Elsa Zamaniego

English 1102
Research Paper
5/11/16

Edward Snowden VS. The NSA

Loathed whistleblower said he had presented concessions to the U.S. government in

an attempt to return to his home country from Russia. He has volunteered to go to prison but
only for the RIGHT reasons. Snowden has openly admitted to handing out certain
information about the NSA and other USA political leaders but in his defense he did it for the
better of the people and his home country. Although he has attempted to work with the US
government, he is still awaiting a callback for a fair trial. Snowden faces many felony
charges and could serve up to decades in prison. He is also in fear that the USA will try to
sabotage his trails in order to put him in maximum security for life. He has these fears
because of what the NSA was doing and concealed secrets the government hid from the
public. People speculate that the government is deceiving civilians and claim Snowden a
hero. Now, new information about how in depth the NSA was going into civilian privacy has
been released and a new bargain for Snowden to return has also been in question. This lead
people to ask : what form of punishment should Snowden face?
People also didn't know what the NSA was and what it was for. Founded during the
Truman Administration, the NSA has engaged in both constitutional and unconstitutional
activity since then; it was exclusively aimed at monitoring communications abroad and not

domestically ("NSA Surveillance Programs"). It was created to monitor foreign activity in

order to protect the domestic one. Domestic snooping exploded in scale after 9/11, when
George W Bush authorized the agency to eavesdrop on Americans without the previous
requirement for warrants. Within a few months of President Barack Obama taking office in
2009 ,they were reading your e-mails, also collecting an obscene amount of data and
surprising number of people can access and analyze this obscene amounts of data ("NSA
Surveillance Programs"). PRISM Program - surveillance of internet activity including
emails, social media posts, video and audio chats, photographs, documents, and instant
messages.FISA Program- allow intelligence agencies to conduct warrantless surveillance on
targets as long as those targets were "reasonably believed" to be outside the USA.These
programs allows the US government to snoop on people without any laws being broken.
This also means NSA can force Big Companies to roll over and forbid Big Companies from
telling you they rolled over. These Big Companies include Microsoft, Google, yahoo,
apple, facebook, YouTube, etc. But they claim to have no involvement what so ever with the
government. Since the beginning of the creation of the NSA, they have done nothing but
illegalities and have become severely hypocritical to what the USA claims to be. It is
understandable that they are wanting to protect their people but it gives them no right to spy
in people's privacy.
When Edward Snowden first came to the scene no one had any idea who he was or
what his importance was. Looking through his background it shows that Snowden was well
educated and that lead him to be more observant in things that others might not have a
problem with. Born in North Carolina in 1983, Edward Snowden worked for the National
Security Agency, also referred as the NSA, through subcontractor Booz Allen in the

organization's Oahu (Hawaii) office(McGregor, "The Snowden Files"). During his time
there, Snowden collected top-secret documents regarding NSA domestic surveillance
practices that he found disturbing. After he had compiled a large storage of documents,
Snowden told his NSA supervisor that he needed a leave of absence for medical reasons,
stating he had been diagnosed with epilepsy (sudden recurrent episodes of sensory
disturbance, loss of consciousness, or convulsions). After Snowden fled to Hong Kong
(China) on May 20, 2013 and met with Guardian journalists and filmmaker Laura Poetries,
newspapers began printing the documents that he had leaked, many of them detailing the
monitoring of American citizens and foreign allies as well. The U.S. has since charged
Snowden with violations of the Espionage Act while many groups call him a hero. Snowden
has found asylum in Russia and continues to speak about his work.
When Barack Obama first went into office he promised his people to be transparent
with the public, but failed in keeping his word. He hid the NSA surveillance programs from
the public and when he did speak on it, he said they only collected meta-data. Meta- data is
"data that provides information about other data" ("Common sense on spying") and is public
information that anyone can get if they wanted. Then the Obama administration's Justice
Department accepted that the agency had been guilty of "over-collection" of domestic
communications but claimed the excess had been accidental. Edward Snowden did attempt to
safeguard certain information about the USA that if revealed, would have done substantial
harm to the US security interest. But it was obvious that he did not put much effort because
many personal reputations were damaged, millions of dollars in repercussions, and his
response to it all? "I don't see myself as a hero because what I'm doing is self interested: I
don't want to live in a world where there's no privacy and therefore no room for intellectual

