Week 3!

The topic that I found to be the most interesting this week was the NSA surveillance scandal, and the government’s rights (or non-rights?) to infringe upon our privacy.  In class Prof. Gartside posed the question about peoples right to privacy vs. the governments duty to protect the US from acts of terrorism.  I had to mull this question over in my mind quite a bit before coming up with an overall idea of what I think is right.  On the one hand the Internet is technically the safest place for terrorists, especially those skilled with computers, to conduct their business and if the NSA did not conduct surveillance on the net there could have been many potential attacks upon the unsuspecting US population.  Nobody really knows if this has worked or not because it is all classified information.  On the other hand it is also safe to assume that the government isn’t just targeting known terrorists but even those who may have negative feelings towards the government or members of certain political parties that don’t exactly fall into line with the ideals of our Democracy.  In the early 1960’s my uncle (a Mexican) tried to run for Alderman under the socialist party, with a female campaign partner.  Even though they had the right to run under the socialist party the election committee still rejected them even though they had the appropriate number of signatures to be added to the ballet.  Long story short they were later arrested.  Who is to say that the NSA and Obama administration isn’t doing the same especially since the IRS scandal?  The idea that as long as you have nothing to hide you’ll be spared is comforting to a certain degree, but if the NSA wants the people to actually trust them then I think it would be in their best interest to release the files that detail exactly how many terror plots have been thwarted in order to demonstrate that this has actually worked, and a supervising committee should be put into place in order to lay down some ground rules on this whole surveillance thing in order to ensure that only terrorists are being tracked down and that there are no secret files being kept about everyone in the US.