NSA Spy Agency Analysis

What if it was revealed that the President of the United States was intentionally violating the Constitution? The very Constitution which our founding fathers had written 200 years ago to protect our freedom. What if, instead of apologizing, the President justified this gross violation with the intent of protecting our nation by a super-secret spy agency? That frightening scenario came into fruition in 2002, when in light of the 9/11 attacks, President Bush signed a secret order authorizing the NSA to eavesdrop on citizens without their knowledge. On the 5th of June 2013, the world was forever changed. The Guardian had just published an article exposing a top secret court order requiring Verizon to hand over millions of customers’ phone records
The NSA had initiated an unconstitutional mass surveillance of American’s communications, domestic and abroad. The most frightening fact is that the public never knew this was happening before the Edward Snowden leaks. In 2008, President Bush signed the FISA Amendment Act into law. This act greatly expanded the NSA’s authority to monitor electronic communications of American citizens. Proponents of the NSA argue that the NSA’s key objective is to maintain our national security, and monitoring communications can be a great tool to prevent acts of terrorism on our soil. Despite this, acts of terrorism such as the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013, could not be stopped. The perpetrators were both American citizens, and had lived in the States for a period of time. Why couldn’t the NSA, with billions of taxpayers’ dollars and its vast intelligence apparatus, prevent the loss of 3 lives and 264 injuries?
In its persistent effort to collect and monitor all electronic communications, the NSA leads a campaign to undermine encryption, place backdoors in both hardware and software and amass a stockpile of vulnerabilities and exploits. “For the past decade, N.S.A. has led an aggressive, multipronged effort to break widely used Internet encryption technologies,” as stated in a memo from Government Communications Headquarters, the NSA’s counterpart agency in the UK (Nicole Perlroth). With support from the CIA and FBI, the NSA has also installed spy tools to monitor internet activity in network routers intercepted from US manufacturers like Cisco (Silbert). Furthermore, as a part of its data collection program, the NSA actively influences US and foreign IT industries to modify the design of their commercial products, making it more susceptible to exploitation. Such actions violate privacy rights of consumers, and in turn undermines confidence in the industry. The insertion of backdoors and vulnerabilities in systems are particularly troubling as such actions weakens cybersecurity as a whole, and could potentially backfire on us. The tools implemented by the NSA in its data collection program could one day be exploited by foreign