Ask the Tough Questions Chris Klaus, Cls 96
Edward Snowden’s release of top secret documents has
opened up a legitimate debate on our Fourth Amendment rights (prohibiting unreasonable searches and seizures and requiring any warrant to be judicially sanctioned and supported by probable cause) and any implied rights to privacy, versus the government’s need for information and data sourcing in the context of its Global War on Terrorism. In light of this, there are several questions that need to be raised. From the Snowden disclosure, the American public and the rest of the world learned of widespread and far-reaching surveillance being conducted by the U.S. government. However, without all of the facts and justifications for the government’s decisions, it’s difficult for the public to have an open debate on the proper balance
between privacy and the War on Terror. One troubling outcome of these actions is potential for trampling on both the Fourth Amendment rights and any implied rights of privacy without any real checks and balances that have historically been incorporated into our system. More than 4 million government employees and 500,000 government contractors have top-secret clearance. Based on the Snowden disclosures, the National Security Agency is sharing U.S. citizens’ communication data not only with the Internal Revenue Service, Drug Enforcement Agency and Department of Homeland Security, but also with many other national governments, including those of Israel, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Australia and Canada. With the vast sharing of top secret data, who is protecting the rights of the U.S. citizen? And how does one protect themselves from potential abuses by the government? It’s very easy to lose trust and very hard to gain it back. With the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s encryption standards being compromised by the NSA, NSA backdoors being added to infrastructure and protocols, and the NSA forcing our high-tech industry to share keys that compromise innocent U.S. citizens’ communications, the U.S. government is breaking the trust of its citizens and the international community. The U.S. has had significant benefits from having everyone’s trust. How will the government regain it? The U.S. government’s justification that it can spy on foreigners creates a false sense of security that the spying doesn’t affect U.S. businesses and the American people. However, these actions are making it easy for all other countries to justify their own spying. Is the U.S. leading by example and justifying China, Russia and many other countries’ efforts to spy on our citizens as we are spying on theirs? President Barack Obama has welcomed a debate on the balance of privacy rights of the country’s citizens versus the need for government intervention in light of the War on Terror. The documents leaked by Snowden show that the pendulum has swung toward the War on Terror, at the risk of American citizens’ Fourth Amendment rights, implied rights of privacy and certain values that I believe the American public cherishes. The War on Terror needs to be looked at holistically and in depth in order to determine what kind of culture and society we want to live in. We need to ask the tough questions and start this debate, as Chris Klaus founded Interit has huge implications net Security Systems, which on the freedoms of people was sold to IBM in 2006. everywhere. GTALUMNIMAG.COM VOLUME 89 NO.4 2013
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