For the last 15 years, the U.S. has been building the world’s largest spying apparatus, spanning hundreds of data centers across the globe; collecting trillions of phone call records, text messages, emails, as well as web and Google searches; and consciously neglecting U.S. citizens’ basic privacies and constitutional rights—a problem that defies what the United States stands for and needs to be confronted immediately.
Even if you're not doing anything wrong, you're being watched and recorded. And the storage capability of these systems increases every year—consistently by orders of magnitude … it's getting to the point where you don't have to have done anything wrong. You simply have to eventually fall under suspicion from somebody—even by a wrong call. And then they can use the system to go back in time and scrutinize every decision you've ever made, every friend you've ever discussed something with, and attack you on that basis, to sort of derive suspicion from an innocent life and paint anyone in the context of a wrong-doer (Williams).
This was proclaimed by a former CIA and NSA employee “whistleblower” who achieved international notoriety in 2013 after leaking thousands of top-secret government documents—sending classified files to the world’s newspapers and starring in a major motion film on these public companies’ spying of millions of American citizens. His name is Edward Snowden.
This massive digital spying network sprouted up after September 11, 2001. In the wake of these lamentable 9/11 tragedies, President George W. Bush and both sides of Congress rushed to pass legislation that strengthened national security and gave the government full freedom to find and extinguish terrorist threats (Greenwald 3). They came up with the “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001” (i.e. USA PATRIOT Act).
The bill, being renewed every four years since its inception, is interpreted by the FBI and NSA to allow these government organizations to search telephone, e-mail, and financial records without a court order—though its stated goal is counterterrorist intelligence (MacAskill). And until 2013, the NSA freely spied on hundreds of millions of Americans, with these people wholly unaware of its plethora of illegal activities. Due to its controversial nature, many bills have been proposed to amend it, but none passed—though federal courts have ruled that a number of provisions are unconstitutional (Dinan; MacAskill). Here is what Snowden had to say about the post-September 11th inception of the Patriot Act:
I remember the tension on that day. I remember hearing on the radio the planes hitting. I take the threat of terrorism seriously, and I think we all do … I think it’s really disingenuous for the government to invoke and sort of scandalize our memories to sort of exploit the national trauma that we all suffered together and worked so hard to come through … and justify programs that have never been shown to keep us safe but cost us liberties and freedoms that we don’t need to give up, and our Constitution says we should not give up (Williams).
Before Snowden’s leaks, there was virtually no data on the NSA’s secretive actions, no acknowledgment from corporations (i.e. the big telephone companies) that their customers’ phone calls were being tapped into, and no forced public appearances from political figureheads to confront the allegations.
First leaking a massive cache of U.S., Australian, British, and Canadian federal documents in June of 2013, Snowden spent the rest of the year leaking classified global and national surveillance information. These documents revealed all of the stats and data behind the NSA’s massive conglomeration of data on virtually every private citizen in this country, loaded with phone call records, recorded emails and text messages, and internet searches (Greenwald 52). This means you, your family, your friends, your coworkers, and your acquaintances.
According to one document in Snowden’s cache, the agency’s Special Source Operations was said to be ingesting “one Library of Congress every 14.4 seconds” as early as 2006 (The Washington Post 77). Year by year after that, according to another document, NSA systems collected hundreds of millions of e-mail address books, hundreds of billions cellphone location records and trillions of domestic call logs (The Washington Post 79). Yet another one revealed this disturbing information:
The National Security Agency pays AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon and Sprint several hundred million dollars a year for access to 81% of all international phone calls into the US, according to a leaked inspector general’s report, which has been reported by the Washington Post, AP, and the New York Review of Books. In fact, this secret report says that “NSA maintains relationships with over 100 U.S. companies” (Lenzner).
Snowden’s leaks were so prevalent and well-spread that British paper “The Guardian,” one of the recipients and publishers of these leaks, was warned directly by Great Britain’s Prime Minister, David Cameron, not to publish any more information, or it will receive a “DA-notice”—to which The Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger responded “we have published I think 26 documents so far out of the 58,000 we’ve seen” (The Washington Post 21).
Through all of this journalistic chaos, Snowden secretly met in Hong Kong with documentary film director Laura Poitras and acclaimed journalist Glenn Greenwald to create a film that shouts out to the entire world what its governments have been doing—especially, but not limited to, the United States’ NSA.
While the U.S. government did its best job to suppress American media and downplay the online document leaks and deny any actions made, it could not stop the artistic expression of the major motion film—and outrage ensued for those who saw it. The documentary movie, which was named “Citizenfour” and went on to win “Best Documentary Feature” at the Academy Awards (also scoring a stunning 98% rating on Rotten Tomatoes), shed the first rays of light—concerning the probe and reach of the NSA’s illegal activities—to the general American public (Rotten Tomatoes).
The documentary consists of a series of interviews between Greenwald and Snowden, in which Snowden lays down everything the NSA has done and continues to do, how it gets away with it, and what it means for the people of the United States. He introduces the audience to the story with this:
I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded… that is not something I am willing to support or live under … Arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say (Ctiizenfour).
