Victoria Ray

Draft 3

Being Electronically and Digitally Watched

             As Americans we may think that we are getting our privacy when it comes to small things. These things can be as small as placing phone calls to our loved ones, emailing friends, or even getting on Facebook to update our page. Lately we have found that the government is spying on certain phone companies, more specifically, the calls that the customers make and receive. As an American I think the government should not listening to the citizen's phone calls because we are losing our privacy, I feel as I am not trusted, and I strongly feel that I am being treated like a low profile criminal.

PresidentObama defends the government’s secret monitoring of Americans’ phone records. Obama is calling it a necessary tool to fight terrorism but says citizens’ privacy remains. “Nobody is listening to your telephone calls, that’s not what this program’s about.” President Obama said. Reporters have found out that the government has ordered the Verizon phone company to share daily records of their daily phone calls with them. Even though reporters and citizens just found out recently that the government was betraying their privacy, one source has told The Washington Post that this nonsense has been going on since 2006, and that there might be more phone company’s involved than just Verizon. Obama also said “They are not looking at people’s names and they are not looking at content,” “By sifting through this so-called metadata, they may identify potential leads with respect to folks who might be engaged in terrorism.” Even if this is true I truly think there are other ways around this action. Even if someone seems suspicious the government could judge that citizen poorly and potentially destroy his/her life dramatically.

It has been said before that if you are a user of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Craigslist, or any other crowd- pleasing sites/site that you are possibly being watched by the U.S. Government. Just think about looking at your computer while you’re on one of your favorite sites and not knowing that someone is looking at you dead in your face. Bob Sullivan a Technology correspondent came up with a site called “Are you being watched on line?” It is posted on Security by NBCNews.com. If anyone can watch you in the comfort you’re home just typing away to your friends than it is just easily for the government to do the same thing as these criminals. Yes, we as Americans understand the concerns of the government with 911. So after that day the Patriot act allowed the National Security Administration (NSA) to eavesdrop on essentially all forms of communication and more. Witch entitles our phone calls, our emails, and also to watch the websites we also visit from time to time.

If you take a citizen advice and upgrade your server and everything there is to do with your internet and phones you will only keep the criminals out. The government will still have full accesses to your life and personal information. But not only are we being watched when it comes to calls and the internet also what we do with our money. The government can see where we have eaten during the day, how we party at night and how much money we are just tossing around. U.S. officials keep promising that they are only tapping into information that points at suspected terrorists and that there are plenty of safeguards to make sure the wrong people do not snoop around on the good people. “I want the American people to know that we’re trying to be transparent here, protect civil liberties and privacy but also the security of this country,” Gen. Alexander (head of the National Security Agency)., said. Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst for the American Civil Liberties Union said “We don’t want to live in a world where anytime you do anything you have to stop and ask yourself, Could this come back to hurt me if somebody found out about it?’ And I as an American agree but the government has put us in a pickle so we do have to ask ourselves this question every once in a while. By the Civil Liberties Union saying what they said we are driving ourselves in a completely different direction.

Ask yourself a few questions.  Are we ever truly alone when we are in the darkness? Will we be blamed as a criminal even though we are not? Will we become a dictator country that we so dread to be in the end? Our government is shutting down slowly by the rates and by the surveillance we are under, we will indeed turn out to be like those other countries we dread of becoming, maybe not in the life time of us young adults but most likely in our children’s life time.