The NSA: America's Parents

            Its summer vacation, and young Jimmy loves to ride his bicycle all over the place. He takes it everywhere from the local nature trails, to the mall in the center of his town. Jimmy is allowed to do this because his parents trust him. They trust him, because they know almost everything about him. They have access to his room, the computer he uses, and him for a good portion of the day. It would be quite difficult for Jimmy to hide something from them. This is not an invasion of Jimmy's privacy, it is simply the nature of the parent child relationship. Parents try to watch out for their kids, and guide them down the right path so access to this information his quite helpful to them.  

            Much like a parent the NSA wants to watch, and protect all of us. It needs to have our emails, Facebook messages, phone records, Skype calls, and GPS coordinates at all times. The United States has to make sure we are all acting in accordance with its interests. It needs to know that we are not being bad children so when the time is right it can put us in an indefinite timeout with hardened criminals. Just think of the National Security Association as a loving third parent.

            Jimmy's parents love him, and as such they like to take pictures of him, and save them as mementos. They also enjoy making a scrapbook of important moments in Jimmy's life. They have pages for his first day of school, family get-togethers, Christmases, and just about everything else that Jimmy could possibly want to look back on. As a loving parent the NSA also does this for you. They database every single one of your online communications. Every chat with a friend, every picture you uploaded, and every post you made on a politically charged blog. They can then at any time take this information and run algorithms on it to create a profile on you. It's just like a Christmas scrapbook page, except this time it is used to detect whether or not the state deems you a threat to national security. This scrapbook is also not viewable by public entities, but the state loves you and it just wants to remember all of the fun times you have had in your life. They are never going to scrutinize this information and recontextualize it incorrectly to see you as a threat.

            Jimmy's parents work very hard to keep him safe, but they cannot be with him twenty four seven. There are always going to be times where Jimmy can get himself into trouble No matter how hard they try, parents simply cannot prevent every scrapped knee. Like human parents, the NSA has these same problems. Despite collecting terabytes upon terabytes of data they can't prevent everyone from being bad. We must however still subject our self to their watching eyes. A child does not abandon their parents the second they make a simple mistake. It's unreasonable to think a huge organization with access to everyone's personal conversations would be able to stop two teenagers from wreaking havoc on one of our nations great cities. The notion that that this mistake might prove their surveillance is unwarranted is incorrect. The NSA truly has our best interest at heart. We must trust them as a child trusts a parent. There is no potential for them to abuse their power because they love us. A child should have nothing to hide from their parents.

Notes:

            Up until this point I do not believe anything I wrote in this blog post to be true. Parents should not watch over their children all of the time and guide their every action. People need to be taught to make their own decisions and live with the consequences. The idea that the NSA is a parent watching over us is absolutely absurd, it is an organization made up of many different individuals all of which have their own personal motivations which no one is privy to (except maybe the NSA through metadata analysis). We are also not privy to motivations of the organization itself. Obviously they claim to be attempting to give us security, but there is so much classified material that few people have a full grasp of the situation.