The Legality of the NSA

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Recommended: Government surveillance and right to privacy

After the disclosures by Edward Snowden turned a critical eye to the NSA many people questioned the legality of the acts. The NSA claimed that their work was legal and had prevented many terrorist plots. However, evidence of only four plots was ever found. Even if the acts were founded in law, they still angered large numbers of citizens. Many citizens do not care if the spying is legal, believing that it is morally wrong. Government surveillance organizations have grown to be extremely powerful and are capable of accessing large swaths of personal information; these abilities intrude into the private lives of citizens and need to be curtailed.
The NSA collects information via various means. Some information is taken during transmission and then decrypted. Most decryption is not done by methods used in war, but instead the NSA undermined cryptographic standards and then utilized the weaknesses they had implanted into the standards to decrypt the intercepted information. Aside from transmission interceptions, some information is taken directly from company servers. The first revelation was in June of 2013 when it was revealed that Verizon had given its database of all its calls to the United States government. However, this information was not taken unwittingly as Verizon had full knowledge of their decision. Many other companies knew that information was being taken, but had no choice in the matter as a secret court was assigning orders to reveal information without the use of a proper warrant. The companies were both forced to comply and keep the fact that this information had been given up secret from the company’s customers. Aside from taking information with court orders, the NSA also took information directly from companies’ ...

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... searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” Thus, a warrant cannot be given on a general location or population. Examples of this being neighborhoods, a person and their friends, the people who happen to be in a building, or the individuals who have used a service. Of course, legal or not, it is unlikely that the NSA will stop spying, and if they do there will always be some organization devoted to spying on people, be it a government agency or non-government information thieves.
A change of law, though unlikely, will only stop one government. Any other sovereign government can easily do what the NSA did for its own gain and cannot be forced to abide by the laws of another country. What can be done to prevent incursions of privacy is, rather than block one government by change of law, change the security measures used by the companies storing the information.

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