Page 135 - Privacy in a Cyber Age Policy and Practice

9

Balancing National Security

and Individual Rights

his chapter deals with the issues that followed from the disclosures
Tin 2013 about the National Security Administration’s (NSA) two
surveillance programs. One, known as Bulk Collection of Telephone
Metadata, collects, stores, and analyzes the records of a significant portion
of the phone calls made and received in the United States (from here on,
this program will be referred to as phone surveillance). The other, known
as PRISM, collects private electronic communications from a number of
online providers such as Google and Facebook and is focused on non-
1
Americans. This chapter focuses on the specific issues raised by these
two programs, although both programs have attributes and raise issues
that are also relevant to other national security programs. I draw on a
liberal communitarian approach in its assessment of the issues at hand.
Section A of this chapter discusses this approach. Section B responds to
critics of the programs who hold that such surveillance is neither needed
nor effective. Section C examines the specific grounds on which phone
surveillance has been criticized and justified. Section D lays out a similar
analysis regarding the PRISM program. Section E examines the alternative
ways both surveillance programs may be better controlled, on the grounds
that the more the government conducts surveillance the more it needs to
be watched. Section F discusses whether accountability measures (such as
civic oversight bodies) or transparency requirements would better address
surveillance abuses that do occur. Finally, section G is a discussion about
the potential dangers these programs would pose if the U.S. government
were to be overtaken by a McCarthy-like figure or even a tyrant.

A. A Liberal Communitarian Approach

2
The liberal communitarian philosophy (as developed by the author ) assumes
that nations face several fully legitimate normative and legal claims and that