An Invasion of Privacy?:
A Look into NSA Domestic Surveillance Policies
Potential Benefits

Most importantly, the U.S. government cites security of its citizens as being the main reason domestic surveillance is required. According to Herman (2014), only after an analyst has acquired access by a supervisor through proof of a link to terrorist can he look up the Metadata. This shows that the information acquired is not used in an irresponsible way. A concern to some is that the analysts have a wide access to the data. In many ways, the reality of such measures is permissible because the Preamble of the Constitution states that the government must ‘provide for the common defense’ of its people. However, has this interpretation of the constitution gone too far? In the current state of warfare amongst the U.S. and it enemies, it only makes sense to monitor for possible communication between terrorist via the technology used today. Price (2014) says that within the last twenty years, the government and corporate surveillance programs have been compiling large amounts of Metadata. As an aside, another benefit of Metadata in the corporate realm could be companies getting better advertisement information to better it marketing techniques to a specific consumer. Going back to the issue at hand, according to Greenwald (2014), Obama is quoted as saying, “we don’t have a domestic spying program. What we do have is some mechanisms that can track a phone number or an e-mail address that is connected to a terrorist attack” (p. 182). While people like Edward Snowden have created a state of panic between the people’s sense of security and the NSA, Americans do need to realize that there is some information that should not be public domain. Therefore, the information leaked in the Snowden scandal may not be completely true. The main potential benefit of such a database is to protect American citizens and property from any form of threat directed at the U.S.