Government Surveillance for Protecting National Security

Government Surveillance for Protecting National Security

Surveillance is the act of carefully watching someone or something especially in order to prevent or detect a crime. According to Marisa Taylor and Jonathan Landay, “The National Security Agency is turning down request from individuals who want to find out whether the agency is holding records of their telephone communications” (1). Since 2013’s revelations about the National Security Agency’s actions that are done in order to catch criminals, the spy agency has been overloaded with requests from people across the country wanting to know if it has files on them. “All of them are being turned down” (1). The government is using what is called a Glomar denial as a response to individuals who are questioning them. Glomar means to neither confirm nor deny. The government should not have to respond to the people who are seeking their own classified information from surveillance because of national security, an increase in technology development, and surveillance does no harm to the people.

National security is the main reason why the government should stick to not telling the public about its surveillance. According to the NSA, “… it cannot respond to individuals’ request without exposing classified information to terrorist and other targets” (2). This would make vital secrets disclosed. “Were we to provide positive or negative responses to requests such as yours, our adversaries’ compilation of the information provided would reasonably be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security” (2). The NSA wrote this in response to a national security reporter who requested his own records.

In addition, the development of new technology is against the government’s decision to keep secrets because technology allows the public to share information to others quickly and easily. An example of this new technology is Google Glass, which allows people to record everything they see while overlaying important facts and statistics upon the real world. It has shown in the past that technology has resulted in favor of the people such as the printing press, radios, and the internet. As a result, humans have been satisfied with what these innovations have been able to do because they expose wanted information by the people to the public. The government does not want to share its secrets with any individual because they know that these individuals will leak it out to the public by the use of technology which would expose it to everyone.

Lastly, government surveillance does no harm to the people which is probably why people have been becoming so curious to find out whether they have been watched. This is because people across the nation have had no clue to whether they have been spied on until they realized the possibility of it which sparked their curiosity. As a result to the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden’s revelations of the NSA’s data collections, the number of open records request filed with the agency more than tripled from 1,065