Government Surveillance

The debate between where to draw the line between allowing government surveillance and keeping society’s members privacy will never be completely clear. It is important to keep a part of an individual’s life private and once the Untied States voted the Patriot Act in privacy went from limited to microscopic. Widening the scope of government surveillance slowly but surely pushes privacy out of the

With the seemingly exponential propagation of inexpensive digital communications technologies over recent years, the general public is becoming more aware of the issues surrounding information privacy and government surveillance in the digital age. Every Tom, Dick, and Harry with a smart-phone has to be wary of how they use their private information for fear of that information being collected and used in a way contrary to their wishes. "Leaky" smartphone apps that transmit private information across the internet can be unethically used by government agencies. The issue of privacy is a balancing act; the public usually wants increased privacy and the government usually wants increased access.

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.

Governments such as the USA justify mass surveillance by stating it protects citizens from dangerous groups such as criminal organisations, political subversives and terrorists. In addition mass surveillance also maintains social control. The disadvantage of state surveillance that citizens articulate is that it violates the right to privacy and political and social freedoms of individuals.

The case being heard today is about the government surveillance of Muslims in New York city and New Jersey. In 2012, the Associated Press, published a series of stories that revealed the existence of a secret surveillance program implemented by the New York City Police Department, also known as the NYPD. The purpose of this program was to surveill and monitor the Muslim American communities in New York and New Jersey since the year 2002. According to the Associated Press, surveillance of these Muslim Communities took place in a variety of settings including: Muslim-owned businesses, muslim college organizations, and mosques to name a few. In the Associated Press’s coverage of this program, they divulged document after document acknowledging the existence of its program as well as its purpose of the program; however, the leaked documents by the Associated Press were unredacted. This alerted the general public to names of various individuals as well as organizations and business that were being surveilled by the NYPD.

The Internet powers our country. Not only do hundreds of millions of Americans use it daily, our government and states use it to do important national and international business. Our government already utilizes it to monitor the activity of its people. This monitoring has especially risen after events such as the Boston Bombing and the attacks of 9/11. The main reason that the government does this is to keep us safe. If the government puts more slack on this matter, then it will give a chance for terrorists to complete their objective. The normal person does not know how many terrorist attacks may have been stopped in the past years due to this surveillance, and how many lives it may have saved. Therefore, we cannot let our government halt

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.

Mass surveillance is a word that has been thrown around every so often in the last few decades, especially ever since George Orwell’s book Nineteen Eighty-Four. Although this book was released over 60 years ago, some aspects of the book are seeming to become true in the United States, and other parts of the world today. The idea of mass surveillance isn’t so taboo anymore, as there are several programs ran by sovereign countries around the world which monitor their domestic citizens, as well as citizens and leaders of other foreign countries. With all of our technological communication advances since 1949, this age of information is only going to get more severe, and more tracking and monitoring will be done. The biggest offender of doing

Total surveillance. Complete obedience. Absolute authority. The world of 1984 scared me when I first read the book last year. Never before had a book made me think so deeply about individuality, society, and government. 1984, a manifestation of my nightmares, described a totalitarian police state of resolute submission. The horror came when I looked upon our own society, and Big Brother glared back at me. We live in a world where every phone call, every text, every search, and every email can be monitored and recorded by our own government. The National Security Agency, or the NSA, was originally proposed to monitor threats outside of the United States, but the NSA began domestic surveillance shortly after the horrific terror attacks of 2001. This cleared the way for warrantless, unlawful tracking of American citizens. Initially, the program collected only the data of high-risk individuals in America with direct links to Al-Qaeda. Now, however, government data collection has spread to millions of otherwise innocent citizens. Government surveillance is a direct violation of the privacy of American citizens that is dangerous, immoral, and unlawful.

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 US has always envisioned itself as the country of free choice and chance, however the US is not as far from a dystopian future as one might think. In the novel 1984 citizens live in a impoverished dystopian future, there is a shortage of food and drink, the three countries are constantly at war, and perhaps worst of all, anything anyone says is monitored to make sure no one is committing crimes against the government/ruling party, Ingsoc. In George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 the government controls through a heavy use of surveillance similar to the US’s use of monitoring calls and texts, incriminating those who reveal surveillance secrets, and using paranoia as an excuse to spy on it’s citizens.

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.

In today’s society, the word “privacy” has become ubiquitous. When discussing whether government surveillance and data collection pose a threat to privacy, the most common retort against privacy advocates – by those in favor of databases, video surveillance, spyware, data mining and other modern surveillance measures – is this line: "If I’m not doing anything wrong, what would I have to hide?" The allowance of the government’s gathering and analysis of our personal information stems from an inadequate definition of what privacy is and the eternal value that privacy possesses. The adherents of the “nothing-to-hide” argument say that because the information will never be disclosed to the public, the “privacy interest is minimal, and the security interest in preventing terrorism is much more important.” 1 In an era where the patterns we leave behind will inevitably become the focus for whatever authority, the issue of privacy affects more than just individuals hiding a wrong. In this essay, I will explore the state of online privacy in wake of the government’s warrantless data collection. Respectively, the nothing-to-hide argument and its key variants in more depth.

Thesis statement: Government surveillance should be stopped because it is an invasion of privacy and gives the government control that is not enumerated in the constitution.

The part of Dr. Christ’s lecture that remained in my mind was his input on the topic of surveillance. In fact when he mentioned that google is able to track us, I immediately opened my phone and shut down the ability for google to track my location. My animation connects to Dr. Christ’s lecture in the sphere of “surveillance” while at first this doesn’t seem to connect with my project I will show you why. Notice when you were playing the game as you moved smug, the cat, the ball followed. This is my way of showing government surveillance. The ball reacting to smug’s movements serve as a metaphor for the way that the government is able to track us via google, our phones and various other mechanisms. Also notice that you can trick the ball into going away from smug. This trick is a metaphor for how people can encrypt information and use the dark web to keep information away from the government. Also the ability to trick the ball into going in the wrong direction serves as a metaphor for how the government is a massive inept bureaucracy that struggles to complete even the most simple tasks with easy and swiftness.