The NSA is worse than you thought.
The NSA has already stored and analyzied this article.
I originally wrote the following as my senior thesis for my high school rhetoric class. I wanted everyone to see it, because the average person is still uninformed regarding the NSA.
After the leaks in the summer of 2013, the tech world was on fire about the NSA surveillance information that had been unearthed. First, a program called PRISM was revealed, a program that some thought gave the NSA complete access to the servers of popular web services such as Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, others. Later a far more sinister program, the Upstream collection program, was revealed to be much more invasive than PRISM: a way for the NSA to directly tap into the fiber optic lines of the Internet to access any data they deemed necessary for an investigation. Collecting massive amounts of data, the Upstream collection program is violating the rights of Americans. As such, the NSA should not be allowed to collect the information of American citizens using the Upstream data collection program.
The NSA (National Security Agency) officially came together and received its name on November 4, 1952. The agency was formed when President Truman signed his name on a paper; there was no congressional debate and hardly anyone inside or outside the government was aware of the new agency . The NSA began to grow into a powerful entity as time went on, Bamford writes “As a result of this overwhelming passion for secrecy, few persons outside the inner circle of America’s intelligence community have recognized the gradual shift in power and importance from the Central Intelligence Agency to the NSA”. We can also see that the NSA had no restrictions placed on it, and at the time Bamford’s book was published (in 1983), “Despite its size and power…no law has ever been enacted prohibiting the NSA from engaging in any activity. There are only laws to prohibit the release of any information about the Agency”. According to the NSA’s website, their job is to collect and analyze data for foreign intelligence purposes and lead the way for cryptology (data protection codes) standards in order to keep government data safe from foreign attacks. After the NSA’s activities were exposed, voices have been raised to start restricting what the NSA is able to do, but the restrictions have already been regarded as week.
In the summer of 2013, top news sites such as The Washington Post reported about a recently exposed program created by the NSA named PRISM. Found through a leaked slide from a top secret presentation, the PRISM program gathers intelligence and data from the Internet’s largest companies. PRISM works by having access to nine of the United States’ leading tech companies such as Google, Microsoft, and Apple. The NSA has access to the information of anyone who has ever signed up for an account with one of the companies, equating to millions of American citizens . The question was, how much data does the PRISM program give to the NSA?
PRISM was the first program we heard about through Edward Snowden’s leaks in 2013. Governed by Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, PRISM was not only confirmed by Snowden’s leaked PowerPoint, but also by the Director of National Intelligence in a blog post. According to the presentation leaked by Snowden and published by top news sites, PRISM allows “‘collection directly from the servers’ of Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook and other online companies”.
Ever since PRISM became a public debacle, the allegedly involved companies such as Google, Yahoo, and Facebook have made statements denying their participation in the PRISM program in the manner in which it was explained by the slides. According to the New York Times, “Each of the nine companies said it had no knowledge of a government program providing officials with access to its servers, and drew a bright line between giving the government wholesale access to its servers to collect user data and giving them specific data in response to individual court orders”. The companies did admit, however, that they did comply with court orders, including those under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and that on occassion, data would be transmitted directly from the company’s servers to intelligence officials. In other words, there is no ‘back door’ access to the major tech companies in which the NSA or another federal agency could take any data they felt was necessary without permission or without one of the companies being aware of a transfer.
A former official who is familiar with the PRISM program stated that the process “is akin to how law enforcement requests information in criminal investigations: the government delivers an order to obtain account details about someone who’s specifically identified as a non-U.S. individual, with a specific finding that they’re involved in an activity related to international terrorism”. With that being said, “the companies were essentially asked to erect a locked mailbox and give the government the key… Facebook, for instance, built such a system for requesting and sharing the information”. Using this system, Facebook decides what information to put into the ‘mailbox’ and this system simply allows for the NSA to have quicker, more efficient access to this information. The information is not collected in bulk and the government does not have unfettered access to confidential user information, the program is merely a more efficient way for the NSA to obtain data that has been legally requested. It is difficult, however, to know everything about how PRISM and the NSA works with tech companies, as “employees whose job it is to comply with FISA requests are not allowed to discuss the details even with others at the company”. These FISA requests can be anything from a specific target, to a much more broad request such as the information of everyone who made a certain search online. There were nearly 1,900 of these requests in 2012. Even though companies like Google attempt to be transparent by publishing information about government requests, they are unable to publish anything about FISA requests legally.
A powerful tool for the NSA to gather information on potential terrorist threats, the PRISM program provides enough information to the U.S. government concerning potential terrorist threats to keep Americans safe from attacks. Likewise, the program allows for a set of checks and balances between major tech companies and intelligence agencies just as branches of government have checks and balances. As Google’s CEO put it, “Our legal team reviews each and every request, and frequently pushes back when requests are overly broad or don’t follow the correct process”. The 9 tech companies that were mentioned in the leaked powerpoint presentation have all stated that they did not allow for direct access to the entirety of their servers, as some may have assumed.
