NSA Surveillance

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Recommended: What is more important : privacy or national security

In 2013, classified information from the US government was leaked out to major media outlets. The information revealed a mass surveillance of millions of civilians, including U.S citizens, undertaken by the National Security Agency (NSA) and their UK counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), and distributed the information they gathered to other government agencies, such as the CIA and the FBI. This was not the first time an American government agency was caught spying on US citizens. For example, a program that ran from 1945-1978, conducted by the Armed Forces Security Agency (AFSA) and its successor, the NSA, analyzed all telegrams entering and leaving the United States, or Project MINARET, where over 1,600 U.S citizens were targeted for being anti-war in the 1960’s, and included spying on important figures such as Martin Luther King, and Muhammad Ali. Today, however, the NSA has access to more information than any time before, in a digital age where millions of people in the US use the internet, led by the rise of the smartphones and tablets. The NSA made deals with and forced companies to take part of the PRISM surveillance program. Huge companies took part of this program, including AT&T, Verizon, Apple, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, AOL, Microsoft and more, and these companies are some of the most valuable companies the world has ever seen, in terms of both money and data they have access to. The NSA also ran other programs and claims that these efforts are to prevent future terrorist attacks; the programs are to protect the nation. However, the legality of their actions are questionable at best. Ultimately, this is a question of privacy vs security. Unfortunately for the NSA, privacy matters in this situati...

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...Collection Of Metadata Is Screamingly Illegal."Forbes. Forbes Magazine, 24 Jan. 2014. Web. 02 Mar. 2014.

Ackerman, Spencer. "Senators to Investigate NSA Role in GCHQ 'Optic Nerve' Webcam Spying." Theguardian.com. Guardian News and Media, 28 Feb. 2014. Web. 02 Mar. 2014.

Ackerman, Spencer, and James Ball. "Optic Nerve: Millions of Yahoo Webcam Images Intercepted by GCHQ." The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 28 Feb. 2014. Web. 02 Mar. 2014

"NSA Spying Risks $35 Billion in U.S. Technology Sales." Bloomberg.com. Bloomberg, n.d. Web. 02 Mar. 2014.

Jarvis, Jeff. "How Much Data the NSA Really Gets." Theguardian.com. Guardian News and Media, 13 Aug. 2013. Web. 02 Mar. 2014.

Gellman, Barton, and Ashkan Soltani. "NSA Infiltrates Links to Yahoo, Google Data Centers Worldwide, Snowden Documents Say." Washington Post. The Washington Post, 01 Nov. 2013. Web. 08 Mar. 2014.

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