Tuesday, June 11, 2013

What can Government Surveillance uncover about YOU?

You wake up in the morning and reach for your cellphone to read e-mail messages. You post your day’s plans to Facebook, call a friend, and search for the address of a lunch spot. You drive on streets tracked by security cameras, and your cellphone emits signals providing your location. 
All of that information, including the credit card payment for the lunch itself, could theoretically be gathered, sorted, and reviewed by the federal government.
This week’s disclosures that the government reportedly tracks cellphone records and taps into Internet databases are only the latest evidence that American society — increasingly reliant on social media, “cloud”-based computer files, and ubiquitous cellphones — is being tracked like never before, partly due to efforts to stop terrorism. And even though the government typically needs search warrants to ferret out the most personal information, the warrant process has become more secretive. 
[...] 
The NSA can go deeper, using subpoenas approved in secret to gather more specific information.
“You don’t have to be a suspect,” said James Bamford, author of “The Shadow Factory” and two other books about the NSA. “It could be anybody who mentions the wrong combination of words or is communicating with somebody who might be communicating with somebody because the concentric circle seems to go around two or three circles.” 
Separate from these government programs, law enforcement agencies can go to the courts and try to obtain subpoenas to gain data about an individual, such as Facebook posts, credit card charges, or e-mails. For example, cellphone carriers received 1.3 million requests in 2011 from law enforcement regarding calls, text messages, and location, according to a congressional report. 
The newly disclosed NSA programs, meanwhile, obtain information after a request is made to secret court, and companies are prohibited from telling its users that their information has been given to the government. 
Many of the companies involved in the programs, which have been classified and were unknown until news reports exposed them last week, said that they were following the law.....
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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

“But they have the ability to call up and target every American.”

Like everyone already said, it comes down to whether or not we TRUST our government with the information. As we have seen with the IRS scandal, personal information does cross over between federal agencies, and is used to target certain groups of people.

So hell yes, I'm now even more scared of my government than I was a few weeks ago. If that is possible.

-Martha