Who is watching you?

President Bush’s Domestic Surveillance Program is now under a world a scrutiny. People like Al Gore have accused the President of flat out breaking the law repeatedly by authorizing domestic eavesdropping without court approval. Under this program the NSA uses Network Pattern Analysis and Detection to spot out certain relationships in a world of cellular and internet traffic. To pick out these threatening relationships the NSA screens traffic to and from the US using indicators such as keywords or financial transactions. Over the course of this program hundreds maybe even thousands of people have been watched by the government. This means that you or I could have been tapped. I agree that national security is a major issue that should be taken very seriously, but the American public doesn’t seem to care that their privacy has been violated in the name of safety. The big deal here to me isn’t that they are spying on people; the government has always done that and always will. It is the way they go about choosing the people they deem a threat. People are picked out on impersonal factors alone, not because they are a known villain.

Even though the legality of this program is under question the President assures the American public that he has done no wrong. “There’s no doubt in my mind it is legal… There’s no doubt in my mind there are safeguards in place to make sure the program focuses on calls coming from outside the United States in, with a belief that there’s an al Qaeda person making the call to somebody here in the States, or vice versa, but not domestic calls.” said President Bush. Taking in mind what he is saying then it is true, but what if these safe guards he is taking about fail. This program could be used for anything, from finding drug rings to spying on a specific person for the better of one man. The whole idea of this program is sketchy, but it does seem to be necessary at this point in time. The best idea would stop the program as soon as possible. And in all reality the terrorists are already probably on to us and are getting their messages through by other means.