![]() ![]() Political terrorists had killed scores of European officials in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Keeping Tabs on Anarchists and Bolsheviksīefore the United States worried about the threat of jihadi terrorists, the nation was gripped by a fear of anarchists. ![]() Regardless of what happens in the wake of the Snowden controversy, these tensions are not likely to evaporate as long as the United States continues to engage in any form of spying and to search domestically for enemies, both real and perceived. While the Snowden revelations have created tremendous controversy in the United States and around the world (as Germany’s Angela Merkel will attest), some of the questions the documents raise have been with us for at least a century.Ĭan an intelligence agency successfully operate within the bounds of the law and under the supervision of a democratic government? Can the United States spy on foreign targets without creating an organization able to spy domestically? Can a line be successfully drawn between domestic and foreign intelligence? Can we ensure that innocent citizens do not get caught up in the hunt for internal enemies? Who should be considered an internal enemy? He promised that reforms would be made to foster greater trust in the system. Obama presented the activities as part of a necessary activity to protect the United States from terrorism, while asserting that laws prevented the “willy-nilly” taking of private information. ![]() President Barack Obama condemned Snowden for leaking, claiming there were other, official channels through which Snowden could have made known his concerns with the program. One of the documents leaked to the Guardian claimed that the NSA’s tools allowed them to see “nearly everything a typical user does on the internet.” emails were gathered up as part of the program. The agency also monitored foreign emails through a program called Prism, part of a larger internet collection effort called Upstream while targeted abroad, the NSA has admitted that U.S. telecommunications companies, revealing the date, time, location, and recipient of phone calls across the United States. One NSA program, unofficially called 215, collected metadata from U.S. Yet, the massive NSA intelligence-gathering programs revealed by Snowden are unprecedented in their sheer scale, their advanced technologies, and in the legal foundation that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court offered them. It was made instead in the 1970s by the Senate’s Church Committee when it held hearings on the activities of the CIA, the FBI, and the NSA.ĭomestic surveillance intended to protect American citizens has been a part of the fabric of American life for more than a hundred years. Perhaps surprisingly, that warning was not issued in the wake of the cache of documents leaked by former civilian security contractor Edward Snowden to the Washington Post and the Guardian this past summer. The potential of the National Security Agency (NSA) “to violate the privacy of American citizens is unmatched by any other intelligence agency,” especially as telecommunication technology advances. Read Origins for more on American current events and history: “Class Warfare” in American Politics, Detroit and America’s Urban Woes, Mass Unemployment, Populism and American Politics, Immigration Policy, the Mortgage and Housing Crisis, American Political Redistricting, and the American Two-Party System.Īlso be sure to catch our podcast History Talk with guests David Hadley, Nicholas Breyfogle, and Steven Conn as they discuss the NSA in the current national and global environment. Beyond the question of personal privacy in the digital age, however, are a set of structural questions as well: How can the judicial process be transparent while still preserving state secrets? How can we draw a line to distinguish between domestic surveillance and foreign spying? How does spying strain the relationship between the President and Congress? As historian David Hadley describes these are questions that have bedeviled American policy-makers, politicians, and citizens for over a century. Classified documents leaked by private contractor Edward Snowden have raised serious concerns about privacy rights both in the United States and internationally. ![]()
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