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Bryan Doria

Malcom Campbell

UWRT 1104

April 5th, 2017

Big Brother is Watching: Should We be Concerned?

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against

unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon

probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be

searched, and the persons or things to be seized. The founding fathers knew that this right

would be essential to having a free and open democracy. The fourth amendment guarantees a

persons right to privacy and the government cannot break that right to privacy without a

reasonable cause, but in recent years the protections granted by the fourth amendment have been

called into question by unwarranted searches and surveillance.

Not too long ago it was considered a fringe idea to believe that world governments were

employing vast data collection programs and that they had the capabilities to collect the vast

amounts of internet data generated daily. To believe such things was ludicrous and you were

considered just another conspiracy theorist if you did. That all changed when the recent leaks

from either traitor or whistleblower, Edward Snowden, came out. It became a well-known fact

that the US and other western countries were spying on each other and on themselves (Lewis et

al).
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The United States has had a long history of putting aside peoples rights for the sake of

security. During the Civil War, President Lincoln suspending habeas corpus, suspending a

persons right to a trial. During World War II, President Roosevelt had passed an executive order

allowing any mail that came from a foreign country or went out of the country to be examined

and he also passed an executive order allowing internment camps for Japanese-Americans. In the

mid-twentieth century, the FBI ran programs such as COINTELPRO (COunter INTELligence

PROgram) that the LA times put as, [COINTELPRO was] created to investigate and disrupt

dissident political groups in the U.S. and it targeted prominent political figures such as MLK

and other extremist groups (Jalon). But none of these of programs have had the scope and

magnitude of the recent programs put in place.

On September 11, 2001, the largest Terrorist attack on American soil occurred. Terrorist

attacked both the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, killing a total of 993 and injuring a total of

8,900, it was the largest attack on US soil since Pearl Harbor. In the wake of 9/11, bills such as

the Patriot Act were passed and agencies such as the TSA were created and agencies like

Homeland Security and The NSA were strengthened. These bills and agencies were formed and

passed to ensure that another tragedy like 9/11 could never occur again on American soil. Since

then the Patriot Act was passed, it has been re-passed two more times as it expires every few

years, once by Bush and once by Obama, and has since been replaced by the Freedom Act. The

Freedom Act is essentially the same thing as the Patriot Act but with a few key changes: The

biggest being that the NSA can no longer collect and store Americans phone records but will

have to request them from phone companies through the FISA courts and it allows tech

companies to publicly report how many FISA court orders they have received. These
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amendments were added to the Freedom Act to help ease our concerns that our fourth

amendment was being eroded (US Freedom Act: What's in, what's out).

Capabilities and magnitude

The National Security Agency (NSA) is the agency that is in charge of handling the mass

data collection programs. As you would guess the NSA is in charge of ensuring that the nation is

kept safe from foreign and domestic enemies.

In light of the 2013 leaks, the (NSA) has stated in 2013 report that they only touch about

1.6% of the daily internet traffic. Now 1.6% might not sound like a significant amount but

around 60% of all internet traffic per day is just media (Netflix, YouTube), about 23% is peer-to-

peer traffic, around 12% is just web browsing, and about 3% of daily internet traffic deals with

communications according to Sandvine study, a Canadian Networking company. So, that 1.6%

turns into listening to about half the communication of the internet (Jarvis). And this is with the

computing capabilities they had four years ago. To put it simply, computing capabilities have

been increasing exponentially for the past half century thanks to a law known as Moores law.

Without getting to deep into this topic, Moores law states that computing devices double in

transistors about every two years meaning that computers get a lot faster and cheaper every two

years and this has remained true for the last 50 years.

The National Security Agency (NSA) is able to sort through this jungle of data by using a

special in house program called XKeyscore. XKeyscore acts sort of like a search engine, like

google. Users input the data of the person they want searched and the program will pull up the

info it has on them. The data in the system can be kept for as little as one day or up to five years

depending on the importance of the data collected, what determines the importance of the data is

not known. Below is a leaked image of presentation regarding the program (Greenwald).
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Now what is metadata? Metadata is simply data that describes other data. Or in simpler

terms metadata is the tag placed on data so it can be easily identified such as address, length, data

type, IP address. Metadata is not only useful to ad companies such as Facebook and Googles to

target you with specific ads but for Government surveillance programs. Small amounts of

metadata are useless, but in large amounts, metadata paints a picture of a persons internet life.

