The Importance Of NSA Spying

An ordinary American citizen calls their friend and never thinks about that call, along with the many others they made that day, being tracked. They would never expect the government to read any of the emails they sent out. After all, their privacy is protected by their basic rights - isn’t it? In reality, citizens of the United States are losing their secrecy piece by piece. Since at least 2005, the National Security Administration (NSA) has been gathering huge amounts of data on the conversations of Americans, both by telephone and Internet, and storing it for investigation. This group has ignored domestic policy and, against all morals of America, spied on its citizens. Though supporters of NSA security say that it is necessary to keep the …show more content…
‘Metadata’ is information containing who placed the call or sent a message, whom it was for, where it was placed, and for calls, how long it lasted (Beaudette 29). Investigation starts with a chosen target who could ‘potentially’ communicate something with foreign intelligence (32). The NSA does not need a warrant to search. It, instead, needs certification to do so. If its appeal for authorization is improper in some way, the NSA can correct it - but in cases with cellular metadata, the investigation is already occurring (31). To begin its search, it analyzes the metadata of its new target. All the people contacted by the target, and all the individuals contacted by those people, become targets as well. The NSA passes the information about the targets to its designated department for analyzation (29). For Internet messages, however, the NSA is permitted “contents of entire communications... via ‘electronic communication service’ providers located in the United States” (30-31). These providers can help the NSA intercept messages ‘lawfully’ …show more content…
There is no concrete proof of this ‘wiretapping,’ but the NSA did admit to call-tracing, or collecting metadata (“Wiretapping”). President Bush even went so far as to speak and try to calm the uproar by attempting to discredit the effectiveness of metadata. He said, “We are not trolling through the personal lives of innocent Americans” (qtd. in “Wiretapping”). This statement did not do much to help, especially because in 2006, the FBI admitted to wiretapping US citizens’ calls without permission and investigating news reporters’ telephone records for leaked information. The NSA was prohibited from domestic investigations after the Watergate scandal, when it had been tapping phones and opening mail. It looked as if the group was ignoring this ban (“Wiretapping”). The American Civil Liberties Union started campaigns in twenty states in May 2006 to stop all NSA spying, but the Federal Communications Commission refused to stop the searching because it cannot gather ‘classified material.’ The phone records would be on each citizen’s bill; therefore, the information was not technically classified

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