Surveillance

                We are the most powerful country in the world. We can handle any attack and take on the whole world. We have become the country we are by brute force and knowledge. We have the strongest military in the world but we also have the most information. Information is power.

                Our country has been known for its surveillance. We have the CIA, FBI, and NSA all working to get information about everyone. It’s been a topic of controversy lately though with leaks through Edward Snowden and new information on drones and other surveillance techniques. This blog I’m going to talk about my feelings on this subject to decide if its justified or not to spy.

                Now there are two types of spying, domestic and of course, the 007-like international intelligence. Getting information on our enemies is needed. It gives this country an edge, an edge that has won us a lot of battles and saved a lot of lives. Knowing the enemy through surveillance saves lives and must continue to happen.

                Then there is domestic surveillance that puts our country in a tough spot. The most dangerous threats to our country are attacks that could happen inside our nation. Terrorism, hacking, and other domestic attacks occur in our country all the time.  It’s these attacks that have forced our country to spy on our own people. Now in the past, spying on your own citizens doesn’t turn out to well. We have the Soviets who looked at everyone with paranoid eyes, the Nazis looking for more Jews, and all dictatorships have probably been accused of spying on their own people. We do not like that idea here in the US.  We call these governments who spy on their own people evil and in control of too much power. Yet, this is happening in our own country and people either don’t know it’s going on or don’t care.  We don’t care that our government monitors everything we do, everything we search and everything we see.  But if we want our personal business to be our personal business, we can’t just sit around and do nothing.

                I don’t really want our government knowing everything about me; they don’t have the right to just snoop in everyone’s business, when we have done nothing wrong. Snowden may have released some things that shouldn’t have been released, but he also showed the American people that our government is hiding really big secrets about us and they are hiding them from us.