United States of Secrets

                Last week, we all had the pleasure of watching the Frontline documentary about the development of the National Security Agency, government surveillance and deceit, Edward Snowden, and data mining done by the private sector. I found the documentary to be refreshing, quite frankly, in that I was able to gain an understanding of the entire story behind the NSA’s comeuppance and the real controversies surrounding it, whereas before I’ve mainly been subjected to one-sided and somewhat vague remarks from my Computer Science peers about how the NSA spies on me and therefore it is bad.

                The National Security Agency was formed with good intentions. It initially made efforts to watch over the world for suspicious activity while preserving the security of the individual on a reasonable level. Unfortunately, need for that to change was generated when the NSA was unable to predict and prevent the September 11^th terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. Since then, the NSA has gained access to wider volumes of user data and managed to bypass its original privacy guidelines through a series of confusing, controversial, and majorly unconstitutional political escapades. With many more details available to parse through, the NSA should be more aware of potential dangers to the nation. But…despite their apparent capabilities to analyze activity on such astronomical levels, it’s still hard to say if the NSA is truly making a difference when it comes to national security, given the past failures and secrecy of the agency. In the documentary, it is mentioned that one of the few threats that the NSA was reported to have prevented was made by a man trying to destroy a bridge using only a blowtorch, which honestly is a pretty pathetic example; the maniac would have been stopped by local authorities before any serious damage could have been made, anyway.

                At the very end of the two-part series, former NSA director Michael Hayden expresses an ‘existential dilemma’ that helped him maintain complacency despite repeated criticisms against NSA activities. Hayden says, “American political elites feel very empowered to criticize the American intelligence community for not doing enough when they feel endangered, and as soon as we’ve made them feel safe again, they feel equally empowered to complain that we’re doing too much.” This was the quote that resonated with me the most out of all the interviews included in the documentary and I do feel that there is some truth to it. I think, in any society or community, there will always be people looking for ways to criticize the bodies of authority that govern and protect them. It’s also definitely possible that those criticisms can come from unrealistic expectations, which I think is what Hayden is trying to get at with his anecdote.

                That said, it’s also very clear to me that the National Security Agency has been raised through dishonest and controversial means, and to this day has only become shadier and employed increasingly underhanded practices to “better protect” our nation. I do (want to) believe that the NSA’s primary goals are to actually prevent or more effectively respond to terrorist attacks and serious crime, but I cannot help but be suspicious about so much of my personal information and activity being collected and scrutinized, as many innocent US citizens are, when the NSA refuses to disclose exactly what they do with all the data that they collect. I’m more comfortable with the idea of Google making a nifty dollar by looking through my data and sending me a personalized ad, than I am with the NSA slurping that data out of Google with a crazy straw in order to potentially use it against me in some obscene way or perform other nefarious and personally violating activities.