Week 8 Blogged Critique: Bamford, Snowden, and the NSA

After the events of September 11, the response most people had was the hate for it to happen again. Work is being done to keep terrorist attacks like that of September 11, and others such like it, from happening again, but when is this work and attempts to prevent its re occurrence too much? James Bamford, in his article “They Know Much More Than You Think,” offers an example of how the US government if perhaps trying too hard to “protect” the American people. 

Bamford’s article starts off by introducing Edward Snowden who earlier this year shed light on the government agency known as the NSA or National Security Agency, and its programs like PRISM and UPSTREAM, releasing classified federal documents which were then published in the UK’s newspaper The Guardian. The NSA had not been a secret agency and described itself as an effort to keep surveillance on the information running in, out, and throughout the United States to look for any terrorist activity. Now though, after the incident with Snowden most description of the NSA are those such as “violation of privacy,” “government interception,” “illegal,” “untruthful,” and to some extent parallel to George Orwell’s ideas of “Big Brother,” and “telescreens.”

In his article, Bamford quotes from the famous book 1984, “The telescreens have hidden microphones and cameras. These devices, alongside informers, permit the Thought Police to spy upon everyone…” At one point the thought of having a world like the one Orwell writes about seemed simply scary and a warning of what we didn’t want. I don’t think it was ever meant to be a description of what was exactly going to happen. As from what Bamford writes, and through the records that Edward Snowden released about the NSA, thought, we can see that it is exactly what it happening. By partnering with “supposed” companies such as AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, Google, Yahoo the NSA has gathered the “microphones and cameras” it needs to keep track of just about everyone in the country. And as Senator Frank Church said in 1975, the US now does have the means to become “a tyranny” and it is up to us, the American public to “see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over the abyss.”

The question is though, does the NSA have a place in our lives? When we experience attacks like that of 9/11, we want the government to protect us through whatever means possible, but at the same time, we don’t. Are we not willing to give up our privacy in exchange for security? In the about page, on the NSA website,nsa.gov, they explain how they use different types of technologies to “gain a decision advantage for the Nation and our allies under all circumstances.” After identifying himself as the “whistleblower” as The Guardian saying “I'm willing to sacrifice all of that because I can't in good conscience allow the US government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they're secretly building."  If collecting phone records and e-mail addresses, and building “this massive surveillance machine” means the government is doing whatever it can to protect the American for “any circumstance” is it a justifiable institution?