The Pros And Cons Of The National Security Agency

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In the wake of the attacks on the twin towers, our government’s main focuses at the time shifted to the new problem of terrorism towards the United States. In order to have access to the information needed to catch terrorism in its earliest stages; congress passed The Patriot Act, an act that allowed government agencies to surveillance American citizen’s information through payments, phone records, internet records, etc. Without the consent of The Patriot Act, actions such as these by government agencies would violate numerous civil rights. One agency that was assigned to monitor American citizens for suspicious, terrorism-guided activity was the National Security Agency. With the vast power given to the organization, the NSA started developing programs that put innocent Americans into systems created to track certain persons connected to terrorist-attributed activity. This is a problem, because The Patriot Act’s wording of, “terrorism”, is so bland that, if needed, authorities could access search warrants and make arrests under The Patriot Act by stating that the person was committing domestic terrorism. The National Security Agency has, in the last decade, abused the power that has been given to them via The Patriot, and as a result to their actions, the NSA should hold limited privileges until the agency has proven themselves trustworthy to the people they are supposedly protecting.
Forty-five days after the events of September 11th, a nationalistic act, called The Patriot act, passed through congress. The main objective for the act, at the time, was to access call logs, addresses, and financial information regarding assumed terrorists. The conflict starts revealing itself in the technique of wording used in the act. From the method of explanation in the act, one would assume that government organizations can target American citizens for the reasoning of domestic terrorism. This would make it possible for the FBI to track an American citizen down for any crime committed, ranging from a misdemeanor, to federal crimes, in the United States based on financial, internet, or any other reasonable suspicion. The individual, who wrote the act, has even publicly expressed his disapproval of his own vocabulary in the act, stating, “As the author of the Patriot Act, I am extremely disturbed by what appears to be an overbroad interpretation of the act”. Due to the act’s involvement with terrorism, the contents of the act include strict Sections, such as Section 21 of the act, allowing the investigators of the person being under surveillance to seize any tangible things related to the case, foreign or not. This one of numerous reasons why there is such demand by the American public to repeal the act before in becomes uncontrollable.
Upon hiring Edward Snowden as a security guard, the National Security Agency had no indication that the bright employee would have the aspirations of revealing one of the nation’s best kept secrets. This secret, of course, would be the dishonest works the agency has taken part in over the course of a few decades. After discovering Snowden’s particularly advanced skills in computer programing and hacking, the agency promoted Snowden to an information technician position in the CIA, under supervisor Booz Allen. While working for the CIA, Snowden accumulated a yearly salary close to two-hundred-thousand dollar a year. Snowden would later risk the luxuries of being a highly paid government employee, after seeing an alarming trend American citizen’s first amendment rights being infringed upon. Shortly after coming to this realization, Snowden started saving classified NSA files to storage devices, such as flash drives, until the time was right to reveal them. Prior to revealing the classified documents in their entirety, Snowden told his supervisor he needed to take a leave of absence for epilepsy treatment. With the time taken off work, Snowden leaked classified NSA documents that
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