Essay: Issue of surveillance of the general public

There truly are cameras everywhere.  From the new phone cameras that scan your facial features to the security cams that reside in many public places, surveillance of the general public is taking place 24/7.  Much of this monitoring is benign, such as security tapes that are not looked at unless something goes wrong, laptop cameras that only take in your face when skyping or recording something, even the cameras in our phones.  But cameras are not the only way of monitoring people on a national level. Practices such as wiretapping used to be more widespread, but with new technologies emerging more rapidly than ever, it is growing easier and easier for extensive agencies such as our government to have surveillance on large portions of the population at a time, with or without the public’s knowledge.  Many citizens are not aware of this observation, making this an invasion into their daily lives.  The many types of government surveillance used to observe the people of America daily are an intrusion to privacy and hurt the relationship between the government and its citizens.
The debate on whether the governments of countries have the right to surveille their citizens is a relatively new one.  This is due to the fact that the technology needed for these government agencies to have the methods of supervision necessary for this practice to be considered surveillance is fairly new, relatively speaking.  The watching of people through cameras has only been around for as long as camera usage was widespread, and the same goes for practices such as wiretapping, for which you need both a wireless/ semi wireless microphone and a phone into which the person being watched can speak into.  Due to this, wiretapping has not been able to occur for very long, as is the case with much of the practices that are now thought of as surveillance today.  Before cameras and phones were widely used and accessible there was surveillance occurring, but this was much more difficult to carry out without the technologies we possess today.
Since technology has been able to support this widespread supervision of the populace, it has been debated upon.  Before the 9/11 attack, the U.S. was on its way to formulating stronger privacy laws to protect its citizens, but after this event the tables turned.  With the passage of the USA Patriot Act shortly after 9/11 came regressions in the laws protecting US citizens. The “wiretapping and intelligence provisions in the ironically named Patriot Act are disturbing… for the two themes they sound; they minimise the role of courts in insuring… wiretapping is conducted legally…, and they permit use of intelligence investigative authority to bypass normal criminal procedures that protect privacy” (Steinhardt 1).  This was one of the first signs that privacy in the U.S. was quickly depleting, as “most of the changes appl[ied] not just to the surveillance of terrorists, but instead to all surveillance in the [U.S.]” (Steinhardt 2).
Many American citizens were not aware of this heightened scrutiny over their actions, however, and were not pleased to hear about it.  In fact, when Edward Snowden leaked information about U.S. Government surveillance programs in 2013, “the disclosure of the programs caused public consternation, since the surveillance was not limited to suspected terrorists or to individuals on the watch list” (Issues and Controversies 2).  This caused a spike in mistrust of the United States government, as they had been both withholding information from their citizens and taking information from them.  The government was, and still is, using a surveillance program named PRISM to gain this information.  PRISM was introduced in 2007, and “through PRISM, the NSA monitor and collect internet communications from the internet service providers using Data Intercept Technology” (Netivist 2).
But once this information is gained, what happens to it?  The answer to this question can only be in regards to those documents and information that has been declassified, as classified information on any subject, but in this case pertaining to intelligence over the community is not able to be viewed by the public.  One place that these documents and other information can be viewed is the Digital National Security Archive.  This archive “includes 50 curated collections of declassified documents relating to U.S. foreign policy, human rights, nuclear history, domestic surveillance, and the intelligence community itself dating back to the Truman administration” (Golderman 1).  This is one of the large databases where declassified information about this topic can be found, along with U.S. Declassified Documents Online, which is a database courtesy of Gale.  This collection includes “once secret presidential documents” (Golderman 1) that date back to 1900.  While these places are wells of information from the public, to the public, about the public, it is logical that citizens still are not pleased with the enlightenment on their position of being under scrutiny by the government at any time.
Since there are declassified documents about examination by leadership from the early nineteen hundreds, it only makes sense that the U.S government and subsequent agencies have been watching other entities since this time. Even these early surveillance programs and ideas are attached to today’s, as the “current domestic surveillance programs are rooted in the nation’s early 20th-century efforts to spy on foreign powers” (Issues & Controversies 3).  Indeed, America’s first intelligence efforts were not to watch their own people, but those of other countries.  Appearing in the early 1920s was a group of code-breakers from the army called the Black Chamber.  This group was instrumental in monitoring international telegrams that were originally sent by the United States; tracking them persay.  While this group was shut down in 1929 by Henry L. Stimson, they are considered a precursor to the National Security Agency (NSA) of today, who is in charge of many, if not all of the 21st-century government surveillance programs in America.