exploration and creativity" (Peterson, "Edward Snowden Says He Would Go to Jail to Come
Back to the U.S"). The US Government disproved that they can be trusted and it's all about
their people. Civilians can't even trust the president they elect to tell them the truth and fix
what is so clearly wrong. All they do is apologize and continue to do the same thing.
Not only did the NSA continue to spy on civilians but they also did it to allied
countries as well. This lead to many allied countries have suspicions that the US government
didn't fully trust in their relationship and was looking into them as well. So Allied countries
began to look into whether or not the U.S was looking through other possible information
that could have been compromised as well. In response to the serial revelations of National
Security Agency (NSA) spying against allied countries, the Obama administration offers two
standard explanations. "One is pragmatic: sweeping up phone records and other data in
places such as France and Germany is an important counterterrorism operation that protects
citizens of those nations as well as Americans" ("Common Sense on Spying"). Since the
information was let out many apologize were sent and was said that the programs needed a
retuning. Seeing how Snowden still has alliances, it is obvious that many alliances have been
damaged/ destroyed.
The effects the trust barrier created by the NSA lead to severe break in relationships
and potential negotiations as well. Reports that the US National Security Agency has
collected internet and telephone data in Europe influenced negotiations for a proposed
Transatlantic Trade and Partnership and require new understanding on rules for the digital
economy (Grabiner, "Government and Market Surveillance"). Bruce Stokes, director of
global economic attitudes at the Pew Research Center, reports on recent surveys: A majority
of Americans suggest that it's unacceptable for the United States to monitor phone calls of

the leaders of allied nations; also, majorities in Germany, France, Sweden, the United States though not in Britain - suggest that a nation's surveillance of its own citizens' telephone or
internet data for security purposes is not justified (Grabiner, "Government and Market
Surveillance"). Majorities in Germany, French, and Sweden also do not find spying on
citizens in other nations as justifiable. Favorable ratings of the United States are on the
decline. Europeans now closely eye data collections by businesses and may consider
regulations on cross-border transfers, while U.S companies point to potential economic
benefits in detecting big-data secrets.
The NSA surveillance programs are overbroad, illegal, and unconstitutional. It
violates Americans right to privacy. The government has also failed to be transparent with
the public about the extent of its surveillance programs. Though the Fourth Amendment
protects people from unreasonable searches and seizures by the government and its right to
privacy. It states that the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers,
and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated...requires law
enforcement agents to establish probable cause and obtain court-issued warrants for ANY
searches and seizures (Grabiner, "Government and Market Surveillance"). The NSA
operates in secrecy, making it unaccountable to the public. This concerns the public because
broad collection of Americans private data opens the door for future abuses and possibly
even the formation of a totalitarian state.
The NSA retorts to such claims that their only motive in collecting data on U.S
residents' phone calls and Internet activity is to root out any terrorist networks. They also
narrow surveillance to foreign targets and does its best to protect the USA from terrorists
while respecting Americans' civil liberties. The Fourth Amendment is not a guarantee against

all searches and seizures, but only those that are deemed unreasonable under the law ("NSA
Surveillance Programs"). The NSA also says that their authority came by the Patriot Act,
Section 215, which allows them to investigate and search anything that is tangible,
suspicious, and/or harmful to the public("NSA Surveillance Programs"). If the they wanted to
counter terrorist attacks and claim to be doing nothing wrong, then why didn't they openly
tell civilians what they were up to. Instead of going in the secretive direction and trying to
keep it as far away from the people.
Washington post, stated the he is willing to work on a deal to return to the USA.
Edward Snowden stated that, he is willing to go to jail... volunteered to go to prison with the
government many times(Peterson, "Edward Snowden Says He Would Go to Jail to Come
Back to the U.S"). He has attempted to work some sort of deal with the government but no
one has responded to his offer. He told the government that he'd go to prison ONLY for the
right purpose. Meaning that, he didn't want to allow the law to become a political weapon or
agree to scare people away from standing up for their rights, no matter how good the deal. as
of May 1, 2016 Snowden still faces multiple felony charges and could potentially serve up to
three decades in prison. Snowden knew he was going to face time in jail because of the
Espionage Act, which finds anyone guilty who provides any information to the public,
regardless of whether it is right or wrong. Although what Snowden did was illegal and many
people could find justifications for his jail sentencing, he should not be punished harshly
because what the government did was also illegal and broke relationships between their
people and other allied countries as well.