The NSA, PRISM, and FISA
In the past few months, many secrets surrounding the NSA have been revealed. Former NSA employee Edward Snowden uploaded several classified government documents, including a court order to Verizon and a PowerPoint presentation about PRISM, that revealed that the NSA, through a program called PRISM, was collecting enormous amounts of personal data on millions of people around the world. This revelation has angered even the U.S.’s most stalwart allies and forced many Americans to rethink their ideas about the government. The question on many Americans’ minds was, “Has the government finally gone too far?” Some Americans say that the U.S. needs intelligence programs like PRISM in order to prevent domestic acts of terror, however; the benefits of PRISM are far outweighed by the costs to people’s basic civil rights.
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The
NSA violated several cornerstones of the United States constitution, but it was
the Fourth Amendment that was most grievously breached. “The right of the
people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable
searches and seizures,” is the exact wording used in the Fourth amendment, and PRISM
shattered those words to bits. The explanation for why PRISM is legal boils
down to the legal manipulation of the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act.
FISA’s intended purpose was
to oversee American intelligence gathering agencies, and, to this end, FISA
created the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court, or FISC. FISA states that the
Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence may authorize the unwarranted
targeting of persons reasonably believed to be located outside the United
States, provided that they can prove that intelligence
vital to national security may be lost if time is spent waiting for a
warrant. This allows agencies like the NSA to sidestep the Fourth Amendment
entirely. The slideshow on the left
is from a presentation by General Alexander. In the slides, Alexander addresses
and tries to alleviate fears of illegal NSA spying. FISA even has the added benefit of prohibiting
the release of information gathered under FISA, so the public will never know
what kind snooping their government is doing behind their backs.
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For some American citizens, there still exists the mentality that private information on the internet is still private. These people do not realize the extent to which the NSA can monitor your private data. Actually, it has been shown that the NSA has collected information on phone calls, e-mails, social network communications, online chats, VoIP communications, and even internet search data. The picture to the left shows the different types of metadata that is collected by PRISM and from what sources that data is gathered. One widespread myth is that encrypted content is protected from prying eyes, but as it turns out, in many cases the companies that created the encryptions were forced, under threat of contempt of court, to hand over the encryption keys, or, if the company refused, NSA computers could simply break the encryption through force. Despite passages in FISA only allowing the gathering of data from individuals reasonably believed to be in a foreign country it has recently been own that intelligence analysts are permitted to collect data that has only 51% confidence of coming from foreign country. This is a much lower confidence than most people would consider reasonable, and, in addition, FISA’s wording allows for U.S. citizens outside the U.S. to be monitored. Another startling revelation is that the NSA will target an individual if they are within three hops of a suspected terrorist. This means that if you are within three cyber degrees from a terrorist suspect, then the NSA can examine your Facebook page, search history, phone records, e-mails, and almost anything else you may do online. With these facts in mind, it seems very unlikely that you have never had personal data unknowingly accessed by the NSA.
With this in mind, I find it impossible to believe that PRISM is at all justified. There are some who argue that PRISM has prevented innumerable deaths and an untold number of terrorist attacks. In fact, the exact number of terrorist attacks claimed to have been prevented by PRISM’s actions is 54. Seems like a decent amount; 54 may even be enough to justify PRISM’s loose-handedness with the Constitution. This would justify PRISM’s existence, but, as it turns out, the NSA doesn’t say PRISM prevented 54 acts of terror: they say there were 54 occasions in which intelligence gathered by PRISM has contributed to the [U.S. government’s] understanding of terrorism activities and, in many cases, has enabled the disruption of potential terrorist events at home and abroad. A vastly different claim than the program thwarting 54 attacks. Even worse, only 12 of those 54 claimed occasions involved the material support of terrorism; the rest were merely plots. Only 12 attacks directly prevented, while spending 20 million dollars a year. So, now we arrive at the conclusion of PRISM not only violating our privacy, but doing so without getting results and spending a huge amount of money.
America is a country founded on the ideal that governments need be accountable to their citizens. Our Founding Fathers believed that a government’s main purpose is to protect and defend its citizen’s individual rights. In this way, our government has failed us, and we the people of the United States need to hold it responsible. We need to pursue those responsible for this injustice and work to avert future incursions. Most importantly, Congress must amend FISA and the PATRIOT ACT to better protect Americans’ civil rights: the NSA should be more than 51% confident that the data is coming from a foreign source. This would at least ensure that Americans are less likely to be subjected to unlawful search-and-seizures. In addition, Congress needs to write new laws barring the government from forcing companies to hand over private encryption keys in all but the most extreme cases. Second, FISC should release information about collected data, provided that data will not immediately endanger national security. Releasing this information would allow outside parties to determine whether or not the programs do indeed prevent terrorist attacks and may even redeem the NSA. Lastly, better encryption methods need to be developed; these new methods should be able to prevent the government from forcibly accessing encrypted data.
America is a country founded on the ideal that governments need be accountable to their citizens. Our Founding Fathers believed that a government’s main purpose is to protect and defend its citizen’s individual rights. In this way, our government has failed us, and we the people of the United States need to hold it responsible. We need to pursue those responsible for this injustice and work to avert future incursions. Most importantly, Congress must amend FISA and the PATRIOT ACT to better protect Americans’ civil rights: the NSA should be more than 51% confident that the data is coming from a foreign source. This would at least ensure that Americans are less likely to be subjected to unlawful search-and-seizures. In addition, Congress needs to write new laws barring the government from forcing companies to hand over private encryption keys in all but the most extreme cases. Second, FISC should release information about collected data, provided that data will not immediately endanger national security. Releasing this information would allow outside parties to determine whether or not the programs do indeed prevent terrorist attacks and may even redeem the NSA. Lastly, better encryption methods need to be developed; these new methods should be able to prevent the government from forcibly accessing encrypted data.