NSA warrantless surveillance controversy
Introduction
The NSA warrantless surveillance controversy concerns with the surveillance of people within the United States. It all started while the collection of allegedly foreign intelligence by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) was going on as part of the war on terror. The National Security Agency is one of America's largest intelligence organizations. It is similar to the FBI and CIA. It specializes in codebreaking and code making, and provides secret and private information to US political and military leaders.
There are two broad “missions” outlined on NSA’s website. The first one i.e. "Information Assurance" mission aims at keeping sticky beaks out of America's business, while the second one which is "Signals Intelligence" mission collects and processes information for "intelligence and counterintelligence" purposes.
The agency describes its vision as "Global Cryptologic Dominance through Responsive Presence and Network Advantage". (Clench 2013)
The program is referred by the Bush administration as the terrorist surveillance program which is a subprogram of the more extensive President’s Surveillance Program. Under this program, the NSA was authorized by executive order to surveil, without any search warrants, the phone calls, Internet activity (browsing, e-mail, chats, etc.), text messages, …show more content…
Think of metadata as the index to all the content the NSA can sweep up. (Buren 2014) So, if NSA collects all the phone data, then metadata for that data would be the incoming and outgoing numbers, call durations, call locations etc. Suppose, the agency is able to record all the calls of a particular network, say AT&T, then NSA can very easily locate any specific call from that huge chunk of metadata. Moreover, they can easily track the physical movement of a particular person. Not only are they going through the call or email records but they are going for the medical records as
Introduction
The NSA warrantless surveillance controversy concerns with the surveillance of people within the United States. It all started while the collection of allegedly foreign intelligence by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) was going on as part of the war on terror. The National Security Agency is one of America's largest intelligence organizations. It is similar to the FBI and CIA. It specializes in codebreaking and code making, and provides secret and private information to US political and military leaders.
There are two broad “missions” outlined on NSA’s website. The first one i.e. "Information Assurance" mission aims at keeping sticky beaks out of America's business, while the second one which is "Signals Intelligence" mission collects and processes information for "intelligence and counterintelligence" purposes.
The agency describes its vision as "Global Cryptologic Dominance through Responsive Presence and Network Advantage". (Clench 2013)
The program is referred by the Bush administration as the terrorist surveillance program which is a subprogram of the more extensive President’s Surveillance Program. Under this program, the NSA was authorized by executive order to surveil, without any search warrants, the phone calls, Internet activity (browsing, e-mail, chats, etc.), text messages, …show more content…
Think of metadata as the index to all the content the NSA can sweep up. (Buren 2014) So, if NSA collects all the phone data, then metadata for that data would be the incoming and outgoing numbers, call durations, call locations etc. Suppose, the agency is able to record all the calls of a particular network, say AT&T, then NSA can very easily locate any specific call from that huge chunk of metadata. Moreover, they can easily track the physical movement of a particular person. Not only are they going through the call or email records but they are going for the medical records as