Protest Against the NSA

In May 2013 a single employee from the National Security Agency (NSA), Edward Snowden disclosed several top-secret mass surveillance programs conducted on its citizens and on members of other countries by the United States to several members of the press.  The articles presented revealed that the federal government was using tools to track United States civilians. The government stated that it was all in the interest of national security, but the damage had already been done. The result of this disclosure brought about many protests from civilians who felt that their rights were being infringed. Many cited the 4^th Amendment to the Constitution as to why what was happening was illegal. While the Amendment does not specifically state there is a right to privacy it does protect against unreasonable search and seizures by the government, and it can be argued that this constitutes an unreasonable search into citizen’s private lives.

One might ask themselves how this issue could lead to more inequality between people. It does not show it right away, but if you dig deeper you can see a startling connection. It involves the intelligence industrial complex. What that entails is that there are large technology companies (Google, Facebook, etc.), which are gathering and storing data on all of their users. The amount of users on these sites is staggering and constitutes the majority of American citizens. The NSA has set up a data collection program called PRISM

that collects stored internet data from internet companies based on their users browsing habits. These Internet companies make most of their profits from advertising, and advertising funding comes from the banks. These are the same banks that led us to a financial crisis and whose priorities lie with the bigger businesses than the “smaller” people.  What it comes down to is that these large companies gather information from these internet sites with the help of the NSA and use that information to advertise to the public based on their internet history. They then use that money they gain from that to give back to the banks, which will be reinvested into the large company, and the cycle of inequality subsists because it starts to lead to deregulation and those funds are not being well-tracked at this time. User information is being sold for profit without expressed consent by the users, and there are no real penalties at this time. These leaks show a staggering disconnect between citizens and larger corporations and proves how unequal the system really is. This is why my Lego protestor has such strong feelings about the NSA and feels that they should “Keep Your Government Eyes Off Me!”