The Necration Of Mass Information : Metadata, And The Use Of Data

Privacy and safety of citizens is common in today's society, as well as the government looking over their shoulder at all times. As an example, George Orwell wrote a book called, "1984" which in it gave an outlook of society being taken over by a party. Government surveillance is different from protecting and bringing safety to the citizens, it violates their freedom, privacy, and human rights.

1984, a novel by George Orwell, represents a dystopian society in which the people of Oceania are surveilled by the government almost all the time and have no freedoms. Today, citizens of the United States and other countries are watched in a similar way. Though different technological and personal ways of keeping watch on society than 1984, today’s government is also able to monitor most aspects of the people’s life. 1984 might be a dystopian society, but today’s condition seems to be moving towards that controlling state, where the citizens are surveilled by the government at all times.

The general public gives an problem with the government surveillance as a media for invading others privacy. With the government monitoring, collecting, and retaining people's personal data, one side would claim that it is an infringement of their freedom to the rights to privacy. While the National security associations justifies the reason for monitoring would be to maintain order. Their ways to maintain order would be to monitor criminal and terrorist activity and to detect incoming threats, terrorists, or problems that would harm their country. This issue shows that freedom cannot exist without order. Although the general public wants their freedom of their privacy, they can not achieve their most of their desires because it puts their lives at risk without protection. Order is necessary in order to have freedom. It is impossible to attain entire freedom for a cause, however, it is possible to attain freedom to a certain

Although the cameras keep track of people for most of their lifetime outside their homes, the surveillance is necessary to regulate citizens and prevent them from doing criminal activity. Cameras control a large part of people’s lives, with purpose “to enforce good laws... to track the government’s political enemies, to gather ammunition for blackmail, and so on,” (Volokh 9). Cameras do not watch everyday activities to observe where one needs to go, but they are there to examine the cities for thieves and vandals. While these cameras appear in almost every part of the city, and people are unaware of what information of theirs is being taken away, the government or city does not scrutinize and judge people for everything they do. Unless a recent crime has occurred and the police requires its usage to track down the suspect, only then would a footage be released for the public regarding the criminal. Otherwise, other trivial and personal information about where one goes is not revealed. Whether the information is recorded or not, it does not affect the normal citizens who live in the area who have done nothing

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 advanced technology makes it possible that our government can have access to any individuals’ private information, including their daily schedules, emails, friend cycles, social network accounts, eating habits, buying behaviors, and the places they frequently visit. Solove finds that the government often uses the way of surveillance to imperceptibly control people’s lives (345). It means that the government has deprived individuals of their freedom in a way that monitors their every move. For instance, people may avoid talking about ISIS on the phone with others under the surveillance because they are afraid of whether their conversation will be taken out of context and misinterpreted by the authorities. Being watched by the government, people may choose to change their behaviors to adapt to the government’s value and interest. Living in a democratic society, people should freely choose what they want to share and what they need to hide. Thus, the government’s surveillance deprives people of their right to live their lives and share their opinions at will, keeping them being controlled by those in power.

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.

In George Orwell’s 1984, Big Brother uses surveillance to spy on everything from people’s everyday actions to thoughts in their mind’s privacy. The government controls much of the citizens, and this book has left a horrifying image to its readers for the future of government surveillance. As much as it sounds extreme, this could be the near future of Americans if surveillance programs continue to grow. Due to the many findings of Edward Snowden on the flaws of surveillance programs, changes must be made to the NSA Domestic Surveillance Programs.

More and more people fight back against NSA surveillance. They are on the opinion that their personal information should be kept in secret. Moreover, a fair bit of organizations and even individuals unite together in order to react against such actions of NSA as they are afraid that vital information about them might become known for everyone and those NSA’s actions disturb privacy of organizations as well as ordinary people.

The electronic surveillance data mining program operated by the United States National Security Agency (NSA) is called PRISM. The National Security Agency’s desire to address the agency’s need to keep up with the immense growth of the social media gave birth to PRISM. The growth of government surveillance began under the Bush administration after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and since then has expanded under the Obama administration.

Today's technological abilities take surveillance to new levels: no longer are spyglasses and eavesdropping from a roof ncessary t survey individuals- the government can and does exploit methods to observe all te behavior and actions

Surveillance cameras are widely used around the world by both law enforcement officers and private entities. The main purpose of installing these devices is to identify any suspicious behavior or criminal activities (Costa, Guedes, Vasques & Portugal 1). For example, in American cities, the police monitor and ticket those who run red lights or drive past the set speed limits using surveillance cameras. State officials monitor these cameras from different locations in the country. With technological advancements, these devices can reveal one’s identity, car number plates, and some even show any items hidden underneath clothing. Nations around the world continue to intensify public surveillance in a bid to provide a safe environment for their citizens. However, not all persons support the use of law enforcement cameras. Many argue that these cameras infringe on people’s right to privacy (Neyland 2). Although some of their arguments are sensible, this paper will conduct a discussion aimed at

According to “A Surveillance Society” by William E. Thompson and Joseph V. Hickey, cameras are becoming more common to people nowadays. They are everywhere – in almost all government and corporate offices, and many social and public places like malls and stores. Britain has been the most active in this trend; putting cameras in some “trouble spots” for public safety. Additionally, since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the United States has been trying to catch up. The government then passed the USA PATRIOT Act which expanded its authority to “spy” on private citizens. Furthermore, the new surveillance systems became more advance; it can not only scan places, but also analyze the scene, thus, it can now record, store, and index images. High-tech surveillance devices are growing in number and use across urban places – to

Gonchar states, “Three-quarters said they approved of the government’s tracking phone records of Americans suspected of terrorist activity. Nearly the same number approved of the United States’ monitoring the Internet activities of people living in foreign countries” (Gonchar 6). Based on another article published on a website titled Monthly Review, Lauren Regan talks about some ways on how the government could surveillance electronic communications. “Email messages can be intercepted and then reformatted to be sent to the intended recipient or someone else altogether”, Regan explained. With this being said, Lee Rainie and Mary Madden wrote an article designed to display some of the feedback from their surveys they conducted to several Americans. In the survey “Americans are divided in their concerns about government surveillance of digital communications”, 17% of Americans said they are “very concerned” about government surveillance of Americans’ data and electronic communication; 35% say they are “somewhat concerned”; 33% say they are “not very concerned” and 13% say they are “not at all” concerned about the surveillance (Rainie/ Madden 4). These surveys do show that the majority of the survey - takers feel that their privacy is being invaded by government surveillance but there is no possible way that we can determine that the statistics are accurate because Rainie and Madden did not specify what group of Americans took part in this