An Invasion of Privacy?:
A Look into NSA Domestic Surveillance Policies
Social Problems

There are certainly many social ripples that can happen as a result of the knowledge that the NSA has access to this surveillance type of technology. According to Greenwald, “Telephony Metadata can expose an extraordinary amount about our habits and our associations,” including our civil and political affiliations (p. 134). A database like the one described can be alarming as it could lead to ostracizing a certain group of people much like the Nazis did to the Jews but in a more technologically advance method. The problem of domestic NSA surveillance comes down to whether or not we can trust elected official and the bureaucrats in charge of these information system technologies. Sagar (2013) concludes that the leaking of information, like that of the NSA, weakens democracy by causing distrust between its citizens and elected leaders (p. 204). While it is okay to never blindly trust the government completely, there must be a certain balance of trust and distrust between the American people and the people stockpiling these massive databases. Ironically, perhaps the data collected may be doing more harm than good with respect to Americans’ trust of the government that created this agency for the intended purpose of protecting them.