Civil Rights Blog- Government Surveillance- Luke

     For my blog, I decided to write about government surveillance techniques and 'spying'. While this is inherently not necessarily a "civil rights" issue, it is somewhat derivative of fear and a little bit of prejudice, and I thought it was interesting to write about. For many years people have realized and understood that the government is constantly paying close attention to the people of the US. In early 2013, Edward Snowden started to release classified documents on government surveillance on agencies such as the NSA and the UK's GCHQ. These leaks have revealed programs and tools that these agencies have, such as phone tapping, email viewing, and other internet communication interception. A lot of these US surveillance programs came after the 9/11 attacks in 2001. Some signs of this 'war on terror' are pointing to a decrease in civil rights among all people. While I personally don't have a strong opinion on this, I can understand what people are thinking.

     PRISM is another surveillance program, led by the United States (But backed by many other nations), that collects internet communication data from large companies. These companies include Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo!, Google, Facebook, Paltalk, YouTube, AOL, and Skype. It was later revealed that 98% of this data is collected from Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo!. With these major companies participating in the program, there is a high chance that the majority of the population has been caught up in it. This raises the question of whether or not this is infringing on any rights that we, the people of the US, have. While technically it seems like an invasion of privacy, the governments justify their actions for "safety" and "security". The vague standards put on "suspicious activities" is more of a superstitious activity in itself, rather than 90% of what they watch. The real question is if this is really a civil rights issue, and frankly, I don't know.