Now unless youre a person of high interest the NSA wont be collecting everything on you as

that would be extremely costly in terms of computing power and money. But what metadata

allows is for these agencies to generally know what you are doing. For example, if one day you

go to howtomakeabomb.org, the NSA would know how long you visited that website, when you

did it, and your location. Then if you went and googled mall busiest time, in theory the NSA

would be able to easily connect dots and see that you looked up both these terms.

Beyond the web

While we mostly dont notice the electronic surveillance, theres plenty examples of

security over privacy we can see firsthand. Anyone thats traveled on a commercial aircraft can

see this first hand. The long lines, the body scanners, body pat-downs, restrictions on what you

can bring onboard and the infamous no-fly-list. The Travel Safety Agency (TSA) operates to
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ensure that another tragedy such as 9/11 wont happen again, but how effective is the TSA? The

TSA is constantly called a security theater they only put on a show and actually serve no

purpose, well how true is this? A 2015 internal investigation conducted by Homeland Security

has shown that the TSA was only able to stop 3 out of the 70 suspects, 67 people with

explosives, guns, or any other harm inflicting objects were able to pass through the TSAs

checkpoints. The report was so bad that the acting TSA director resigned after these reports came

out (Bradner & Marsh).

Beyond the Airports, the powers of federal agents along the border have been increased

to make us safer. An ACLU report has shown that federal agents along the border are able to

operate in a legal gray-zone thanks to their new-found powers. The gray-zone known as the

border-zone is any land within the United states that is within 100 miles of the US border. The

ACLU states that about 200 million people or about two-thirds of the US population lives within

this border zone. The ACLU says that in points of entry, federal authorities do not need a

warrant or suspicion of wrong doing to stop and search you. They state that within the border

zone, US border patrol agents can operate but with limited powers compared to what they have

at points of entry. Within the border zone, border patrols agents can only legally stop someone

if they have probable cause or a warrant unlike points of entry. While these powers are yet to be

widely misused, there are lots of small cases of abuse. There has been lots of reports of border

and custom agents demanding people to unlock their phones or laptops. Agents then go through

your phone to see if they can find anything incriminating. Agents can seize your device for

weeks and can even detain you if you do not comply (Victor). While you might think that your

data is safe even behind a password, the FBI has proved that wrong. About a year ago there was

a terrorist attack in San Bernardino, CA and one of the terrorists iPhone was recovered but the
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FBI could not access it without the 4-digit pin code. The FBI asked apple to write a program so

they could see the phones content and Apple refused. The FBI ended up taking Apple to court so

they could be forced to comply, but before the case was settled the FBI dropped the case after

they said they had a 3rd party crack the phone for them (Kharpal). These agencies have shown

that security is their main focus and privacy is only something that stands in their way.

Potential Political Ramifications

In recent news, allegations by current president Trump that former President Obama had

wiretapped him (Costa et al.), though providing no proof, begs the question, could these vast

surveillance programs be used for political gain? If this allegation were true, it wouldnt be the

first-time shady actions by US top officials were used for political gain. In the mid twentieth

century, the FBI was no stranger to such tactics and used them liberally. The New York Times

stated that the:

F.B.I. had carried out an expansive campaign to spy on civil rights leaders, political

organizers, and suspected Communists, and had tried to sow distrust among protest

groups. Among the grim litany of revelations was a blackmail letter F.B.I. agents had sent

anonymously to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., threatening to expose his

extramarital affairs if he did not commit suicide (Mazzetti).

Another example of trying to get data for political gain is the Watergate scandal. Agents of the

CRP (Committee to Re-elect the President), Nixon at the time, were caught inside of the DNC

with two sophisticated devices capable of picking up and transmitting all talk, including

telephone conversations, and 40 rolls of unexposed film, two 35 millimeter cameras near
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two open file drawers (Lewis). They tried to collect anything they could use inside the DNC to

help boost Nixons chances of winning the election.

Potential Justifications

The justifications for these programs has been for the sake of security, but unless more

leaks come out we, the average American citizens, would never know the effectiveness of these

programs. Without proof, we should have a healthy amount of skepticism of the effectiveness of

these programs. Without high level security clearance, the general public simply cant see the

evidence to support these programs. But a recent example of someone who has gained high level

security clearance and has had a change of heart has been former President Obama. We can see

the change of heart in Obamas perception of these programs as he went from senator/presidential

candidate Obama to President Obama. In light of the recent leaks by Edward Snowden Obama

had this to say:

Some of these programs I had been critical of when I was in the Senate. When I looked

through specifically what was being done, my determination was that the two programs

in particular that had been at issue, 215 and 702, offered valuable intelligence that helps

us protect the American people and they're worth preserving. (qtd. in Transcript:

President Obama's News Conference).

