No More Privacy in US ( Foreign Policy ) Just In Print , July 1- 15, 2013

The  NSA  ( US National security agency ) was created along with the CIA and the FBI, they've been spying big time,it's just now we're realizing it. Nothing new. Facebook became the first to release aggregate numbers of requests, saying in a blog post that it received between 9,000 and 10,000 US requests for user data in the second half of 2012, covering 18,000 to 19,000 of its users' accounts. Facebook has more than 1.1 billion users worldwide.

The US National Security Agency (NSA) is secretively collecting personal phone and internet data of millions of people in the US and around the globe to prevent terror attacks on American interests worldwide and inside the homeland.

Americans love their privacy and do not lightly tolerate it being violated. This is a long-running tradition that dates back to the country's founding. The Founding Fathers did their best to protect it, and put provisions in the Constitution to make sure the government respected it. This is changing, though. Technology is advancing, and with it comes newer and better ways to watch people which were impossible only a few decades ago. The ability curious observers have to spy on unsuspecting people is as astonishing as it is   frightening. 

The order to do so should have directly come from the White House; in fact from the Oval office. Since the agency is doing it in the name of national security, not too many Americans except media are protesting the surveillance. In its defense, the White House maintains that it took the permission of national security court and did not overstep the authority of the US Congress.

Privacy issues have become very controversial since the War on Terror began. This is a serious problem which seems to be ignored by most politicians. The federal government is  seeking information  from organizations that collect personal information.

If the phones and internet data of some of the American residents and citizens have been followed up by national security agency (NSA), even then Mr. Obama has not done any thing illegal - leave alone him violating Constitution. If it turns out that there was something fishy about the whole operation by either the Federal Supreme Court or the US Congress or both by applying the laws to maximum precision and the White House admits its fault, even then Mr. Obama cannot face any retaliatory action from the US Senate.

He took the permission of a special national security court and did not overstep the authority of the US Congress, if media reports are to be believed. Once these two things are taken care of then it comes within his formal and legal executive authority to order the surveillance, should the national security situation warrants it. He did not do anything to face impeachment proceedings as it is the US Congress which should have allowed formation of NSA with such wide ranging powers—which can be abused in extreme conditions—and also the formation of the special national security court. All should hope that Mr. Obama ordered the wiretapping and phishing in good faith and in national interest without any prejudice and bias.

Washington is facing growing international pressure to explain the previously undisclosed surveillance programme identified in the documents leaked by the NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden as ‘Prism’.

U.S. intelligence officials said that National Security Agency surveillance programs have disrupted "dozens" of terrorist plots in the U.S. and more than 20 countries around the world.

A string of media reports describing secret US surveillance programs underscore the degree to which laws originally designed to track phone records relating to criminal investigations have been expanded to authorize the collection of vast quantities of new forms of data that intrude much more deeply into the private lives of both citizens and non-citizens.

Recent revelations about the scope of US , national security surveillance highlight how dramatic increases in private digital communications and government computing power are fueling surveillance practices that impinge on privacy in ways unimaginable just a few years ago. There is an urgent need for the US Congress to reevaluate and rewrite surveillance laws in light of those technological developments and put in place better safeguards against security agency overreach.

The US government may have a legitimate interest in engaging in certain types of targeted surveillance for specific periods of time. However, the secrecy of these programs prevents an assessment of whether these measures have proper oversight and whether they unnecessarily impinge on the rights to freedom of expression, association, and privacy.

One thing is certain that the White House has trespassed some of the diplomatic niceties and procedures. The better thing for the US is to properly check immigration from all sides and all regions and as a repeat for emphasis it should make a proper immigration and exit policy. Once the US Congress makes a balanced and proper immigration and exit policy, it should use its executive powers to maximum to influence the other Western and European Parliaments to follow the suit. The spreading of the wealth by sharing and proliferating is mandatory for the stability of the whole globe. The US should remain the leader in innovations and in wealth generation; by expanding its influence worldwide and that comes more with symbiosis with equals and quasi-equals. Predation is good for making humans, superhuman, more egoist and multi-functional and not to offend allies and friends.

In Australia, the conservative opposition said it was "very troubled" by America's so-called PRISM programme, which newspaper reports say is a top-secret authorisation for the US National Security Agency (NSA) to extract personal data from the computers of major Internet firms.

Australia's influential Greens party called on the government to clarify whether Canberra's own intelligence agencies had access to the NSA-gathered data, which according to Britain's Guardian newspaper included search history, emails, file transfers and live chats.

"We'll examine carefully any implications in what has emerged for the security and privacy of Australians," Australia's Foreign Minister Bob Carr said in a television interview, when asked whether Canberra had cooperated with Washington's secret initiative.

Both countries are members of the so-called 'five eyes' collective of major Western powers collecting and sharing signals intelligence, set up in the post-war 1940s.

Australia's spy and law-enforcement agencies want telecoms firms and Internet service providers to continuously collect and store personal data to boost anti-terrorism and crime-fighting capabilities - a controversial initiative that one government source said would be even more difficult to push through now, after news of the secret U.S. surveillance of Internet firms.

The Prism program is potentially a lot more nefarious. The US intelligence community has access to just about everything that you do, say, or post on Facebook, Google (Gmail, Search, YouTube), Yahoo, AOL, Microsoft (Hotmail, Skype), and Apple. As far as we can tell, there’s no separation between domestic and international citizens, nor innocents or people suspected of wrongdoing: Prism, in a word, appears to give the US government completely unfettered, warrant-free access to almost all of your online activity and communications.

It’s not that simple, though: The intelligence community would undoubtedly claim that there would be more terrorism without these Big Brother-like measures – a claim that’s awfully hard to refute, when all of the data is top secret. 

For the time being, if you’re worried about Uncle Sam reading your messages and looking at your photos, your best bet is to stop using big, US-based Internet services such as Google and Facebook.


The upshot of these reflections is that the relation between surveillance and moral edification is complicated. In some contexts, surveillance helps keep us on track and thereby reinforces good habits that become second nature. In other contexts, it can hinder moral development by steering us away from or obscuring the saintly ideal of genuinely disinterested action. And that ideal is worth keeping alive.

Some will object that the saintly ideal is utopian. And it is. But utopian ideals are valuable. It’s true that they do not help us deal with specific, concrete, short-term problems, such as how to keep drunk drivers off the road, or how to ensure that people pay their taxes. Rather, like a distant star, they provide a fixed point that we can use to navigate by. Ideals help us to take stock every so often of where we are, of where we’re going, and of whether we really want to head further in that direction.

Ultimately, the ideal society is one in which, if taxes are necessary, everyone pays them as freely and cheerfully as they pay their dues to some club of which they are devoted members – where citizen and state can trust each other perfectly. We know our present society is a long way from such ideals, yet we should be wary of practices that take us ever further from them. One of the goals of moral education is to cultivate a conscience – the little voice inside telling us that we should do what is right because it is right. As surveillance becomes increasingly ubiquitous, however, the chances are reduced that conscience will ever be anything more than the little voice inside telling us that someone, somewhere, may be watching.

Siddhartha Shankar Mishra,

Sambalpur, Odisha