Government Surveillance

Oakley Hill

P.8 AP Lang

12/20/18

“At what point is government surveillance not about safety anymore, and just becomes crossing personal boundaries?”

Government surveillance; safety or sneaky? The NSA seems unfit to handle the responsibility of surveillance of U.S. citizens personal online accounts and/or devices. In this particular article, the NSA was gathering and searching “through Americans’ international emails, internet calls, and chats without obtaining a warrant.” They were using multiple common online communication portals, such as Facebook, Google, Apple, and Skype. The government says that the program the NSA is using to do all this “surveillance”, called PRISM, is only focused on the foreigner’s part, but are still infiltrating private conversations. That is what makes this particular article so important: the fact that the government admitted to spying.

Technology today, with the many advances and upgrades that are available to us, it seems almost as though we making ourselves more available, and less protected on the internet. Practically everything we do is able to be replayed, used against us, or even used to locate us. A positive spin on the situation is it can be used for safety, as a sort of GPS for school campuses or if walking alone when it is dark. So surveillance can be a good thing, but in order for the searching to be ethical, I think a warrant, or at least ample evidence or reason behind your business in other people’s business is imperative to maintain trust and order.

This is a worldwide issue. In 2015, the privacy of Peru’s vice-president, along with several congressmen, was violated when it surfaced that Peruvian Prime Minister, Ana Jara, has allegedly been spying on them for political reasons. When news of the scandal broke, instead of appeasing the public and taking action to improve the issue, the the nation’s spy agency has been “pushed forward with a $22 million program to increase the government’s surveillance capabilities.”

My question regarding a government issue is ‘at what point is government surveillance not about safety anymore, and just becomes crossing personal boundaries?’ This issue is one that I don’t think has a concrete answer. Surveillance, when properly executed by professionals, is helpful as a tool to uncover any potential, legitimately potential, threats to the nation’s safety. Surveillance, when misused by power-crazy individuals, is crossing a boundary and violating the Fourth Amendment enormously. I suppose, the only currently available solution to this situation is having a warrant of some sort, a valid reason to invade privacy. Perhaps in the future there will be some monumental new invention that will rid the world of this problem.

DMU Timestamp: December 19, 2018 18:14