Blog Post 4: The NSA Controversy

John Borg

Glenn Greenwald’s book, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State, examines the NSA controversy of 2013. The National Security Agency is a public government agency that is charged with collecting and analyzing information from foreign governments for counterintelligence purposes. While under the oversight of four-star general, Keith Alexander, the NSA experienced a period of broad and extreme power expansion; with a motto of “collect it all,” Alexander quickly became “the most powerful intelligence chief in the nation’s history,” pushing the agency to collect and process over 20 billion communication events from around the world each day. However, it did not take long before the NSA strayed away from foreign governments and began collecting information from average citizens throughout the globe; by 2012, the NSA had amassed roughly 20 trillion samples of electronic interactions between United States citizens alone. In response, Eric Snowden, a Booz Allen Hamilton employee contracted with the NSA, released thousands of classified documents that revealed the true extent of the agency’s actions. According to Greenwald, the Snowden files highlight the American government’s ultimate goal of removing electronic privacy of any form.

In the year and a half since the controversy caused an international firestorm, the most significant debate has, of course, focused on the government’s blatant disregard for civil liberties. Obviously, as citizens of the United States, we expect the government to adhere to the certain inalienable rights that we are legally given, which includes privacy. No one is truly exempt from these desires; in an effort to avoid an Orwellian society, we tend to emphasize personal freedoms over political manipulation. I will admit, as a student majoring in journalism, I have separate, and relatively off-topic, issues with Eric Snowden and the whistleblower debate in general. Yet his actions have undeniably sparked a productive and necessary discussion in this country about the extent to which a government can go in order to “protect” the citizens it represents.

My take on the situation is rather two-sided. It’s clear that the American government greatly exceeded its legal rights in order to obtain much of the information it did, something most individuals, myself included, find rather distressing. However, many of these measures were the result of the post-9/11 consolidation of power within the government. During this time, the American people gave, and allowed, much authority to the federal government; its no secret that the country experienced a striking “rally around the flag” phenomenon following the tragedy, which would have allowed the government to take very broad measures and still receive widespread public support. Furthermore, our country’s decision makers were facing a threat that had yet to be encountered by any other society throughout history. With little precedent to go on, the government resorted to the extreme, yet controversial, tactics we’ve become familiar with, from this controversy to the recent CIA torture strategy highlighted in the Senate report.

While I am very disturbed by the actions of the government, I cannot say I am all that surprised by it. We all knew after that, after the events of 9/11, the country would enter a period of intense government oversight. Let’s face it: we all knew it was happening; the extent of which our freedoms were being violated were not fully clear, but with laws such as the PATRIOT Act, the American population knew our rights were being compromised in some capacity. I guess I find the outrage over the NSA controversy not entirely convincing because we basically asked for it to happen. Americans offered broad support to government initiatives in the wake of the attack and did not provide enough opposition to ignite change as rumors of governmental travesties began to circulate. In some capacity, citizens were aware of the government’s actions and, until someone did something about, it was relatively a non-issue. The NSA’s actions are shameful, but the fact that it takes an international controversy, over something that should have never gone to the extent that it did, to bring about an intense fervor in the American population is, perhaps, even more so.