Government Spying

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Government Surveillance is a rising privacy issue with many pros and cons from an ethical standpoint. Although technological surveillance has stopped many crimes, there have been many instances where federal agencies have taken advantage of the average U.S. citizen. There are numerous types of government surveillance; all of them under laws that either protect the federal agencies that use surveillance or the citizens they are spying on.
Government surveillance is the monitoring of individuals through technology. The different methods that the government monitors the average citizen range from tracking personal items such as phone calls, emails and web usage, and text messages to tracking the community through satellites and security cameras. Government technological surveillance first consisted of only wiretapping of landline phones. Technology has made huge advances, making it easier and faster for federal agencies to track and monitor individuals. Major corporations such as Apple and Verizon have recently given records of cell phone usage. There have also been mentions of drones that could be controlled from a video game-like console to record certain events (Eil 1).
To prevent misusage of this power, there were two significant laws passed to limit surveillance. The first of these laws is Wiretap Act of 1968. This was the first step to protect citizen from invasion of privacy. The law states that there are five terms in which all of them have to be broken to consider the act illegal. The terms are:
(1) The act must be intentional; (2) The interception of the communication must happen at the same time as the transmission; (3) The interception must be of the contents of the communication; (4) It must involve any...

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...n tried delaying the FBI. When he was caught, however, President Nixon resigned as a sort of appeasement to the Democratic Party.
There have also been reports of surveillance being too abundant that the information becomes useless. According to Rachel Levinson-Waldman’s report, “the failure of the intelligence community intercept the so-called “underwear bomber” was blamed in significant part not on insufficient information but on an overabundance of data” (Allen 2). The underwear bomber was a suicide bomber that nearly took down a plane to Detroit on Christmas in 2006.
Overall, government surveillance has many major pros and cons from an ethical standpoint. Even though there are many laws to protect the citizens from illegal surveillance, there have been several scandals. However, there have been many terrorist attacks that were stopped because of surveillance.

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