Citizens from across the nation are perturbed with their privacy being infiltrated by the National Security Agency (NSA), even though they are obliged to ‘protect’ the People of the United States. When did the protection of our natural rights interfere with our privacy? Are these paranoid citizens the evolved breed of ‘Conspiracy Theorists’ or is their paranoia objectively congruent to the certainty of espionage that has been obscurely administrated by government officials? In this essay, we will dissect the inevitable evidence exposed to the general public in which we will determine the veracity of what government officials clandestinely do.
To introduce, there are numerous government organizations that create the conglomerate…show more content… As part of the war on terror, NSA created new IT systems (Thin Thread) to deal with the flood of information from new technologies like the Internet and cell-phones. This was established in order to achieve global surveillance of people within the United States during the collection of allegedly foreign intelligence “…which is regarded as unconstitutional and unnecessary” (2014). However, due to President Bush signing The Patriot Act, “…It lowered protections against government collection of Americans' communications and personal records” (Vicens, 2017). This decision allows government officials to access private information of citizens, regardless of their consent. Even when The Patriot Act was reauthorized in 2006 (Risen and Lichtblau, 2013), The NSA still tracked millions of phones with major telecom companies, which was leaked with evidence from a former AT&T technician (Cohn and Rumold, 2013). Like I stated before, “…the NSA obtains full copies of everything that is carried along major domestic fiber optic cable networks” (Cohn and Rumold, 2013). This allows them to access and wire-tap nearly, if not, all…show more content… I state this quote because regardless of how the People of United States emotionally perceives the violation of their privacy, they still have complete power to do as they please. With that in mind, NSA decided to expand its domestic surveillance on innocent, untargeted Americans. Major technological companies such Microsoft, Google, and Facebook have cooperated under the NSA’s PRISM program, which enabled the NSA to collect data on emails, search history and file transfers. However, in 2010 a federal judge ruled that warrantless wire-tapping was illegal and unconstitutional under the Bush Administration (Risen and Savage, 2010). Did that stop the NSA? No way. Even WITHOUT the Patriot Act (which was renewed and signed by former President Obama in 2011), the NSA still has access to numerous technological communication devices. In June 2013, The Guardian reports that “…the NSA has been collecting millions of Verizon customers' call data” (Cohn and Rumold, 2013). They are deliberately persistent in hacking information that in no way is relevant to the war on
