Privacy vs. Surveillance Essay

NSA Surveillance Program A Threat to Civilians Privacy Since the beginning of WWI, detection activity has become a very important part of issue security to United States. To track the activity of people, U.S.A. has many spying agencies and topic Security Agency (NSA) is one of them. NSA is the main producer and manager of token intelligence for the United States. It collects, monitors, translates, and analyses global instruction, and data for intelligence purposes and performs c be course of instructions in spite of appearance the United States. The activity of NSA and the issue of the covert of citizens has long been debated for decades. With advanced engineering and newly installed equipment it is possible to spy on almost everyone.Though the justice enforcement officials consider the NSA surveillance programs as necessary weapons in the war of terror, the well-mannered rights groups claim that it is a clear violation of civilian privacy defend by the Constitution of the United States. The U.S. Constitution gives every U.S. citizen the right to entertain their privacy. The Fourth Amendment prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures and sets surface requirements for search warrants based on verisimilar cause as determined by a neutral articulate or magistrate (U.S. Constitution). But the NSA argues that because of security reasons surveillance programs should be continued and appeals to copulation not to limit the powers of NSA. After the disclosures of the classified advertisement documents by the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, it has become clear that NSA willingly avoided judicial system, conducted much broader surveillance program and did not abide by the Constitution at a least(prenominal) bit. The Guardian reports the vastness of the disclosure shocked many people, including the elected representatives of the sexual congress who were unawargon of the extent of the surveillance.NSA conducts domestic surveillance through a make sense of programs. The agency never publishes any comprehensive, official list of programs. The majority of the surveillance programs are classified, meaning that they are not available to public. The entirely reason people know active these programs is because of the whistle blower Edward Snowden who discover classified documents after meeting Glenn Greenwald, a reporter of The Guardian. The first discover classified document was about the PilotProject, which contents agitate the country. On October 2, 2013 The New York Times reported that NSA carried out a private pilot project in 2010 and 2011 to test the collection of bulk of data about the location of Americans cellphones. The existence of pilot project was also confirm by James R. Clapper, the director of national intelligence, at a senate judiciary committee hearing.The pilot project used data from cellphone towers to resolve anyone who is using any electronic device which is Wi-Fi or cellular technology enabled . This project was a serious violation of Fourth Amendment and has been highly criticized twain by the lawmakers and U.S. citizens. As prof. William Stuntz, a criminal justice scholar and a professor at Harvard Law School, points out the Fourth Amendment was drafted partly in reaction to the British Government in eighteenth century which carried out general warrants to seize personal diaries and letters in support of seditious- smear prosecutions that were aimed to suppress political thought. The top secret documents reveal that the NSA is collecting and storing the online metadata of millions of meshwork users, regardless of whether or not they are the persons of interest to the agency (The Guardians).Metadata is a cloud or envelope that includes the duration of a phone call, the individualism of the caller and the receiver for an email it could include the location information, the sender and the recipient, time, and roughtimes its content, the web browsing history of an user and in some case account passwords. This envelope can be used to relieve oneself a detailed picture of an individuals life. From the disclosed classified documents of Edward Snowden, The Guardian reported on September 30, 2013 that NSA has developed a metadata repository, codenamed Marina. each computer metadata collected by NSA software is directed to the Marina database, Phone records are directed to a separate system. The agency is also gathering information from Facebook, twitter, Skype to build individual profile of every U.S. citizen (The New York Times). This type of work out of NSA greatly hampers civilians right to free speech. Extensive surveillance is harmful because it desponds the play of civil liberties. Just consider the surveillance of mass people when they are reading, thinking, and communicating with each other in order to make decisions about social and political issues. The only solution to protect our intellectual privacy to think and decide is we need inte llectualfreedom from state interference.