NSA Surveillance: Does It Violate the Fourth Ammendment

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

National Security Agency (NSA) regulations and tactics’ is an invasion of privacy, an infringement on the Constitutional Amendments, and fails to keep the private or confidential data of Americans safe from hackers.

On September 11, 2001 Al-Qaeda attacks the Twin Tower of the World Trade Center. In response to this attack, President George W. Bush administration increases their data capability. “A federal judge sitting on the secret surveillance, panel called the Fisa court would approve a bulk collection order for internet metadata every 90 days.” So does the NSA violate the 4th amendment? According to uscourts.gov “4th Amendment, protects people from unreasonable searches and seizures by the government. The 4th Amendment, however, is not granted against all searches and seizures, but only those that are being unreasonable under the law.” On one hand, the 4th amendment and other hand you have the Patriot Act and now called the USA Freedom Act.

Under the Bush Administration, the Protect America Act was passed in the wake of the terrorist attacks on September 11th, 2001. As a result, in 2007, the National Security Agency designed and operated a surveillance program called ‘Prism’. The programs’ intent is to gather web communications from major United States internet corporations. Under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, Prism collects suspicious stored web communication and further employs communication companies such as, Verizon, to turn over all data that included court-approved terms, that indicated conspiracies targeted to compromise our national security. ("NSA PRISM Slides - IC OFF THE RECORD," 2013). Now, you may feel conflicted about their approach to securing our safety, but some are certain that this is undoubtedly a breech in our civil liberties. Lee (2013), states, “Civil liberties groups warned that the PAA 's vague requirements and lack of oversight would give the government a green light to seek indiscriminate access to the private communications of Americans. They predicted that the government would claim that they needed unfettered access to domestic communications to be sure they had gotten all relevant information about suspected terrorists.” Imagine we have a government that justifies spying on its citizens without any legal authorization to do so. The exploit our trust by suggesting that they

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 fourth amendment is designed to protect the privacy of its citizens, its ultimate goal is to protect the right of privacy from the arbitrary government. Due to the fourth amendment, the NSA can only record the phone numbers and the duration of citizen’s phone calls, not the content. Nobody can heedfully listen onto the content of your phone calls because of the fourth amendment. As well as phone calls, the NSA can also not read or document your personal emails. If the NSA does conduct any illegal recordings of any sort the information cannot be used in court or to prosecute an individual. Lastly, if the NSA wants to access any information of phone calls or emails of citizens, they must acquire a court order or a warrant to access the information

The National Security Agency (NSA) has been an information gathering arm of the Executive branch since the Cold War and continues to be an essential part of ensuring the security of the United States. The public issue that involves the NSA is the spying of U.S citizens which can be seen as a violation of the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution. This was revealed to the public by the whistleblower Edward Snowden who released classified documents of activities that the NSA had been conducting in conjuncture with telecommunication companies, which angered many U.S citizens and received media coverage with a call for the U.S Government to restrict the NSA’s activities or at least for there to be Congressional oversight. This debate revolves around how much the NSA’s surveillance activities are actually used for national security as well as the constitutionality of the NSA’s surveillance. This all began after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 when there was a call for the attacks to never happen again and the adoption of the Patriot Act in that same year which increased the power of the NSA.

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.

However, with the revelations of Edward Snowden, we learned, that in direct violation of the Fourth Amendment, our government spies on all of us; without suspicion, probable cause or warrants. In my worldview, this qualifies

The privacy of American citizens is clearly being unnecessarily invaded. Frankly, Americans’ rights under the fourth amendment of the constitution are being threatened. Federal judge Richard Leon was quoted in a Washington Times article saying, “I cannot imagine a more

One of the National Security Agency’s top goals, is to prevent future terrorist attacks. Since its passage following the September 11, 2001 attacks, the Patriot Act has played a key role in many successful operations to prevent and to protect innocent Americans from the deadly plans of terrorists dedicated to destroying America. However great results from passing the Patriot Act, Congress allowed, slow and small changes in the law. But what ended up happening was a huge movement and netting of survelliance and wire taps around the country. People felt as though their rights were being violated. Congress had only taken existing legal guidelines and reestablished them to protect the lives and liberty of the people in the United States of America from the challenges posed by a global terrorist network(NBC News). That is why the NSA should be allowed to break our constitutional privacy. Yet that is only if the security and the well-being of the United states is threatened, if our allies and members of our own country join those making threats against us, and when it is made clear that our national security has been broken down and

On June 6, 2013 the details of the National Security Agency’s (NSA) surveillance activities where given by Edward Snowden to the public; raising concerns of Americans about their privacy. Edward Snowden, a former employee of the NSA, gave the alarming details of surveillance programs in his interview on how the NSA accesses our emails, calls, internet activity, and anything else that is related to technology. In this system of surveillance the NSA can gather data from companies and tap the cables that are vital for moving around information from technological devices, they may also use their relationships with technology companies to get emails or information straight from U.S. servers. (Cawley, Kiss, Boyd, Ball) Nevertheless, the claim is

Most people do not want a 9/11 repeat and will say, the NSA should be allowed to monitor everything we do on the internet to protect our families and loved ones. The NSA is here to protect us and doesn’t care about the stupid videos you watch for laughter, they don’t care about the pictures you took when you were on vacation. The “spying” the NSA does keeps track of phone calls, emails, messages, purchases and your location. The people opposing monitoring our internet behavior say, monitoring everything we do and saving our data, is breaking the Fourth Amendment right which is,

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.

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.