President Obama is set to deliver a speech on the NSA reforms he plans to implement in the wake of massive backlash his administration has encountered as a result of information uncovered in 2013 by Edward Snowden. While the main points President Obama plans to discuss on January 17 have yet to be revealed, this speech is set to be one of his most important, considering it addresses one of the largest obstacles he has encountered during his presidency.
Whether you believe Snowden is a patriot or a traitor, the truths he brought to light and the debates they’ve sparked are without a doubt some of the most challenging beasts America’s ever faced. With phone metadata, email contents, and browsing habits being collected by the tons, this violation of privacy is something right out of Orwell’s “1984.” It is even somewhat funny, if you look at it as though its a black comedy of sorts in which those guys with the tinfoil hats have been right all along. If that picture isn’t enough to scare the bajeebies out of you, I don’t know what will.
Many Americans believe the story that this massive invasion of Americans’ privacy was, and is, done all in the name of the security of the nation. While that may or may not be true, we as Americans should understand that the more we give in to this Big Brother style of surveillance and homeland security, the more we will encounter a lack of collective liberty. That would be an obvious result of the powers and free rein government institutions, such as the NSA, have. The NSA, in particular, is able to run rampant; its subgroups are allowed to hack into WiFi devices from up to 8 miles away. That means your smartphone and your laptop.
NSA apologists use various arguments to defend the widespread data mining tactics employed by the NSA, the most pathetic of them being “You have nothing to worry about if you have nothing to hide.” We, as the watched, do not get to decide what we should be worried about the watchers finding. We don’t make the rules, they do. While the NSA and American government at large may or may not be using their invasive powers for sinister, or personal, reasons, the simple fact is that where there is power, there will likely be the abuse of it.
Hopefully, if you didn’t already understand just how close to a real-life Oceania America might become if the NSA is left unchecked, you have an idea now and realize the significance of the President’s speech on January 17. Of course it is important to keep in mind that the announcement of reforms and their actual implementation are very different from one another. Snowden’s leak has shown the NSA that there is a very real threat of whistleblowing; this could lead to a bolstering of measures to silence whistleblowers, but selecting that path would undoubtedly lead to further outrage from the American public.
Every generation has a crisis to deal with — World Wars, the Great Depression, the Teapot Dome scandal — and this one is ours: the blatant violation of our privacy. Let’s make sure we acknowledge it and deal with it thoroughly and effectively so that we can ensure Orwell’s world remains dystopian fiction.
Photo courtesy of: Mirror.co.uk