President Obama then went on to address the concerns of critics of these programs:

if you are outside of the intelligence community, if you are the ordinary person and

you start seeing a bunch of headlines saying, U.S.-Big Brother looking down on you,

collecting telephone records, et cetera, well, understandably, people would be concerned.

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I would be, too, if I wasn't inside the government. (qtd. in Transcript: President

Obama's News Conference).

In our ever-advancing world our rights to privacy will continue to shrink. Be it ad

companies making a dime or government agencies collecting data for the sake of security, as our

reliance to an always connected world grows, so will the number of listeners. While we might

never know the scope and size of these programs due to national security, its important to

understand that these programs will simply not go away anytime soon but we must ensure that

protections have been placed to minimize abuse, but what can we do? We can rely on

whistleblowers and leakers to show us what goes on behind the curtain or we can demand our

politicians to tell us the truth. We can see that before the 2013 leaks, the NSA operated without a

care but after their actions were made public, reforms were put in place to minimize their

potential for abuse of power. There must be an open and frank discussion when it comes to

National security to ensure that potential for abuse has been minimalized.
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Work Cited

Transcript: President Obama's News Conference. NPR, NPR, 9 Aug. 2013,

www.npr.org/2013/08/09/210574114/transcript-president-obamas-news-conference.

Accessed 5 Apr. 2017.

US Freedom Act: What's in, what's out. The Washington Post, WP Company,

www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/usa-freedom-act/. Accessed 27 Mar. 2017.

Bradner, Eric, and Rene Marsh. TSA screeners failed tests to detect explosives,

weapons. CNN, Cable News Network, 2 June 2015,

www.cnn.com/2015/06/01/politics/tsa-failed-undercover-airport-screening-tests/.

Accessed 30 Apr. 2017.

Costa, Robert, et al. Trump, Citing No Evidence, Accuses Obama of 'Nixon/Watergate' Plot to

Wiretap Trump Tower. The Washington Post, WP Company, 4 Mar. 2017,

www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2017/03/04/trump-accuses-obama-of-

nixonwatergate-plot-to-wire-tap-trump-tower/. Accessed 5 Apr. 2017.

Greenwald, Glenn. XKeyscore: NSA Tool Collects 'Nearly Everything a User Does on the

Internet'. The Guardian, 31 July 2013, www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/31/nsa-

top-secret-program-online-data. Accessed 5 Apr. 2017

Jalon, Allan M. A Break-in to End All Break-Ins. Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Times, 8

Mar. 2006, articles.latimes.com/2006/mar/08/opinion/oe-jalon8. Accessed 5 Apr. 2017.

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Jarvis, Jeff. How Much Data the NSA Really Gets. The Guardian, 13 Aug. 2013,

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/aug/13/nsa-internet-traffic-surveillance.

Accessed 5 Apr. 2017

Kharpal, Arjun. Apple vs FBI: All you need to know. CNBC, CNBC, 29 Mar. 2016,

www.cnbc.com/2016/03/29/apple-vs-fbi-all-you-need-to-know.html. Accessed 25 Mar.

2017.

Lewis, Alfred E. 5 Held in Plot to Bug Democrats' Office Here. The Washington Post, WP

Company, 18 June 1972, www.washingtonpost.com/wp-

dyn/content/article/2002/05/31/AR2005111001227.html. Accessed 5 Apr. 2017.

MacAskill, Ewen, et al. NSA files decoded: Edward Snowden's surveillance revelations

explained. The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 1 Nov. 2013,

www.theguardian.com/world/interactive/2013/nov/01/snowden-nsa-files-surveillance-

revelations-decoded#section/1. Accessed 29 Apr. 2017.

Mazzetti, Mark. Burglars Who Took On F.B.I. Abandon Shadows. The New York Times, The

New York Times, 7 Jan. 2014, www.nytimes.com/2014/01/07/us/burglars-who-took-on-

fbi-abandon-shadows.html?_r=0. Accessed 5 Apr. 2017.

Victor, Daniel. What Are Your Rights if Border Agents Want to Search Your Phone? The New

York Times, The New York Times, 14 Feb. 2017,

www.nytimes.com/2017/02/14/business/border-enforcement-airport-phones.html.

Accessed 30 Apr. 2017.