Electronic Government Surveillance Essay

Opinion Editorial-Electronic Government Surveillance

In this world where anyone could be under surveillance at any given moment, personal privacy and the security of information have become one of the greatest and most controversial issues at hand. The burden of having a digital footprint that is fully accessible by the government is a concern for many, and there have been countless debates over whether it is constitutional or not for the government to conduct such intrusive electronic surveillance.

The U.S. government argues that multiple segments of the Constitution give them the authority to conduct mass electronic surveillance over the American population, which is true, but only to a certain extent. What the government intentionally omits

F. James Sensenbrenner, who helped draft this statute, it was written “to allow the intelligence communities to access targeted information for specific investigations”, but the government is collecting an awfully large amount of information, and it doesn’t take a genius to understand that it simply isn’t possible for each one of these four billion calls to be relevant to specific investigations that all have reasonable suspicion. Therefore, we can conclude that the government’s mass electronic surveillance doesn’t fall underneath the category of being “relevant to a specific case” as they claim it to be, and therefore cannot be treated as an exception or justified as being constitutional through this

government’s argument is weak and outdated. Their last-ditch argument is that personal electronic information is not physical property, and is therefore inapplicable to the fourth amendment, which protects the right of “the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated…” However, in 1967, during a Supreme Court case dubbed Katz vs. United States, this notion was overruled, and it was determined that the fourth amendment was intended to protect a person’s sense of privacy, which included electronic property and information obtained without a physical search. This overrules the U.S. government’s argument, and more importantly, proves that electronic property falls under the aegis of the Constitution, and that electronic surveillance is, therefore, without a doubt, a clear violation of the