National Security Agency: A Loss Of Privacy

Personal freedom is a right that we are fortunate to have today. It allows us the right to our own privacy and personal affairs. National security aims to keep us safe and protect our welfare. So the question is, would you be mad if you found that someone was secretly reading your texts,phone calls and email and storing it all ? Because that's exactly what the government is doing. This heightened security began after the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11th, 2001, and has only grown over the years. Creating better security was obviously a necessity, but in doing so they have directly violated our 4th amendment. All our data has been stored through metadata and programs such as RETRO. The NSA has too much control, they see everything
we do and they shouldn't. This is supposed to be a free country, right ? They dont have the right to snoop into our personal lives and they don't have the right to violate our fundamental human rights. This conflict is not just an invasion of privacy but unconstitutional. One reason i'm against this because in a way it violates the first amendment. The government is threatening our freedom of speech. According to Mr. Nat Hentoff there's a connection between what's happening with the Fourth Amendment with the First Amendment. He told his students that “if citizens don't have basic privacies—firm protections against the search and seizure of your private communications, for instance—they will be left feeling "threatened." Eventually this makes people concerned about what they do,what they say and even what they think. Doing this will constrict our freedom of expression. Because of the government nitpicking through everything thing we say or write we can be misunderstood or misinterpreted. This will turn into a Big Brother society where we can't even think without being suspected of something. And to the people who say "I have nothing to fear, I don't do anything wrong" and “ Well i've done nothing wrong so why should i worr? “ it's not that simple. Because things you say can twisted into something they're not. And then soon enough you're a criminal or suspect in something you had nothing to do with.
Through something called MetaData the NSA is able to track someones internet experience.
"The Marina metadata application tracks a user's browser experience, and gathers contact information. So what this data does is it records anything a user does online, such as browsing history and websites visited, email activity, and even some account passwords. So basically this builds a picture of your life. A loss of expectation of privacy in communications is a loss of something personal and intimate and will have broader implications. This quote by Nat Hentoff explains that we are losing our personal information for the ‘ sake of safety’. But further along the line the government is going to want to continue searching through our private information. In a way i believe that this violates our amendments. In the Bill of rights the 4th amendments states : The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated unless of course there's probable cause. And lot of the times there is no probable cause, the government is just spying on innocent people. Taking away these simple rights is threatening. This invasion of privacy is actually an attack on the american people not cracking down on the bad people. So in conclusion privacy is more important than security. Although due to current happenings it does raise questions on why security wouldn't be our top priority. All the things we do requiring the internet are being recorded, listened to and collected. Privacy is one of our human rights and the government is taking it away. Its starts off by looking through little things such a phone calls but it will eventually turn into something else - something
bigger.