Spy On US Phones

Recently the U.S. government has been criticized for intruding on people’s privacy. Our government has especially been invading our privacy after the USA PATRIOT Act was passed in 2001. It’s interesting that they are allowed to know what we are doing however they don’t have to disclose to us what they are doing. The organization Wikileaks have been releasing classified government information and videos since 2006 when it first started. Recently Devlin Barrett a staff reporter for The Wall Street Journal wrote an article “CIA Aided Program To Spy on U.S. Phones” which was published by The Wall Street Journal on March 11th,2015. In it he explains the roles that the Central Intelligence Agency and the Justice department played in creating a

Barrett says the technology works by acting like a cell phone tower and tricking the phones to send information to the device. The device is carried by an airplane, and it scans data as it flies over land. After the device picks up on a cell phone, it can track that phone to within three yards of its actual location. The technology was supposed to be only intended to spy on terrorists overseas, but Barrett claims it’s also scanning the domestic cell phones used by innocent people.(Barrett) He reports the CIA and Justice Department began creating this new technology shortly after the terrorist attacks on September 11th, 2001. Since then he reports that over 100 million dollars have been spent on developing a way to attain information from cell phone users. This technology is used primarily in countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan, but “Civil-liberties groups say the technique amounts to a digital dragnet of innocent American’s

Much of what they release is classified U.S. military documents.(Hjelmgaard) This raises many questions, one being should citizens have the right to know what our government is doing. The government is supposed to be working for us yet we know just a small fraction of what is going on many times. Clearly our government doesn’t think we should know what they are doing since he is said to face charges of espionage if he ever came back to the U.S. The last two years he spent in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London since it was a diplomatic safe harbor for him.