America's Privacy
America’s Privacy The National Security Agency (NSA) is a federal program under the Department of Defense that has the primarily task of global monitoring, collection, decoding, translation and analysis of information and data for foreign intelligence and counterintelligence purposes, including surveillance of targeted individuals on U.S. soil. In the mid-1970s, the NSA was investigated for the first time by Congress. At that time, the order of the NSA was that is “would never direct it’s surveillance apparatus domestically.” After the investigation was performed, Frank Church, the Democratic senator who was the head of the investigative committee, warned: “The NSA’s capability at any time could be turned around on the American people, and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversation, telegrams, it doesn’t matter” (Greenwald). Recent leakage of government documents, that shows evidence of immense domestic spying, has many Americans worried that Frank Church’s warning has become a reality. So, what exactly is the NSA collecting and why? How does the United States’ data collection compare to that of other countries? And most importantly, have the government and the NSA put the privacy of US citizens at risk? In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, a U.S. law called the Patriot Act was passed under the Bush administration. The goal of passing this law was to strengthen domestic security and broaden the powers of law-enforcement agencies with regards to identifying and stopping terrorists (Grabianowski). The privacy of the American public was first questioned in 2006 when USA Today reported that the NSA had “been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth” and was “using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity” (Greenwald). This article referred to a secret