In 2013, classified information from the US government was leaked out to major media outlets. The information revealed a mass surveillance of millions of civilians, including U.S citizens, undertaken by the National Security Agency (NSA) and their UK counterpart, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), and distributed the information they gathered to other government agencies, such as the CIA and the FBI. This was not the first time an American government agency was caught spying on US citizens. For example, a program that ran from 1945-1978, conducted by the Armed Forces Security Agency (AFSA) and its successor, the NSA, analyzed all telegrams entering and leaving the United States, or Project MINARET, where over 1,600 U.S citizens were targeted for being anti-war in the 1960’s, and included spying on important figures such as Martin Luther King, and Muhammad Ali. Today, however, the NSA has access to more information than any time before, in a digital age where millions of people in the US use the internet, led by the rise of the smartphones and tablets. The NSA made deals with and forced companies to take part of the PRISM surveillance program. Huge companies took part of this program, including AT&T, Verizon, Apple, Google, Yahoo, Facebook, AOL, Microsoft and more, and these companies are some of the most valuable companies the world has ever seen, in terms of both money and data they have access to. The NSA also ran other programs and claims that these efforts are to prevent future terrorist attacks; the programs are to protect the nation. However, the legality of their actions are questionable at best. Ultimately, this is a question of privacy vs security. Unfortunately for the NSA, privacy matters in this situati...
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...Collection Of Metadata Is Screamingly Illegal."Forbes. Forbes Magazine, 24 Jan. 2014. Web. 02 Mar. 2014.
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Is the American government trustworthy? Edward Joseph Snowden (2013) released to the United States press* selected information about the surveillance of ordinary citizens by the U.S.A.’s National Security Agency (N.S.A.), and its interconnection to phone and social media companies. The motion picture Citizenfour (2014), shows the original taping of those revelations. Snowden said that some people do nothing about this tracking because they have nothing to hide. He claims that this inverts the model of responsibility. He believes that everyone should encrypt Internet messages and abandon electronic media companies that track personal information and Internet behavior (op.cit, 2014). Snowden also stressed to Lawrence Lessig (2014) the importance of the press and the first amendment (Lessig – Snowden Interview Transcript, [16:28]). These dynamics illustrate Lessig’s (2006) constrain-enable pattern of powers that keep society in check (2006, Code: Version 2.0, p. 122). Consider Lessig’s (2006) question what is “the threat to liberty?” (2006, p. 120). Terrorism is a real threat (Weber, 2013). Surveillance by social media and websites, rather than the government, has the greater negative impact on its users.
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With the introduction of the internet being a relatively new phenomenon, the act of cyber espionage is not something that has been properly acknowledged by society. The American Government has done a stand up job of keeping its methods in the shadows and away from the eyes of its people since its documented domestic surveillance began on October 4th, 2001; Twenty three days after the Twin Towers fell President George Bush signed an order to begin a secret domestic eavesdropping operation, an operation which was so sensitive that even many of the country's senior national security officials with the...
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Currently, Snowden’s leaks have revealed a global surveillance apparatus used by the NSA as well as Britain’s Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group, a surveillance apparatus in the UK that conducts real time monitoring of social media networks. The exact size of Snowden's disclosure is unknown, but the following are possible: 15,000 or more Australian intelligence files, according to Australian officials9; at least 58,000 British intelligence files, according to British officials10; and roughly 1.7 million U.S. intelligence files, according to U.S. officials.11 Snowden’s leaks are unprecedented on several levels. His disclosure has been called the most significant leak in U.S. history by Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg.12 Regardless of future action, the debate on the protection of...
"The Government Is Spying On Us Through Our Computers, Phones, Cars, Buses, Streetlights, At Airports And On The Street, Via Mobile Scanners And Drones, Through Our Smart Meters, And In Many Other Ways." Washington. 23 Sept 2013: n. page. Web. 2 Dec. 2013. .
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On 6th of June 2013, breaking news appeared on ‘The Guardian’ newspaper where in the report; it revealed that the National Surveillance Agency (NSA) of the United States was collecting telephone record under top-secret court order. The next day, ‘The Guardian’ and ‘Washington Post’ reported that NSA has been assessing information and data in the system of Internet giants such as Facebook and Google under a surveillance program. Edward Snowden, on 9th of June 2013 was named to be the one who leaked the information to the newspaper when he made a debut interview from Hong Kong.
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