National Security Agency Spying Analysis

Government surveillance is beneficial in moderation, but can quite easily become excessive. A well-known example of this is the controversy regarding the NSA monitoring U.S. citizens discreetly on American soil. This unwarranted watch crosses the fine line between monitoring criminal suspects for security, and blatant overreach of authority in spying common citizens. The personal infringement of information has been commonly associated with the NSA’s PRISM, but their MUSCULAR program is much more disconcerting. According to Harry Bruinius in “Why Tech Giants Are Now Uniting Against U.S. Surveillance”:

The Patriot Act was introduced as a response to the terrorist attacks in the US on September 11th. It has radically changed the way in which the government operates in the investigations of people in and out of our country. It has broadened the powers of the federal government in the way in which they can obtain information on people. In this paper I will be discussing the ethical and moral issues of the expanded ability of wiretapping, search and seizure, the establishment of the FISA court, and end with the transparency of these practices.

The National Security Association (NSA) monitors the communications without warrant or viable cause, except for the threat of terrorist attacks. Allowing the U.S. Government to monitor its people violates their Fourth Amendment right to privacy. Not only is monitoring a violation of right, but the NSA is also keeping

The NSA has been secretly ordered to eavesdrop by the Bush administration after the 9/11 terrorist attack. The base of where the NSA has been operating their wiretapping agenda is in Bluff Dale, Utah the building sprawls 1,500,000 square feet and possess the capacity to hold as much as five zeta bytes of data it has cost almost $2,000,000,000. The act of spying over the USA citizens even though they are suspicious is a threat to the people’s privacy and the privacy of other countries’ members are being infringed on by the NSA by the act of wiretapping. The action of wiretapping violates laws for privacy, like the Bill of Right’s Amendment Four which says “Every subject has a right to be secure from all unreasonable searches, and

After the disclosures by Edward Snowden turned a critical eye to the NSA many people questioned the legality of the acts. The NSA claimed that their work was legal and had prevented many terrorist plots. However, evidence of only four plots was ever found. Even if the acts were founded in law, they still angered large numbers of citizens. Many citizens do not care if the spying is legal, believing that it is morally wrong. Government surveillance organizations have grown to be extremely powerful and are capable of accessing large swaths of personal information; these abilities intrude into the private lives of citizens and need to be curtailed.

Edward Snowden’s disclosures have brought to light many secret government actions that were previously unknown. One of the most controversial government programs that Snowden disclosed was how the National Security Agency (NSA) collected virtually every phone record for calls made in the United States between US citizens. It makes sense to monitor phone calls to or from callers located outside the United States, because non-US citizens don 't have the protection of the US Constitution and monitoring these calls also might be helpful in identifying foreigners who might be plotting terrorist attacks in the US. However, US citizens have 4th Amendment privacy rights under the Constitution, so it is much more of a problem when the US government collects bulk information about US citizens who do not pose an obvious danger to the country.

While I can agree that there are means that the government has to use to protect its citizens, compromising their privacy is not a valid means to do so, specifically without their knowledge

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

The National Security Agency can find out much more about someone than you think. The NSA must stop its intrusion of our privacy. This is a direct violation of our fourth amendment, which states that citizens should be allowed their confidentiality. Not only is it a blatant attack on our liberty, but also just unorganised. Just like weapons left overseas, in the same way Al-Qaeda repurposed the Afghans’ weapons, the software the NSA uses can be collected by any evildoer. When Edward Snowden released information of the mass NSA surveillance Americans felt betrayed. The NSA’s illegal conduct must come to an end.

Privacy is defined by Dictionary.com as “freedom from damaging publicity, public scrutiny, secret surveillance, or unauthorized disclosure of one’s personal data or information”. This is something that most people value extremely highly. From everyday civilians to government officials, everybody wants some level of privacy. Many say surveillance technology denies them the right to privacy that they are given at birth as American citizens. However, there should be a small amount of wiggle room when it comes to this technology, in order to protect the country and its people. In “Visible Man: Ethics in a World without Secrets”, Peter Singer gives us an insight into privacy in the government. He discusses the

As this issue has been recognized in the past, the agency has been forced to go to court to face the accusation of law bending. In some of these cases, there has been a ruling of unconstitutionality, however, as time progressed and more of these cases had come to surface, former U.S. President Bush moved all cases of this degree to a specific court. By doing this, the public began to feel that the agency’s illegal activities can be automatically defended by a mysterious and unexplained claim of ‘maintaining national security’. When attempting to evaluate the legality of their actions, only the information available to the public can be evaluated, but even then, there are issues that have appeared. When reviewing legality concerning national security, the president and congress will undoubtedly come into play. This is a responsibility and action that the president gives approval for to maintain his standards of national security. However, this does not mean that it is a legal route as “FISA is a valid regulation of presidential powers, and therefore that the wiretapping program is illegal” (Lee). As the agency’s activities can be accused to be unconstitutional or illegal, it is easy to assume they are aware of the loopholes and methods to get around this type of ‘technicality’ in their eyes. Along with the concern of legality of surveillance, the ethics behind

The use of intelligence gathering efforts of the United States in clandestine operations incognito with significant levels of deception is often rarely open to the American public. The intelligence agencies’ empowerment by the Federal government continues their surveillance methods and information gathering techniques often without interference in the name of national security. Since the release of the intelligence gathering methodologies by the National Security analyst Edward Snowden, there has been a significant amount of public scrutiny regarding intelligence operations and concise scholarly research clarifying its controversial approaches. The circumstances that surround the implementation of the USA PATRIOT Act continues to center on the inability of the U.S. government to balance the legal authority of the USA PATRIOT Act with that of the right of the American public to privacy as the constitution affords.