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In the wake of the 9\/11 terrorist attacks, the US government had never been so exposed in failing to protect the country. The NSA, namely, admitted that they had failed in their intelligence gathering abilities and it was evident that surveillance\u00a0needed to change in order to prevent another terrorist event from happen again. In the article published by “The Guardian,” the authors claim that the strong increase in surveillance can be credited to the 9\/11 attacks and the major increase\u00a0in cell phone and internet usage the past 10 years.<\/p>\n
Enter Edward Snowden in 2013, who exposed the “unethical” actions of the NSA by releasing classified government information to the public. Amongst the documents that Snowden released, the US government was exposed for spying on its citizens using unethical methods, such as partnering with large communication companies and hacking online encryption codes meant to protect US citizens. Snowden rationale was that, “harming people isn’t my goal. Transparency is.”<\/p>\n
So where does the finger pointing begin? As a government employee, Snowden was certainly exposed to classified information that, like much government information, was not meant to be seen by the public. So by releasing said information, he violated the obligation to his government and his nation. However, Snowden also exposed the NSA for, what he believed to be, questionable surveillance activity and gave attention to the questions: How much does the NSA know about our lives and have they taken domestic surveillance too far since 9\/11?<\/p>\n
The reason why I would favor the latter part of the previous argument is because of what the government could “hold over our heads” based on information they have collected. In the interview with Ladar Levison, Levison states\u00a0that “a lot of people have nothing to hide” but “by collecting all of this information and making it only accessible to a small group of people, we are creating a world that is that close to becoming a totalitarian state.”<\/p>\n
Nonetheless, Edward Snowden has created a near revolution that merge together elements of civil liberties, national security, and government surveillance power. Perhaps Snowden’s\u00a0wrongdoing has sparked a change in the way we think about government surveillance that otherwise may have not come about for another\u00a0couple of years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In the wake of the 9\/11 terrorist attacks, the US government had never been so exposed in failing to protect the country. The NSA, namely, admitted that they had failed in their intelligence gathering abilities and it was evident that surveillance\u00a0needed to change in order to prevent another terrorist event from happen again. In the … Continue reading Edward Snowden: Domestic Enemy or International Hero?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-298","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-group-3","category-readers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig210\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig210\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig210\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig210\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/21"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig210\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=298"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig210\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":302,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig210\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/298\/revisions\/302"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig210\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=298"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig210\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=298"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.digitaldavidson.net\/dig210\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=298"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}