Privacy is a Myth

Mario Rivas

Professor Rowley

English 1

9 June 2015

Privacy is a Myth

American citizen privacy is becoming more and more transparent due to government agencies illegally spying on U.S. citizens without their consent. Laura Poitras’ documentary CitizenFour offers actual footage of NSA IT Administrator and whistleblower Edward Snowden confirming the fact that the NSA uses wiretapping techniques to illegally spy on U.S. citizens. According to Snowden, major telecommunication carriers, like AT&T and Verizon, allow the NSA to intercept their customers phone calls and their internet communications. Because of these leaks detailing how the government spies on the U.S. using the NSA, citizens have concerns about whether or not their information is private or not anymore. Our smartphones have developed the capabilities to track all and record all of our data, whether it’s location data, or who we have recently contacted over the phone. Admittedly, these spying practices do not negatively affect the common citizen, but allowing the government to use the NSA to spy on American citizens gives the government access to too much power. Congress should declare these practices illegal and ban any spying conducted on U.S. citizens.

Contrary to popular belief, the Patriot Act does not allow any government agency to gather up records and intelligence on U.S citizens without reason. The Academy Award winning documentary film, CitizenFour, shows how NSA IT Administrator Edward Snowden, was successful on challenging the authority and power that the NSA currently has over mass surveillance. According to the film, on June 9, 2013, the press got a hold of what was the first of the Snowden leaks detailing the various methods that the NSA uses in order to gather intelligence and data on US citizens without the consent of the people. Throughout the film, Snowden reveals that the NSA is harvesting millions of e-mail contact lists, search engine results, tracking and mapping the locations of millions of people worldwide using cell phone data. These practices and with the government harvesting this much data gives the government too much power for them to control. The government should not have the power to invade people’s privacy without reason as it violates the peoples fourth amendment of unreasonable searches and seizures.

Cell phones, without a doubt, contain data on every part of our lives. With our cell phone, one can determine what kind of person we are, what we search for, where we have been, who we keep in contact with, and more. These devices are a portal to our personal lives, and leaves us vulnerable if it were ever in the wrong hands. The information in our cell phone is not private, and can be accessed by anyone in position of power so long as the person knows how to access the data. Michael Isikoff’s article, “The Snitch in Your Pocket” gives readers insight on what kind of information the government can access, apart from just location data tracking: “There are numerous of other fronts in the privacy wars - about the access to email content for instance, and access to bank records and credit card transactions” (Isikoff 3). All of this data, unfortunately, is now generally stored in a person’s cell phone thanks to numerous applications which store this type of sensitive information. Isikoff provides various scenarios in which a police officer who abused this power was able to obtain data on our cellphones without a consent of a warrant. In his article, Isikoff also notes that cell phones companies, such as Sprint, gave the government location data on its customers without a legitimate warrant being presented. The information   provided by Isikoff brings up a very important question: What can the government do with the data collected, and are we giving the U.S. government too much power over us?

Once the government has access to one’s data, it has unrestricted power of it. Of course, the ability for someone to care about this data collection ultimately depends on a person’s view of privacy, whether they care about it, and whether or not one is at risk if an NSA agent is actually spying on the person. Some people, would not be bothered by this data. People don’t see the problems with the government spying on people because it has no immediate negative effects on them. The danger comes later on when the government actually has the power to misuse the data collected. The New Yorker writer Mattathias Schwartz comments on this issue: “With the data collected innocent people are deprived of the ability to travel, pressured to become informants, and, in some cases, wrongfully detained without access to counsel” (par. 5). In other words because of the government’s power, people can be negatively affected in these ways without serious probable cause.

While it is true that data collection is not a threat to a common citizen, as stated above, the government still has untrammeled power over the data that it has collected. Emily Bazelon’s article “I Am Worried. You Should Be Too,” talks about how the mass surveillance techniques that the NSA uses to spy on American citizens can be harmful in the long run. Bazelone states that “the existence of these newly reported databases should be worrisome because once the information is collected, it is so much easier for the government to misuse it. The more data mining, the more it becomes routine and the more tempting to come up with more uses for it” (par. 6). In other words, once the government is in control of a person’s data, it can be used in a number of ways, and the government would also have the power to misuse the data. Bazelone also brings up the possibility of the government spying on its citizens using other methods that have been unheard of . Mattatias Schwartz confirms this possibility stating that “Section 215 [of the Patriot Act] has been used to obtain driver’s license records, hotel records and I.P Adresses” (Par. 4). The government is already using authoritarian ideas to spy on people. If the government feels that it’s already ok to illegally spy on its citizens, what’s stopping it from conducting other illegal practices that haven’t been leaked yet, and possibly never would? This is the possible threat that citizens should truly be worried about in the long run.

Citizen privacy has become very transparent because of the ability of cellphones to gather a bulk of information about our private lives. Because of the recent NSA leaks detailing how they collect mass surveillance data, citizens are growing more and more concerned over the fact that there is no true privacy in the United States. So far, the NSA has been stopped from the power to collect cellphone data in bulk. In his article “A huge victory on mass surveillance for Snowden, and its not over yet,” writer Ewen MacAskill states that more steps will be taken in order to ensure true privacy among U.S citizens. McAskill says, ”later this week Congress as a whole is expected to pass legislation – a USA Freedom Act – that will enshrine some of these changes, most importantly the end to the collection of the phone records of millions of Americans” (par. 2). The passing of this legislation would ensure that something like this never happens and that no agency is permitted to practice these spying methods. The passing of this legislation would be the beginning of what will hopefully be the end of illegally obtaining citizen data without the consent of a warrant and spell the start of what U.S. citizens would finally be able to call “true privacy.”Works Cited

Bazelon, Emily. “I Am Worried. You Should Be Too.” Slate. The Washington Post. 7 June 2013. Web. 2 June 2015.

Citizen Four. Dir. Laura Poitras. Perf. Edward Snowden, Glenn Greenwald. Radius-TWC, 2014. Film.

Gellman, Barton. “NSA tracking cellphone locations worldwide, Snowden documents show.” The Washington Post. The Washington Post. 4 December 2013. Web. 2 June 2015.

Isikoff, Michael. “The Snitch in Your Pocket.” Elements of Argument: A text and reader. Eds. Annette T. Rottenberg and Donna Hasty Winchell. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s. 2015. 130-133. Print.

McAskill, Ewen. “A huge victory on mass surveillance for Snowden - and it’s not over yet.” The Guardian. The Guardian. 1 June 2015. Web. 2 June 2015.

Schwartz, Mattahias. “Three Big Questions About the N.S.A.’s Patriot Act Powers.” The New Yorker. The New Yorker. 2 June 2015. Web. 2 June 2015.