A time in history where international intelligence proved advantageous was in World War Ⅱ.  During this time decoding of telegrams and other intelligence methods were used by the U.S and its allies to determine the next moves of opposing powers.   For this purpose, President Franklin D. Roosevelt created a new government agency called the Office of Strategic Services (OSS).  During this time period, the OSS gathered information critical to winning the war, until it was dissolved after World War Ⅱ had ended by President Harry Truman (Issues & Controversies).
9/11 was the next event that caused a serious change in privacy laws.  In the 1990s, and up until this point in time the U.S. had been slowly introducing laws that protected citizen privacies.  After this monumental attack, however, the government decided against this and “in October 2001, Congress passed the USA Patriots Act… the law greatly expanded the government’s domestic surveillance powers” (Issues & Controversies 5).  Not much has changed significantly in the way of legislation on this issue since then, but the public opinion was tremendously altered in 2013 when Edward Snowden released a report on the surveillance techniques used in the U.S.
As aforementioned, the NSA (National Security Agency) is one of the largest components in the surveillance and intelligence community in the U.S.  The NSA is a government organization that “performs two principal missions: signals intelligence (SIGINT) and information security (INFOSEC)” (Richelson 1) and was created in 1952 by the National Security Council (Richelson 1).  These two missions consist of many tasks, for example “the NSA’s signals intelligence mission involves the interception, processing, and analysis of foreign communications and electronic signals” (Richelson 1).  Much of this mission relies on the equipment from the military to intercept these types of signals and gather and process this information properly. Due to the large number of tasks they carry out, the NSA boasts a staff of between 20,000-24,000 employees, with the headquarters of the organization located in Maryland.  Additionally, an extra 30,000 “employees” operate the SIGINT units in the military. There are also those employees in the government agencies whose codes and communications they review, such as the State and Defense departments, and the CIA and FBI.  This government agency has been quite controversial as of late due to the practices that it has been tasked with.
One of these controversial measures is that of wiretapping.  Wiretapping is “the secret tapping of a telephone line in order to eavesdrop on another person” (Grazia 1).  While this is the dictionary definition, the term has recently been expanded, and now is referred to in lieu of many other surveillance practices.  Wiretapping is now used when monitoring not only phones, but computers and other electronic devices as well.  This form of supervision is “used by law-enforcement officers, who find it a valuable way of accumulating evidence or anticipating criminal activity” Grazia 1).  Despite this, wiretapping has been regarded as a type of unreasonable search, which is prohibited by the 4th Constitutional amendment.  Due to this breach, the practice has been deemed illegal by Congress.  Despite the illegality of this, it has been found that out of 12,661 wiretapping requests by the government from 1991-2005, only three of them were denied.  For an illegal practice, that is a lot of practicing.  The number of wiretap requests did soar with the 9/11 terrorist attack, and the amount of requests per year are now significantly fewer than they were at this time.
America is generally behind when it comes to privacy laws of a country’s citizens on a global scale.  It has been found that “by the end of the 1990s, most industrialized countries aside from the U.S. had strong privacy laws on their books, often overseen by powerful privacy commissioners” (Steinhardt 1).  This alone shows that America is not up to par with the rest of the world when it comes to this issue.  This dichotomy widened further after 9/11, as the rest of the world progressed and privacy laws became stronger and more concrete, the U.S. took a step back to evaluate whether privacy was a value that its citizens needed, or if it was more important to find and weed out potential terrorists and other enemies to the government.  Even though it was released in 2013 that the UK government had spied on its citizens through the Communication Headquarters in the government, America is still quite behind when it comes to citizen privacy compared to the rest of the modernized world.
The citizens of America generally disagree with the idea of their government spying on them, to no surprise.  In fact, “sixty-three percent of Americans say they are very or somewhat dissatisfied with the government’s surveillance of U.S. citizens” (Knickerbocker 2).  Despite this, in a survey done during Obama’s presidency it was found that about 42 percent of Americans rated government surveillance of civilians as priority for the president when compared with other wants.  Though this is a fairly widespread concern, the controversy is one between political party lines, as so many differences are.  Generally speaking, the Democratic Party is against the idea of a broad government surveillance program, as are many liberal citizens.  The Republican Party, on the other hand, “has experienced a rift between a longtime contingent that favors granting the government broad powers in the name of national security and a newer faction, influenced by the Tea Party movement, that is more distrustful of expansive government power” (Issues & Controversies 11).  This is one of the major issues that has caused a long-standing rift in the Republican Party, and could eventually lead to a complete party split.
