Surveillance Ensures Freedom: The Program Must Continue

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The intelligence community has conducted surveillance operations on a domestic and international level for years. The methodology of surveillance operations has been the same for decades; to collect data and to interdict with plots carried out to cause harm, destruction and death. According to Mike Rodgers, the Chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, the surveillance program has prevented over fifty terrorist attacks in the U.S and abroad. Technology has advanced tremendously since the Cold War era. The intelligence community has always had the capabilities to listen in on millions of American citizens.
It has recently been demonstrated through classified leaks of the depth and the breath of the NSA’s capabilities. American citizens protest that internal surveillance operations violate their privacy rights, and that the program should be terminated. With the numbers continuing to grow on terrorist threats to the homeland, the NSA should continue on the path of prevention and provide answers as to how the agency will grant the public’s request of re-instating their privacy rights.
The collection of data has changed in many ways for the intelligence community since non-state actors, such as Al Qaeda, have announced its goal to kill as many westerners as possible. One agency, in particular, is the National Security Agency (NSA). The NSA has demonstrated its sophisticated capabilities of using technological communications to spy on U.S. citizens and individuals abroad. This approach of collecting intelligence was deemed necessary and could bypass federal statutes, along with the Constitution, as long as there was a connection for tracking terrorists. The NSA’s surveillance program was exposed for the fir...

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...June 07, 2013., Regional Business News, EBSCOhost (accessed March 23, 2014).
Katyal, Neal and Richard Caplan. "THE SURPRISINGLY STRONGER CASE FOR THE LEGALITY OF THE NSA SURVEILLANCE PROGRAM: THE FDR PRECEDENT." Stanford Law Review 60, no. 4 (02, 2008): 1023-1077. http://search.proquest.com/docview/224068749?accountid=8289.
Page, Susan “Poll: Most Americans now oppose the NSA program,” usatoday.com, accessed March 23, 2014. http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2014/01/20/poll-nsa- surveillance/4638551/.
“What does the NSA/CSS do?” (2011). About NSA: Frequently Asked Questions. Accessed March 22, 2014. http://www.nsa.gov/about/faqs/about_nsa.shtml#about3.

Wiebe, Kirk J. Sep 2012. “Wiebe declaration in support of plaintiffs’ motion.” Jewl v. NSA. Accessed March 21, 2014. https://www.eff.org/document/wiebe-declaration-support-plaintiffs-motion.

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