Since September 11, 2001 and the beginning of the War on Terror, the United States has become heavily focused on combating terrorism, both at home and abroad (Greenwald). However, unfortunately for the American people, combating terror has come to be largely synonymous with collecting intelligence on the American people. Never has this become so apparent as it was after Edward Snowden, who worked for a contractor with the United States government, downloaded 1.5 million files from his employer and turned these files over to the American media.
The resulting firestorm changed almost everything. Snowden is now in exile, condemned for participating in what essentially amounts to treason; however, the American people are now left to wonder what should be done with the information that he released to the world. Through the leaks, the American public became aware that the NSA issued a secret order that allowed them to collect the telephone records of millions of Verizon customers without ever telling these customers that the order occurred; it also used a program called Prism to enter through “back doors” in the Internet and collect information about citizens and their activities online (Landau 55-56). The information shows plans for cyber attacks on foreign nations, hacks on foreign computers, and data taps that take private information from the American public and integrate it into the massive cache of data that the NSA has been storing for many years (Landau 55-56; Landau 64). It is also likely that the information that has been released recently is only part of the problem and only part of the picture: Snowden was able to leave Hawaii with millions of files, but these files present only part of the picture of surveillance in the American government today (Greenwald).
The problem with answering the question of whether the Snowden data has been used to stop terrorism or crime in general is that there is no real way to answer the question itself—the NSA and the other agencies involved are, by their very nature, extraordinarily clandestine (Lee 152). According to sources in the government, the data that has been taken secretly from Americans and others has led to direct action and lives saved on 54 different occasions (Landau 62). However, there is no real way to verify this information: due to the secrecy requirements under which the NSA operates, they have been largely unwilling to give any more information about the activities that the organization has been party to in recent years (Greenwald).
Most researchers interested in this particular case have noted that despite the massive amount of information that has been gathered about the American public and individuals living within the borders of the United States, very few investigations and official charges have been filed using this information. The USA PATRIOT Act has given the American government unprecedented access to the personal information of many American citizens, and many citizens are not even aware that their personal information has been collected by the government (Greenwald; Miller and Walsh). The USA PATRIOT Act, passed in the wake of the terrorist attacks on 9/11, does provide the government with the ability to collect all this information—but many question whether this particular piece of legislation is one that should be in existence today (Greenwald; Landau 55).
There are arguments, of course, that any protections against terrorism are good protections, and that any lives saved are worth the invasion of privacy that the government is committing against its citizens. There are even arguments that suggest that if individuals have nothing to hide from the government—that is, that they are doing nothing wrong—then why should these people be afraid of government intervention or surveillance. However, privacy and the right to privacy from the government are things that are very highly prized by the American people as a whole. It is not surprising that this policy of wiretapping and sculling metadata from the Internet has had significant backlash with the American people (Landau 62-63).
Thus, the question remains: if the government is not using the bulk of this information to find and prosecute terrorists, what is the government using this information for? There is a massive amount of information publicly available to anyone interested in looking, so the question of why the government needs to use these methods to find information about Americans remains a very pertinent one. As time goes on, it is likely that more information will become available about the wiretapping and metadata collection, and it is also likely that more cases will emerge in which the NSA demonstrates that it has made good use of the information it has gleaned from the American people. However, there are still—and there should be—serious concerns about the legitimacy of privacy laws in the United States when the government can so easily violate the privacy of so many with so few knowing about these violations. The whole issue is shrouded with such secrecy that it is almost impossible to get a clear picture of the issue.
Works Cited
Greenwald, Glenn. "XKeyscore: NSA tool collects' nearly everything a user does on the internet'." The Guardian 31 (2013).
Landau, Susan. "Making sense from Snowden: What's significant in the NSA surveillance revelations." IEEE Security & Privacy 4 (2013): 54-63.
Landau, Susan. "Highlights from making sense of Snowden, part II: What's significant in the NSA revelations." Security & Privacy, IEEE 12.1 (2014): 62-64.
Lee, Newton. "The Afterlife of Total Information Awareness and Edward Snowden’s NSA Leaks." Counterterrorism and Cybersecurity. Springer International Publishing, 2015. 151-182.
Miller, Seumas, and Patrick Walsh. "The Nsa Leaks, Edward Snowden, and The Ethics and Accountability of Intelligence Collection." Ethics and the Future of Spying: Technology, National Security and Intelligence Collection(2016): 193.
