, becomes everybody’s information and can be bought and sold without the individual being aware of it at all. However, this is no accident. Americans in the post 9/11 era have grown accustomed to being monitored. Government entities such as the NSA and laws such as the Patriot Act have received power to do so in order to protect security of Americans. However, the founding fathers wrote the fourth amendment to protect against violations of individual’s privacy without reason. In a rapidly growing technological world, civil liberties are increasingly being violated by privacy wiretapping from government entities such as the NSA, Patriot Act and the reduction of the Fourth Amendment.