An Ethical Argument - Spying and Surveillance

Overview
Recently, there has been a lot of controversary over the National Security Agency (NSA) and its spying of Americans as well as other countries.  This issue falls under Computer Science because you must hack or program a device in order to record surveillance of it.  Lately, reports have come out that the NSA has access to a nearly limitless amount of private content such as phone calls and internet communications.


Connection to Computer-Science
Spying and surveillance relates to computer science in a variety of ways, but it all really comes down to programming.  Our ISPs (internet service providers) allow the government access to our browsing history by law.  Our browsing history is recorded by our ISP and is given straight to the government for analysis and storage.  It must be programmed and coded by our ISP to store the information as well as retrieve encrypted information.  Overall, computer science plays a heavy role behind the scenes of internet security and spying.  Think of it kind of like anti-spyware software that you can install on your computer, only the spyware is hard coded and there is no way to stop it.




Positives
Through surveillance of its citizens, the NSA claims to have resolved several issues and terrorist attacks before they have occurred.  There have been multiple cases where the NSA intercepted a possible terrorist attack successfully and got a guilty plea from the suspects.  It can be argued that if spying on telephone or internet communications have even saved a few lives, it is surely a successful program, even if it is not entirely well liked.  It is difficult to appreciate something that happens so deep behind the scenes and you only rarely hear about foiled terrorism plans.


Negatives
The most clear issue behind the NSA spying and surveillance is the infringement of privacy.  You would expect that if you were to send an email or have a phone call that it would be kept private.  The NSA has access to a significant amount of internet traffic each day and they can review anything that has been flagged as suspicious.  One huge problem with dealing with all this suspicious activity is the amount of false positives.  For the NSA, false positives could mean innocent people are monitored, detained, find themselves on no-fly lists or are otherwise inconvenienced, and that the agency spends resources inefficiently.  This infringement of privacy has many citizens upset.


My Stance
Personally, I support the idea of spying on everyone for suspicious activity.  I feel that if you have nothing to hide and you don't do anything suspicious you should have no reason to worry.  I think that if the system has even saved a few lives, it is worth the resources we spend.  If you had a loved one that was injured from a terrorist attack, you would want every system possible in place to prevent such attacks.  However, I do also feel that the NSA may be a bit extreme.  I don't believe that the NSA's methods of finding terrorist activity is as well-defined as it should be.  They shouldn't need so much access to so much information; they should rather search for and detect any activity they deem as extremely suspicious that raises red flags.


Summary
NSA spying and surveillance of American's communications such as phone calls and e-mails is a huge controversial issue.  Many believe that it is infringing on our privacy while others feel that it is warranted.  I can understand both viewpoints but I do feel it isn't that huge of a deal.  More information is constantly being exposed and the situation constantly develops, so hopefully the issue is soon resolved in a way that makes both sides satisfied.

Any opinions or comments are welcome in the comments section...