He then provides documentation that three billion phone calls made in the U.S. each day are snatched up by the agency, which stores each call’s metadata (phone numbers of the parties, date and time, length of call, etc.) for five years (Citizenfour). A lot of the documents concerning phone data were previously classified, but a secret court order in April of 2013 that required Verizon, one of the many large phone corporations that dealt records with the NSA, to “turn over ‘originating and terminating’ telephone numbers as well as the location, time and duration of the calls” was found and reached headlines everywhere—complimenting Snowden’s leaks (Lenzner). The Lenzner article verifies that the NSA worked with AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile in virtually identical circumstances; but the Verizon case is unique in this case because it hit the public even before Snowden’s storm.
“You can’t have 100% security and then 100% privacy,” United States President Barack Obama said in a TV appearance shortly after these findings—making sure to not acknowledge the specific accusations or criticize anything the NSA did (Obama). After this, U.S. Federal District Court Judge Richard J. Leon said that the NSA’s “secret phone-snooping program” violates Americans’ privacy rights, particularly the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution (Dinan). The Fourth Amendment states:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized (U.S. Constitution).
This violation exists because the NSA—despite its consistent pitching of what many people perceive as meaningless, chauvinistic counterterrorism platitudes—has no warrant or probable cause to go through hundreds of millions of innocent Americans’ personal lives (Dinan). Also, this was the first time that a judge ruled against the NSA, with Glenn Greenwald, main interviewer and journalist of “Citizenfour,” commenting that “transparency is for those who carry out public duties and exercise public power. Privacy is for everyone else.”
Since 2013, minimal public awareness (amongst the politically informed, intellectuals, and journalists) has facilitated tangible change, though the NSA is still far from legal in its ventures. On June 2, 2015, although the Patriot Act was renewed, “Section 215 of the law was amended to stop the National Security Agency from continuing its mass phone data collection program” (Dinan). The question remains whether or not the NSA will honor this, but pundits “applaud the acknowledgment of fault and sense of progress.”
Phone data aside, the NSA is still spying on U.S. citizens in 2016. Even though the NSA cannot and will not produce a single instance in which its surveillance and spying helped any counterterrorist plots, its “XKeyscore program scoops up some 40 billion Internet records every month and adds them to its digital store house, including our Gmails, Google searches, websites visited, Microsoft Word documents sent, etc.” (MacAskill). In light of this static—if not progressively expanding—issue, Snowden appeals to all by emphasizing that what happens in 2016 isn’t just about us; it’s about our future and its people.
A child born today will grow up with no conception of privacy at all. They’ll never know what it means to have a private moment to themselves, an unrecorded, unanalyzed thought. And that’s a problem because privacy matters. Privacy is what allows us to determine who we are and who we want to be (Williams).
As for the organization’s ethics, in the last decade, 12 NSA employees were caught abusing the spy network for their own personal love lives; not a single one of them was prosecuted (Perez). Another was caught tapping into ex-President Bill Clinton’s personal e-mail account, but yet again was not prosecuted (Perez). The discovery proves that not only does the NSA neglect our rights and spy on whomever it wants whenever it wants, but that the organization is entirely corrupt and will protect itself at all costs, even its employees who break the law with absolutely no justification from the nature of their jobs. To quote Snowden, “These programs were never about terrorism: they're about economic spying, social control, and diplomatic manipulation. They're about power” (Williams). The many ancillary stories like these—in addition to the thousands of informational leaks—provide for a population that is relatively skeptical of the NSA’s surveillance, but work of course still needs to be done.
Almost nine out of 10 people surveyed…have heard something about government surveillance. Fifty-six percent said they have heard “a little” about it and 31 percent have heard “a lot” … eighty-two percent of people think it’s acceptable “for the American government to monitor communications from individuals suspected of terrorist activities,” and only 40 percent think it’s acceptable for the government to monitor communications from American citizens. Fifty-seven percent think that’s unacceptable (Kleinman).
This 2015 PEW Research Center poll notes that most Americans are now aware—to at least a minimal extent—of what the NSA has been doing in the last decade and a half, but substantiates that little (31 percent) have heard a lot… a big concern considering the massive extent of the NSA’s actions. Moreover, the poll suggests that the majority (57 percent) of Americans think the government’s monitoring of communications from American citizens is unacceptable, proving that further awareness needs to be spread, but also that most Americans who are aware of this issue agree with Snowden’s stance.
We all have a stake in this. This is our country and the balance of power between the citizenry and the government is becoming that of the ruling and the ruled—as opposed to actually, you know, the elected and the electorate … yes, governments possess extraordinary powers. But at the end of the day, there are more of us than there are of them (Citizenfour).
In response to the above quote (one of the film’s closing points): we, as citizens of the United States of America, have ludicrous amounts of palpable, undeniable information which prove the NSA’s illegal activities; an obligation to protect one another’s rights, especially those of the Constitution; and, in order to truly solve these issues, an urgent need to spread awareness until every person in the country has an informed, nonpartisan awareness of what the NSA—and the rest of the government—are doing to us. Bush and Obama, as well as the bulk of their parties’ leaders, proved to only “escalate the NSA’s powers” (Greenwald 102). Now it’s time for us, the electorate, to unite and institute change.