Mass Surveillance Research Paper

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Recommended: Individual privacy vs national security

Gayathri Manchella
Grade 10

My partner and I stand in firm negation of Resolved: Mass surveillance is not a justified method of governmental intelligence gathering. We negate because we believe in the act of protecting our country at any cost. Before we begin, however, we have a few observations to make. 1) Governmental intelligence as a government agency that controls the collection and analysis of information, which is in turn in support of law enforcement, national security, defense and foreign policy. Governmental intelligence is used to protect the well being of the country, as stated above. 2) Mass surveillance can be classified under metadata, and metadata is used to find important information, as supported by the National Information …show more content…

The government is risking so much and protecting the country. It is only just that the citizens also give something in return, and in this case, it is any suspicious information. Many mistake this to be giving us the Privacy of the citizen, but this is very wrong. The problem with this assumption is that the person isn’t taking into consideration that it is only metadata, so if you type in “Bomb” more than 20 times, then it will get triggered. Using the Social Contract, we can see that it is vital to give and take when it comes to government. If a jewelry store has a guard and is armed, why should out country not be able to look through our …show more content…

Out of the many thousands of workers that work in mass surveillance programs, only a handful of people prove to be problematic. No system is perfect, that’s a given, but mass surveillance is so close to perfection that the amount of leaks that go through the system are almost not noticeable. One of the most recent leaks, most commonly known as the Edward Snowden leak, was handled to almost near perfection. NSA released that whatever Snowden had said was virtually nothing to all of the information they had on him. The governmental intelligence is extremely top secret, and for the people who think that people who work in the NSA abuse their rights, even they are all subject to the defined laws of metadata! For all the mentioned reasons above, we very strongly

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