Privacy And Identity Theft

As human beings and citizens of the world, everyone values their privacy. It is a right that is often looked over and taken for granted by most. Since the beginning of time, there have been concerns about individuals’ rights to privacy and their personal information remaining confidential. Our founding fathers had concerns about this which is why, “…this right has developed into

The government looks at our emails, text messages, listens to our phone calls and other similar communication devices. “The U.S. has led a worldwide effort to limit individual privacy and enhance the capability of its police and intelligence services to eavesdrop on personal conversations. The campaign has had two legal strategies. The first made it mandatory for all digital telephone switches, cellular and satellite phones and all developing communication technologies to build in surveillance capabilities; the second sought to limit the dissemination of software that provides encryption, a technique which allows people to scramble their communications and files to prevent others from reading them” (Solove). How much of this did you know about? Almost all of our current devices already have technology that makes it an easy access for the government to know about all of your conversations.

Modern Americans see privacy as one of the greatest freedoms. When Edward Snowden revealed the NSA surveillance program, the citizens of the United States were appalled by the extent of access the NSA had to personal information. However, according to Dan Tapscott in his essay, “Should We Ditch the Idea of Privacy?” we post just as many details daily on our numerous social media outlets. The majority of the information we freely post is not meaningful and does no harm to us by being public, yet there is a dangerous side to our open-book nature.

Privacy is what allows people to feel secure in their surroundings. With privacy, one is allowed to withhold or distribute the information they want by choice, but the ability to have that choice is being violated in today’s society. Benjamin Franklin once said, “He who sacrifices freedom or liberty will eventually have neither.” And that’s the unfortunate truth that is and has occurred in recent years. Privacy, especially in such a fast paced moving world, is extremely vital yet is extremely violated, as recently discovered the NSA has been spying on U.S. citizens for quite a while now; based on the Fourth Amendment, the risk of leaked and distorted individual information, as well as vulnerability to lack of anonymity.

Every move you make on the Internet can be recorded step by step, website to website. While researching articles on internet surveillance one said how US government has been forcing American telecommunication companies to turn over the call records of every one of their customers to allow the NSA to search them with a reason.(Glenn Greenwald. NSA collecting phone…). However I find this completely wrong, the government shouldn’t be having our call records unless they have some sort of evidence that we are a suspect or threat to this country. It also mentioned how the “NSA believes this general monitoring of our electronic communications is justified because the entire process takes a small amount of seconds”.(Glenn Greenwald. NSA collecting phone…). Despite the general illusion that today’s surveillance technology is used for a good purpose, people should be aware of the consequences when it’s used in the wrong

The illegal surveillance of Americans was first discovered by the public in 2005. Since then, and before, many organizations were founded to defend civil liberties in our digital war such as the EFF. “Secret government documents, published by the media in 2013, confirm the NSA obtains full copies of everything that is carried along major domestic fiber optic cable networks. The reports showed-and the government later admitted—that the government is mass collecting phone metadata of all US customers under the guise of the Patriot Act. Moreover, the media reports confirm that the government is collecting and analyzing the content of communications of foreigners talking to persons inside the United States, as well as collecting much more, without a probable cause warrant.”(EFF) NSA surveillance tracks the location of hundreds of millions of people, collects phone records of our entire nation, and taps into the very backbone of the internet. “The US government, with assistance from major

Its purpose, as most Americans understand, is to stop any potential terrorist attacks in domestic America. However, people’s fear of terrorism has been exploited by the American leaders to allow them to eavesdrop on every innocent America. It is shockingly similar to that in 1984, except the massive surveillance in America today is larger and more dangerous because it’s on the internet - “where virtually everything is done”. The internet, where every human interaction is made and the most private data is created and stored, has become the very tool for American government to spy on its own citizens. In just thirty days at the beginning of this massive surveillance in 2013, the National Security Agency (NSA) had collected data on more than 97 billion emails and 127 billion phone calls around the

Keeping the United States of America safe from foreign threats is far from an easy task. However, preventing domestic threats is a much more complicated and delicate one. Government organizations such as the National Security Agency [NSA] are known to have invaded our privacy through our connection to technology. The NSA has publicly admitted to the surveillance. Due to media coverage, the NSA is often viewed as the main agency that bulk collects data. Emails, phone calls, and even our text messages have been surveilled under an NSA program known as “PRISM” (“Domestic Surveillance Techniques”). Everyday government organizations invade our privacy for the sake of national security in an attempt to defend us from domestic threats, but it seems they often take surveillance a step too far. United States citizens should understand legality of these actions, as well as the purpose this data collection serves.

