Thoughts about United States of Secrets and the NSA Program

We watched the United States of Secrets for class last week. I found it to be a great documentary about the NSA and it was a really great history lesson for me. It really brought a human face to all the actors involved in this huge case. My favorite part of the documentary was seeing how all the political figures interacted with each other. Like when they visited the outgoing attorney general Ashcroft at the hospital when he was dying. Part of the reason I found this so interesting is that I don't generally hear about interactions like this because everything is done in secret.

One of the reasons I voted for Obama was that he promised to bring transparency to government. I thought that this meant that he would stop with all the secrets and we would get to see what the government was doing with our taxpayer money. So far I would say he has not delivered on this promise. In fact I would argue that he has done the opposite by prosecuting whistle blowers who leak government secrets. When Obama became president he was briefed on the NSA's mass data collection program and had the choice of discontinuing the it but chose not to.

As you can already probably tell, I am not a fan of the NSA PRISM program. I don't think it does anything to protect us. One of the lines from the documentary that I remember was the government saying that if you exposed the NSA program then you would have blood on your hands because you would be held responsible for any terrorist attacks that occurred afterwards. If that is the case then I think the NSA should be held responsible for any terrorist attack that occurred while this program was in effect.

I believe the government should be required to get a warrant if they wish to spy on anyone. This level of data collection is completely unnecessary and in fact I believe in hurts American companies. As shown in the movie, the NSA is willing to implement backdoors in AT&T backbones. If that is the case then who knows what other technologies have these NSA backdoors. What country in their right mind would continue to buy American products knowing that they may contain an NSA backdoor?

What worries me the most is the extent to which these tyrannical governments will go to protect their secrets. The senior NSA executives who quit and went to the press had their homes raided and were almost sentenced to a lengthy prison term. Their computers were confiscated and their data taken from them. In the UK, the Guardian editors were forced to drill holes in hard drives containing files leaked by Edward Snowden while police from the GHCQ watched. These police officers refused to leave until they destroyed all the hard drives.

In conclusion, I found this program to be a complete violation of the fourth amendment. It treats everyone as a criminal and illegally searches everyones' private lives. This is not something we should be doing and we should put a stop to it.