Prof. David
Privacy
Due: 11/10/14
Government Surveillance Privacy can mean different things to different people. It all depends on which part of the world you live in and whether people of that country give any value to their own privacy. Privacy is when you know you are able to live freely without having fear of someone watching you all the time. It also means to be the owner of your own personal information and not telling some stranger about your life. Privacy is having your own personal space, and it depends on you who you let in that personal space. Despite what people think of Privacy, we have no privacy at all. For example, whenever we use internet we are continuously track on the web and what we click on and different sites we visit, as a result we get recommendation of videos, websites according to our taste. This shows that the web makers are tracking our minds and recommend sites that would reinforce us to use web again and again. Being constantly watched and tracked by someone is not only invasion of one’s privacy but also violation of the 4th amendment. It is clearly stated in the constitution that the right of people should be secured and unreasonable search of people is unjustified unless there is a probable cause and in order to search, police need a warrant. However, nowadays no one cares about it. People have no privacy and they don’t know when, what and how they are being watched by the government. Not only that, the FISA law states surveillance of people and their electronics to get more information about terrorist attack. But if there is no probable cause then why do government get the authority to track people’s life. There has been many whistle blower cases in the United States history, who disagree with the idea of NSA tracking a lot of personal information about people without them knowing. One of the whistle blowers is William Binney. He is a 36-year NSA veteran. He was a senior NSA crypto- mathematician and was largely responsible for automating the agency’s worldwide eavesdropping network. He resigned after the September 11th attacks, concerned about the increasing surveillance of the American people. He argued that NSA gets a lot of information about people and 9/11 attack could have been stopped if they wanted to but they didn’t. He disagree with the idea that government thinks that they can get terrorist by continuously keeping track of phone calls and emails of American people, which is simply wrong. He continues to prove his point by saying that there could be a simpler way of getting terrorist rather than invading people’s privacy by tracking their phone record and reading their emails. If there is a suspicion on one person it leads NSA to track all of their friends and people they talk to as well. I agree with Benny that there could be another way to track terrorists because obviously terrorists know that America has best surveillance program and they can get caught so they would not use any electronic device as mean of communication because this would create problems in their terrorist mission. Furthermore, Benny gives the solution that government should monitor Jihad- i’s websites and find out about their mission and track them. By using this way of surveillance government would not be invading anyone’s privacy and there is a probable cause of doing the search in order to stop the terrorist attacks. Edward Snowden is responsible for one of the most significant leaks in US political history. He is 29-year-old and former technical assistant for the CIA and current employee of the defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton. He has been working at the National Security Agency for the last four years as an employee of various outside contractors, including Booz Allen and Dell. He is responsible for letting people know about the most significant documents from NSA. When he was working for CIA he didn’t disclose the documents because those were about people not about machines that are used