PRISM is powerful enough to track down potential threats, yet still preserves the privacy that is to be expected for American citizens. While some could point out that not every tech company is PRISM compatible, this would not be a major problem for the NSA. Even if information was needed from a non-PRISM compatible server, the NSA would still be able to request the necessary information, at which point the company in question could transfer the information so the NSA could make the next steps to fix the issue at hand. For instance, even though Twitter was not included in the list of PRISM compatible websites, the United States government is still able to request information from Twitter. The PRISM program is strong enough on its own to protect American citizens from foreign threats and does not need the help of the any additional programs to collect data. The PRISM program stays within the Constitution and does not violate the rights of American citizens.
The reaction to PRISM was overdone. Many Americans looked at the evidence and quickly assumed that the NSA would have complete access to any information they wanted, but they were wrong. These fears, however, were not completely unfounded, as there is a program that does allow the NSA to have this type of access to data, and more. Known as the Upstream program, this program is used by the NSA to gather data directly from the very veins of the internet: fiber optic cables. The NSA is able to make a clone of information sprinting through the cables for their own use. This information is then collected by the NSA and stored in a top secret facility. In 2006, it was reported that a secret room called 641A was used by the NSA in conjunction with AT&T to collect data directly from the fiber optic cables that ran through the secret facility. When questioned, members of a Congress committee confirmed the existence of such a program and, “AT&T neither confirmed nor denied assisting the NSA, asserting that the U.S. Department of Justice said discussing the program would harm national security”. Since then, it is estimated that about 10 to 20 of these stations have been set up within the United States to pull in data.
The Upstream collection program was designed to capture foreign to foreign communications because about 80% of the world’s internet communications travel through American soil even if they aren’t traveling directly to the United States. This is quite the upgrade from PRISM, a program that only allows access to files and information if allowed by the courts through due process and the cooperation of a major tech company. The Upstream collection program allows for the warrantless search of foreign communications, but it has also resulted in the collection of communications that originated from and is destined for an American location. This type of spying on American citizens is a clear violation of the unalienable rights given to Americans by the Constitution. The United States government is hypocritical in creating rules only to break them, especially at the price of its citizens. Using its Upstream collection program, the NSA “is searching the contents of vast amounts of Americans’ e-mail and text communications into and out of the country, hunting for people who mention information about foreigners under surveillance”. The NSA says that they run through about 29 petabytes of information per day, which is more data than what Google processes in a day. To put 29 petabytes into perspective, that is the equivalent of over 29 million gigabytes, or about 170 years worth of HD Blu-Ray video.
The NSA claims to be searching for dangerous foreigners, but why does the NSA only look for foreigners? To 95% of the world, every United States citizen is considered foreign. Since we are all created in the image of God, the NSA should not make a distinction between foreign and domestic targets. We are all created equal.
Additionally, the NSA actively look for people who mention information that could be linked to any foreigners in question. This eavesdropping is made possible by a law that allows for this type of spying as long as the target is foreign. In order to search through the communications that could possibly contain valuable information, the NSA makes a direct copy of every bit of data that passes in or out of the United States that they intend to store and analyze. This information is then searched by powerful computers searching for certain keywords; some data is kept in a top secret facility while the rest is deleted. Some may argue that anyone who isn’t a threat to the United States shouldn’t worry about the NSA. However, this type spying is restricting the rights that this country is built upon. By using the Internet, anything that is searched for, read, uploaded, or viewed can be seen by Big Brother.
The NSA has spent $2 billion on creating a data center in Utah to store all of the data it sucks in. The new facility is not only able to store massive amounts of data and analyze it, but is also works as a state-of-the-art code breaker. Since the data scooped up from the Upstream program often have passwords that protect it, the NSA’s new database will help to break through the passwords with brute force to access the data behind it. This facility will help to store “all forms of communication, including the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls, and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails—parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases, and other digital ‘pocket litter’”. Any bank transfer, Google search, email, text message, status update, or any action you take online can be seen, and stored, by the NSA, even if you aren’t aligned with a terrorist group or some sort of threat. With this new facility, the NSA “has created a supercomputer of almost unimaginable speed to look for patterns and unscramble codes. Finally, the agency has begun building a place to store all the trillions of words and thoughts and whispers captured in its electronic net”. The facility is theoretically able to store yottabytes of information; it is estimated that:
…global Internet traffic will quadruple… reaching 966 exabytes per year. (A million exabytes equal a yottabyte.)…Google’s former CEO once estimated that the total of all human knowledge created from the dawn of man to 2003 totaled 5 exabytes… Should the agency ever fill the Utah center with a yottabyte of information, it would be equal to about 500 quintillion (500,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text.
If the NSA needs to monitor anyone’s life, it would be simple because “as data like bookstore receipts, bank statements, and commuter toll records flow in, the NSA is able to paint a more and more detailed picture of someone’s life”. Today’s generation is very close to the Internet; with the amount of information shared online by Americans, there seems to be very little that is not shared with social networks, banks, payment systems, and other portals that were thought to be secure. Just as how Nixon used his surveillance systems to spy on his enemies, without oversight there is nothing to stop the NSA from turning this ‘anti-terrorism’ tool into a way to spy and keep track of any American citizen with a connected device.