In 2013, a man named Edward Snowden ignited a national debate by revealing that our National Security Agency, or the NSA, has been gathering mass amounts of phone records and other, private, data without consulting the American public. That means American emails, chats, phone calls, online transactions, web searches, or even online medical records can and have be stolen by the government without consent. Using decryption methods, court orders, supercomputers, and technical tricks, the NSA is slowly gaining ground on its war on encryption. All of these things are supposed to be defended by technology companies and Internet Service Providers, but in the article, “Revealed: How US and UK Spy Agencies Defeat Internet Privacy and Security” by James

People make phone calls, and send emails all the time. These things are usually private and involve small groups of people. However, we have discovered that phone calls and emails are not as private as one may think. The government and the National Security Agency (NSA), have been spying on citizens and collecting data from the calls made and text messages and emails sent. Though they say they are doing this for our safety and to detect terrorists, the NSA has not caught many terrorists with the methods of surveillance they are using. NSA methods are ineffective and have not produced adequate results to justify their damage to civil liberties.

Another Important milestone in the new privacy paradigm was the revelation of the NSA’s surveillance program, PRISM. On June 5th, 2013, Edward Snowden leaked documents that revealed the National Security Agency’s surveillance program. The documents revealed that the NSA was tracking information from nine major Internet companies, including Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Apple. PRISM could collect about 600 million communications a day and store them for up to 30 days. Through the use of various methods, the NSA was able to intercept communications in real time (“Edward Snowden Leaks” 2014). With the implementation of PRISM, the United States government was able to covertly monitor information. The program was used to collect information from the Internet, but it was also used to obtain information from allies. One of the major issues with this program was the ability to monitor citizens without them ever becoming aware of the intrusion. PRISM was a drastic shift from the policies implemented in the eighties. Certain companies were cooperating with the NSA, many willingly handed over records. While these programs were implemented over a decade ago they have shaped the way the government views privacy. New policies are implemented which extend the government’s ability to gain access to information. This increase in power is problematic to the Internet user because it has restricted the rights of people. Internet privacy has been limited under the new paradigm in order

The National Security Agency of the United States has created a confidential surveillance program named PRISM, operating as the world’s largest “Planning Tool for Resource Integration, Synchronization, and Management”. This program is designed to gather and process “foreign intelligence” that travels through the United States, by extracting data from some of the world’s largest tech companies and its users. The United States describes itself as the “Worlds telecommunications backbone”, which was explicitly listed in the leaked PowerPoint presentation of PRISM’s operation. By going undercover and secretively accessing file transfers, e-mails, videos, call logs and numerous other types of data, the United States government is enabling a watch dog on its citizens and creating the largest terrorist regime. These PowerPoint slides behold some very disturbing information in how U.S citizens are being deprived of privacy, leading to loss of agency. Restricting individuals to be watched all the time turns the human race into robots, as individuality is lost, and liberty and freedom begins to diminish. America’s justification for surveillance and spy activity since 9/11 was to fight terrorism and protect the population, but these documents have nothing to do with capturing foreign terrorists or improving national security. They are a means of control, and instead of indicating those as the elected and the elector, meaning that congress and this government was only created through the

Online privacy is a major problem facing many people today. The major problem is that our privacy is being invaded and being used for other personal needs. Not only that but it is harming you in more ways than you know. For example it could affect your social security, lost job opportunities, and denial of insurance.

Whether using a search engine, watching an online video, creating content on a social network, receiving an email, or playing an interactive video game, people are being digitally shadowed online. This data is combined with the time, length and frequency of visits and recorded by the providers. These abilities are being utilized by different companies, and by law, are required to give this information to the government if they require it. With an increase of reliability from society of technology, it is unreasonable that we are not given a choice when accessing said necessity. That we should be forced to give up any information in an unnegotiated trade of a provided necessity for private information. One of the many pieces of legislation that allowed for this expansion of control after 9-11 was the Patriot act. the Patriot act allows federal agents to follow sophisticated terrorists trained to evade detection and allows law enforcement to conduct investigations without tipping off terrorists. Although this is positive, it gives them more free rein in invasion of privacy, a sacrifice of privacy for security. For instance, the Patriot act allows “Federal agents to use "roving wiretaps" to investigate ordinary crimes, including drug offenses and racketeering. A roving wiretap can be authorized by a federal judge to apply to a particular suspect, rather than a particular phone or communications device.” This allows the government to track any communications possibly related to the suspect, even innocent bystanders. The Patriot act also allows federal agents to freely gather a citizen's library habits. The government states it is because most terrorist plan their attacks in a library, and that they can not become “safe havens” for terrorists. The Patriot act blantly allows for an increase of invasion of privacy. Some files released by Snowden show that

Today, individuals are sacrificing privacy in order to feel safe. These sacrifices have made a significant impact on the current meaning of privacy, but may have greater consequences in the future. According to Debbie Kasper in her journal, “The Evolution (Or Devolution) of Privacy,” privacy is a struggling dilemma in America. Kasper asks, “If it is gone, when did it disappear, and why?”(Kasper 69). Our past generation has experienced the baby boom, and the world today is witnessing a technological boom. Technology is growing at an exponential rate, thus making information easier to access and share than ever before. The rapid diminishing of privacy is leaving Americans desperate for change.