Have you ever had a person in a trench coat secretly follow you everywhere you go, listening to every conversation you’ve ever had, peeking over your shoulder every time you look at your phone, while staring at you the whole time, unblinking? If so, then you have some more critical things to do than read this blog post. If not, then you’re probably thinking something along the lines of,
"No way. That’s a gross invasion of my privacy. This is the whole reason I moved out of my parents’ house. Why would someone need to know which fungal cream my cat uses?”
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David Farley (2006) [Cartoon], Retrieved from https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/06/cartoon_nsa_sur.html |
It is so easy to think that passwords, firewall, and privacy settings on Facebook are doing the job to keep your life from the eyes and ears of others. However, there are a couple of events in the past few years that have led civilians in the United States and even countries across the pond to question their sense of security.
One of them was the NSA scandal involving former CIA contractor Edward Snowden in 2013. Snowden had revealed that the US National Security Agency (NSA) was collecting “metadata” from cellphone users which included call location data, time, duration, and identification of both callers.[1]
Initially, the reason this news was so unsettling was because no one outside of select CIA knew that at any time they could have been watched by their own government. Some felt vulnerable, and wary of infringement on their legal rights.
There is no escape for the average American from the range of the government’s ears, and the privacy laws in the States don’t seem to offer much help in protecting privacy, considering the NSA broke US privacy rules 2,776 times from 2011 to 2012.[2] This revelation really likens the activity of the NSA to “Big Brother” considering Orwell’s Oceania did not have laws in place to ensure its citizens’ communications privacy, let alone let them go anywhere without being spied on.
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| Beeler (2013) [Cartoon], Retrieved
from http://asheepnomore.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/261.jpg |
A common theme found in the most unsettling surveillance tactics executed by the U.S. government is the lack of disclosure. Sure there are reasons to believe that counterterrorism efforts are maximized by keeping this information from the public. In this way, our government is not like “Big Brother” because at least “Big Brother” had the decency to tell their people that privacy would no longer have meaning in their lives.
Bibliography
In text:
[1] Greenwald, G. (2013,
June 6). NSA collecting phone records of millions of Verizon customers
daily. Retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-records-verizon-court-order
[2] Gellman, B.
(2013, August 15). NSA broke privacy rules thousands of times per year, audit
finds.
[3] Kelion, L. (2013,
June 25). Q&A: NSA's Prism internet surveillance scheme.
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