Such a revelation should be alarming to Americans. The NSA has given itself the ability to search through American data indiscriminately. Even if the NSA is simply using the data to find a mention of a certain terrorist or threat, the NSA is still searching through massive amounts of data without a warrant or permission. The NSA should show respect to citizens by obtaining warrants or even permission to access private information.
The NSA uses section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act to carry out spying on American citizens; Kauffman writes “Capturing communications ‘about’ approved targets means that no matter who you are or who you talk to, the content of your emails and texts are fair game for NSA surveillance”. Wyden, a Senator from Oregon, warned us that “Once Americans’ communications are collected, a gap in the law that I call the ‘back-door searches loophole’ allows the government to potentially go through these communications and conduct warrantless searches for the phone calls or emails of law-abiding Americans”. Another document leaked by Snowden shows that the United States was involved in the surveillance of an American law firm that was working with Indonesia while the United States was having trade discrepancies with the country. Doing so if completely wrong, the NSA is in no way treating its business or ally in a way that the United States would want to be treated. What is keeping the NSA from searching through the personal lives of Americans to stay on top of potential crimes and suspects within its borders?
The fourth amendment clearly stands against unreasonable search and seizure. While the NSA may try to justify their searches by stating that they have probable cause, they often do not have enough reason to legally search through an American’s information simply because the citizen appeared in a search for a certain keyword, email address, or other selector. The United States government should not be able to break an amendment without the due process outlined in the Constitution. In defense of the NSA, some have used Smith v. Maryland to show that the NSA does have probable cause and should be able to search without a warrant. However, in Smith v. Maryland, the case was much different than the situations the NSA may face when searching through a citizen’s data. In Smith v. Maryland, a warrantless search was allowed because there was no question who the criminal was, the telephone company gave permission, and the crime was becoming very serious. The NSA’s use of this information obtained via its Upstream data collection program violates the fourth amendment, and is therefore unconstitutional.
The United States is a high profile nation that is subject to attacks from groups that mean to do the United States harm. Therefore, the United States needs some amount of security to ensure the safety of the citizens that live within its borders. As the world becomes more and more digital, there are more cyber threats, but we should not fight outlaws by becoming outlaws ourselves. With that being said, a balance between security and freedom must be made. Establishing the United States’ balance between the two will prove to be a particularly arduous task for Congress, but it is a decision that must be made at some point. The sheer amount of freedom that the NSA demolishes for the fragment of security gained is simply not enough to be justifiable. While a program such as PRISM is effective in increasing security without taking away freedom, the NSA’s Upstream collection program is starting to take away the freedoms that America holds dear. Every text message, every email, and every bit of information ever uploaded by an American citizen is subject to the NSA’s watch. If the United States government continues to sacrifice security for freedom, what could be next? If the NSA is already allowing itself to search through American citizen’s information for communications with potential foreign targets, there is little to stop the NSA from searching through various channels (email, texts, direct messages, etc) for American targets and criminals. No innocent American citizen should be afraid to publish information online simply because it mentions a controversial topic, a certain person, or any other information that the citizen may suspect is being monitored by the government.
The NSA’s Upstream program doesn’t stop at the fiber optic cables that connect the public internet. Similar to the Upstream program, the NSA’s MUSCULAR program intercepts data coming through fiber optic lines as well, but instead it taps into the private fiber optic lines that connect the various connected servers of Google, Yahoo, or others. The MUSCULAR program is different from the PRISM and Upstream program, but is like both. Because not all of Google’s data is stored in one single location, the NSA is able to find the connections between each of Google’s data centers and have access to the unprotected, raw data that belongs to Google.
The NSA gets around the law by having all of this take place on foreign soil, making the laws bend more in their favor. Even though the NSA is able to use the PRISM program to lawfully request this information, they still have decided to secretly go behind the backs of some of the most valuable companies in the world in an attempt to gather more data. The MUSCULAR program, quite simply, is the NSA spying on American companies in a way that should never be considered acceptable. The NSA has violated the rights of every tech company who was victim to this scheme.
The NSA’s behavior and decisions cannot go unregulated. It is quite clear that the NSA is violating the rights of every American citizens that uses the internet, as this data is not safe from prying government eyes. The government’s surveillance is breaking the very principles that have made the United States such an amazing country. The United States has already established specific systems for retrieving information and due process. American authors have long prophesied of the potential surveillance state that American could transform into (see George Orwell’s 1984); one cannot help but ask if this is just the beginning of a spiral into that very state. With PRISM, the United States has a strong, legal option to obtain data, but it instead chooses to use programs like Upstream and MUSCULAR to spy on foreigners and United States citizens. The NSA has absolutely no right to use Upstream data collection to spy on any individuals, period.
