Surveillance In The NSA

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Just a couple years back I would’ve thought conspiracy theorists who say the government is listening in on our conversations were just crazy and delusional. Turns out, those crazy people actually weren’t too far off from the truth. The National Security Agency (NSA) has just recently been put in the limelight by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. The NSA was tapping in on every cellular and internet activity in the USA and for paying off foreign officials across the world to conduct surveillance in their government and on their people. To be able to carry out wide-scale surveillance on the entire world requires a lot of power and influence, so how did the NSA carry out such a heavy task? How did they become an omnipresent surveillance agency? Now that everyone knows about NSA operations is the price of worsening foreign and domestic relations worth keeping world-wide surveillance to better government security?
The key to the heavy lifting of the surveillance within U.S. borders must be credited to the highly complex program called PRISM. PRISM is a program that sorts through all of the metadata, a set of data that describes and gives information about other data, for key words hostile to government security. The metadata comes from well-known and used companies that were paid millions of dollars to relay all activity under their supervision to the NSA to be analyzed. The creation of PRISM came from a specific part of the NSA dubbed NSA’s Tailored Access Operations (TAO). TAO is responsible for making new hacking programs and wiretapping software (More NSA revelations: backdoors, snooping tools and worldwide reactions) was responsible for things like the bugging of all iPhone’s. As Martin Luther King said “There comes a time ...

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...ed onto by Obama, allowing the wiretapping, searches of business records, and surveillance of individuals (that are ONLY) suspected of being a terrorist or related to terrorist activities.
Turns out that those “crazy” people weren’t crazy enough to imagine what the NSA was really capable of. There was the NSA’s climb to power were they used 9/11 to harness our nation’s fear and used it to empower themselves. As of now foreign relations remain stable, but as time passes huge global politics may shift as Edward Snowden and further investigations may prove to reveal more secrets on the NSA. Also, the fiery controversy of whether the compromise of millions of people’s privacy is worth a secure government security is still being debated. Many are outraged of the new findings in the NSA’s dark secrets and are pushing for new rights to privacy to combat NSA surveillance.

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