While more and more citizens are leaning away from the surveillance of their government, the country is always more united after a scandal.  This was the case in 2006, when news reports had “alleged that the NSA had also created a database of purely domestic long-distance calls” (Richelson 3).  Views on this topic are constantly changing due to new news coming out or a scandal occurring such as this case, but the general consensus over the last few years is that civilians would like stronger privacy laws enacted, and dislike being spied on by these government agencies.
The intelligence community in the United States has seen some fairly major changes in legislation on surveillance.  The first Supreme Court case involving wiretapping was Olmstead v. United States in which it was held “that police wiretapping was not a violation of the 4th Amendment” (Grazia 1).  This ruling did not stand for long, however, when Congress outlawed the practice of wiretapping in 1934 in the Communications Act of 1934, and has mostly been considered illegal since this point.  Security laws in general increased in number during the 1990s, but much of those clauses were changed in the USA Patriot Act that was passed in October of 2001 in response to the 9/11 attacks.  This act was passed to beat down terrorism and keep the country safe, but many were unhappy when they realized that the clauses listed in the act were not limited to suspected terrorists, but  to everyone in the general population.
Despite the great controversy on this issue, there is a very large case made against government surveillance actions.  As aforementioned, there are many people who feel as if these government actions violate their Constitutional rights, such as those in the Fourth Amendment protecting them from unreasonable search and seizure; this is especially a concern considering the USA Patriot “act’s ‘sneak and peek’ provision permitted government agents to install a device in a suspect’s computer that captures every keystroke” (Grazia 2).  Because of this provision, anyone who is considered a suspect could have this in their computer, and even if people on a large scale do not have a device in their computer, there are certainly other ways for government agents to get access to that information.  One of the biggest arguments in relation to the Fourth Amendment is one that “argued that the collection of data can render actual content unnecessary by providing agents with a sufficiently specific portrait of someone’s behavior to determine whether they may pose a threat” (Issues & Controversies 2).  In effect, this means that with mass data collection occurring, the data collected from a person’s phone or computer could give a wide enough profile of them to potentially mark a person as a threat.  By many citizens’ standards, this is enough to be called search without use of a search warrant, which is illegal on all standings.
Residents of the United States also make the argument that they do not know what is happening with the information they are unwittingly providing to the government.  This information is naturally not disclosed to the greater population, so for the people there is always the threat that “the information collected by mass internet surveillance programs could be used for other purposes” (Netivist 3).  Inhabitants could have their information sold to companies, or compiled in a file, but people do not know what happens to it, and that contributes to the fear surrounding this topic.  This has also been contested by businesses and even corporations, who are afraid of the government’s abilities because “the U.S. government’s ability to decode encrypted internet messages has been contested by financial and business entities, who fear loss of confidential information” (Dickson 3).  They are afraid that this information could be decoded and possibly sold or used against them, and do not want the government to have that type and amount of control over them.
Monetary expenses are a huge argument against the surveillance of the inhabitants of the United States as well.  Recently it has been figured that “the NSA budget, which is officially secret, was estimated at $10 billion a year in the 2000s” (Richelson 2).  This is money that taxpayers are contributing to, and for many who do not agree with these practices, this money would be much better spent in an area such as education, from which money has been cut year after year.  To many it seems unfair that their money is being used to spy on them in a way that they do not endorse.
There is also an argument that the government has the responsibility to protect that country’s citizens’  privacies.  In a world where much of people’s time is spent online, “the broad nature of the pro-privacy coalitions underscores the fact that in the U.S., as elsewhere, privacy is a fundamental value that, like national security, governments have a responsibility to protect.” (Steinhardt 3).  Everyone wants their privacy to be respected, and what is more private than a person’s laptop or phone? Many people store almost everything on these two devices, and a government eye in one of them could provide people with quite a bit of information very quickly.  If the government databases were ever to be hacked, that information could fall into the wrong hands very quickly.
There are certain members of the U.S., however, that are for government surveillance.  One major argument is that of security.  When doing polls on citizens’ opinions on this issue, it was discovered that “many people do express a wary willingness to give up some privacy to gain security” (Steinhardt 3).  There are people who find security and privacy to be a careful balance, and are willing to give up a little bit of each to gain the other.  While this is understandable, giving up too much of one’s privacy can tip the scale entirely, and both privacy and security can be jeopardized.  Despite this, in small amounts it could be beneficial that the “government develops a know-how that could be very important in future security” (Netivist 3).  It certainly could be useful to have that information stored in a government database somewhere, but then again the issue with who has access to this information comes into play.
The other part of the argument is that this spying is crucial in protecting the country from terrorists.  The case is made that “imposing further restrictions on domestic surveillance is a mistake that could cost lives” (Issues & Controversies 1).