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Snowden Pros And Cons

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The National Security Agency’s collection and tracking of personal data goes against the Constitution, specifically the first amendment. The NSA is a government-run agency created to protect the American people from threat, in addition to this, the NSA is also accountable for the monitoring, collecting and the handling of foreign and counterintelligence information. In June 2013, Edward Snowden leaked classified documents belonging to the United States Government. These documents are now known as the NSA files. Since their release, these documents have provoked outrage from American and foreign citizens.The NSA was created for the safety of the American people, and has expanded into an agency with the purpose of surveying and collecting data …show more content…

Snowden is believed to have gone through the documents before giving them to MacAskill and Greenwald, Snowden here states, "I carefully evaluated every single document I disclosed to ensure that each was legitimately in the public interest. There are all sorts of documents that would have made a big impact that I didn't turn over". The NSA files held information on confidential programs such as PRISM, Bullrun, Carnivore and ECHELON. PRISM is a surveillance program in which the government has partnered up with nine different private companies in order to have access to online data. These companies include, Apple, Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Facebook, Dropbox, Youtube, Skype and AOL. PRISM was started in 2007, as a product of the Protect America Act under the Bush Administration. PRISM accounts for over 90% of the NSA’s data records, by far the largest program (“NSA slides explain the PRISM data-collection program”). Bullrun, also a classified encryption program, focused on the access of the medical files, emails and online bank accounts of American citizens. Bullrun has been the most costly program run by the NSA, as of 2011, totaling to approximately 800 million US dollars (Neal). Carnivore was an FBI-run program that audited email and online communication. It was implemented in 1997, and replaced in 2005 by NarusInsight, a for profit software company. ECHELON is a program that’s existence was confirmed in the NSA files. ECHELON deals with intercepting satellite signals, specifically Intelsat satellites. Intelsat is a company which controls 52 commercial satellites. TRANSIENT, a program much like ECHELON, instead oversees the interception of Russian

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