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.
Computer Fraud and Abuse Act Everything is stored on the internet including highly classified government information, and your bank information. How do we make sure no one steals, views, or sells your passwords, and private information? Congress passed a law in 1986 called the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) to protect the government’s information. Many laws have been passed that revises the CFAA. The CFAA has imprisoned many people, and many people want changes to the CFAA today.
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Web. 16 Dec. 2013. Barker, Cyril Josh. "NSA phone scandal." New York Amsterdam News 18 May 2006: 4.
Metadata is the telephone record NSA has forced Verizon to hand in to them which includes who’s on... ... middle of paper ... ...n, and Devlin Barrett. "NSA Violated Privacy Protections, Officials Say." Wall Street Journal. Wall Street Journal, 10 Sept. 2013. Web.
"Fact Sheet 9: Wiretapping and Eavesdropping on Telephone Calls." Wiretapping and Eavesdropping on Telephone Calls. Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, Feb. 2014. Web. 01 May 2014.
With Internet privacy becoming increasingly questionable, the debate arises “Is it ethical for the government to access our personal viral information?” Since gaining access to this personal information, many individuals are more vulnerable to attacks and have been denied the right to privacy. Opposition claims that this gathering of intelligence is necessary to ensure public security has been . With personal information being a very important and profound issue, the answer of many would be that personal information should remain private and out of the reach of government. Cyber privacy is becoming increasingly questionable with the emergence of new technologies and the revealing of new government secrets. With the 9 -11 attack in 2001, terrorism and the protection of civilians became a number one priority.
"Edward Snowden: The Whistleblower behind the NSA Surveillance Revelations." The Guardian. Guardian News and Media, 10 June 2013. Web. 29 Mar.
This loophole allowed the NSA to perform searches on Americans’ phone calls and emails and whatever else they could get their hands on. The NSA programs that used this loophole are Prism and Upstream. Prism being used to collect information from many tech companies, ranging from Apple to Yahoo and everything in between. In another move reminiscent of 1984 was president Barack Obama’s defense of this broad surveillance in June of last year.1 However, it;s not just American spy agencies doing surveillance on citizens. According to recently leaked documents say that the GCHQ, a British spy agency, has tapped into fibre-optic cables and begun to share the information with their American counterparts,the NSA.
Greenwald G. (2014). "How the NSA Plans to Infect 'Millions' of Computers with Malware". The Intercept Greenwald G., MacAskill E., & Poitras L. (2013). “Edward Snowden: the whistleblower behind the NSA surveillance revelations”. The Guardian (London).