Late October 14th, the Washington Post reported that the National Security Agency (NSA) has been sifting through millions of contact lists from email address books of personal accounts. These contact lists were taken from Yahoo, Gmail, Facebook, and Hotmail accounts that move through global data links. This information was provided by documents from NSA leaker and former NSA systems analyst, Edward Snowden. The documents were further confirmed by senior intelligence officials to be true.
The NSA’s Special Source Operations were reported to have collected over 440,000 email address contact lists in a single day last year. This would mean that over 250 million contact lists were taken in a year. The NSA continues to claim this information is logged for the use of information regarding targets for terrorism suspicion and not to look into personal information of U.S. citizens. The collection of these contact lists would be an illegal action if it were done in the U.S., but the NSA was able to get around this by intercepting lists from access points around the world.
Should your information be taken this easily without your consent or even knowledge? Should the information the government is allowed to seize include your connection with others online as well? Should the government be trusted with your information just because they say it’s for the use of fighting terrorism? Clearly these recent NSA leaks have created a great debate among the citizens of this country. The fact that even when it became public knowledge that the government was taking personal information of its citizens and logging it in a collective in order to spy on its own people for the so called use of “fighting terror”, the government came up with excuses and pretended it had nothing else to hide. We now know on top of our own information, they log information of those the government considers “affiliated” with us. Where will the line be drawn? How much information are they truly taking and what else is there that they have to hide?
Who is to even say the people in your e-mail contact list are all people affiliated with you in a significant way? They may be someone you hardly know, someone you may not even know in person at all. So why should you be drawn in with them if they are to be under suspicious activity?
Not only that, but the internet is worldwide, many people we have in our contact lists may not be from this country, wouldn’t this mean the NSA is not only taking information from U.S. citizens, but from citizens of other countries around the world? They should not have the right to collect personal information of U.S. citizens, let alone citizens of another country.
