The National Security Agency (NSA) is a federal program under the Department of Defense that has the primarily task of global monitoring, collection, decoding, translation and analysis of information and data for foreign intelligence and counterintelligence purposes, including surveillance of targeted individuals on U.S. soil. In the mid-1970s, the NSA was investigated for the first time by Congress. At that time, the order of the NSA was that is “would never direct it’s surveillance apparatus domestically.” After the investigation was performed, Frank Church, the Democratic senator who was the head of the investigative committee, warned: “The NSA’s capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversation, telegrams, it doesn’t matter” (Greenwald).
Recent leakage of government documents, that shows evidence of immense domestic spying, has many Americans worried that Frank Church’s warning has become a reality.
So, what exactly is the NSA collecting and why? How does the United States’ data collection compare to that of other countries? And most importantly, have the government and the NSA put the privacy of US citizens at risk? In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, a U.S. law called the Patriot Act was passed under the Bush administration. The goal of passing this law was to strengthen domestic security and broaden the powers of law-enforcement agencies with regards to identifying and stopping terrorists (Grabianowski).
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The privacy of the American public was first questioned in 2006 when USA Today reported that the NSA had “been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth” and was “using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity” (Greenwald).
This article referred to a secret program, through the NSA, that was authorized by President Bush on 4 October 2001, around the same time that the Patriot Act was passed. This program implemented a bulk collection of domestic telephone, internet and email records. Some Americans began to question the intentions of the government and the NSA. The U.S. government received criticism again in June of 2013 when a top-secret document that ordered Verizon “to give the NSA information on all telephone calls in its system” was leaked to the public. According to the order, the information being collected included the originating phone number of a call, the terminating number, the duration of a call, the time of the call and possibly the location of the call. This leak showed the continuation of the domestic data collection, which began (as far as we know) in 2001, on an even greater scale under the Obama administration (Greenwald).
Following the Verizon leak, other tools that the NSA uses were revealed.
One of these tools is a program called PRISM. PRISM collects electronic data belonging to major internet services like Gmail, Facebook, Apple, and others. These companies have “vehemently denied knowledge of and participation in PRISM” and they have “rejected allegations that the US government is able to directly tap into their users’ data” (“Everything You Need”).
The person responsible for the PRISM leak is 29-year-old, former employee of the NSA, Edward Snowden. He said he felt a “civic duty” to leak the information and said, “I don’t want to live in a society that does this sort of thing.” Snowden left the United States prior to leaking the documents to avoid capture. He first fled to Hong Kong, then to Moscow where he is requesting asylum in Ecuador, Russia (“Everything You Need”).
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About a month after Snowden’s first leak, he leaked a second top-secret NSA program called XKeyscore. According to Snowden, XKeyscore makes available virtually everything people have ever done online. This includes browsing history, searches, content of emails, and online chats.
The program allows analysts the ability to search through the entire database of your information without any prior authorization. Shortly after the XKeyscore leak, the NSA finally spoke out in defense saying that it only used the technology to legally obtain information about “legitimate foreign intelligence targets in response to requirements that our leaders need for information necessary to protect our nation and it’s interest.” The NSA goes on the say that “XKeyscore is used as a part of NSA’s lawful foreign signals intelligence collection system” and that “allegations of widespread, unchecked analyst access to NSA collection data are simply not true (Wills).
President Obama responded to the allegations of vast domestic spying saying, “There is no spying on Americans. We don’t have a domestic spying program. What we do have are some mechanisms where we can track a phone number or an email address that we know is connected to some sort of terrorist threat (“Obama’s Tonight Show”).
President Obama’s response received a great deal of backlash because it completely contradicted the evidence of the government’s capability that was presented by Snowden. While the NSA has generated a heated debate in the U.S. and around the world about privacy, reports show that the United States is not the only country with special intelligence programs similar to the NSA.
Some of these countries include the U.K., Germany, The Netherlands, and India. The U.K.’s data intelligence agency is called the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ).
When faced with questions as to whether GCHQ used internet data collection similar to PRISM, Prime Minister David Cameron defended the program, saying that they obey the law and that the program is in place to keep citizens safe. Germany has a program called Strategic Communications Intelligence that is used to sift through digital communication using search terms. Reports show that The Netherlands’ program, The Dutch General Intelligence, has access to Prism and other similar programs. Privacy issues are also being talked about in India as the country plans to begin its Central Monitoring System to track communications on its networks. While much of the information about these intelligence programs is classified, it appears that they all have similar goals as the NSA (Essers).
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While the U.S. government defends its programs, stressing that they are only looking out for the best interest of the citizens, many Americans do not understand the necessity of collecting and recording information on every single citizen.
I, personally, believe that the government may be taking it slightly too far. Of course, I want to feel safe and want to feel like my government’s defense system is doing its job. The problem is that, today, you hear more people talking about being afraid of the government, rather than being afraid of terrorists. I feel like the question in many Americans’ heads is, “at what cost?” Sacrifices must be made, but I don’t think total privacy loss should have to happen. I believe the government should strive for the protection of Americans while still preserving our constitutional rights. Even still, Frank Church’s warnings he made in the 1970s definitely leave a haunting feeling in my mind: “The NSA’s capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left (Greenwald).
