The NSA’s Broad Purpose

Tapping Into Google and Yahoo

In this article, the NSA and it’s counterpart, the British, were exposed in copying mass amounts of data in data centers from foreign servers under Google and Yahoo. According to the article, “Google and Yahoo said that they were unaware of government accessing of their data links” (Savage, Miller,Perlroth, 2013 Par.3).Even with extended encryption across Google and Yahoo servers, the NSA was able to break their codes and collect this information. They were enraged and wanted this problem to be dealt with as quickly as possible, even though they were already suspecting the NSA doing this in the first place.

With the emails and other information collected the NSA was supposedly able to produce intelligence leads against hostile foreign governments. They tried to use loopholes in defense by saying they were “focused on “foreign” intelligence collection — not domestic — and pushed back against the notion that it was collecting abroad to “get around” legal limits imposed by domestic surveillance laws,” (Savage, Miller,Perlroth, 2013 Par.5).

Benefits to the NSA’s Actions

According to this second article, the “NSA’s Office of Research and Technology Applications (ORTA) Technology Transfer Program facilitates the exploration and formalization of partnerships between the NSA and outside organizations,” (NSA May 3, 2016 Par. 1). With these leverages in partnerships, they are able to gather information needed in order to perform “dynamic, time-sensitive mission requirements.” Within correlations with the first article, they gather this information in order to gain benefits: “Government can access external people, knowledge, intellectual property, capabilities, and facilities to achieve mission goals and promote economic growth,” (NSA May 3, 2016 Par. 3). Plus, “business can access innovative technology to achieve market advantage and differentiation,” (NSA May 3, 2016 Par. 3). This results in share cost efficiencies, leverage in R&D resources, science and technological advancements, and they speed up the process in which they finish their time-sensitive missions, as well as, technology commercialization.

So with this information, even though the NSA is technically breaking privacy policies, in order to gather the metadata of millions of people from global data centers, they use this data in the best interest for our country. Their objective is to help our country remain a major global power among countries, however, regardless of their intentions, law  is law and we should abide to what the government have created in the first place.

This is relevant in the new law from the FCC, in which requires organizations to ask the people to use their data. If this is broken, as well as, the other privacy acts, then like Snowden said in his interview with Greenwald in Hong Kong, “it could be dangerous to our democracy.”