NSA Imperialism

Recently I learned that college is not in the plan for my cousin who is a senior in High School. I was shocked to hear this because I cannot imagine myself or any of my fellow classmates not going to college, so I wanted to learn more. I learned from my uncle that my cousin is very tech-savy and has landed an internship for a company that most 4 year college graduates would  be lucky to get. He is planning on following his dream career path in computers but his end goal is especially interesting to me. Apparently, he for people in his field the prized job is working for the NSA.

This did not surprise me because I recently studied how the NSA has expanded their surveillance of American citizens dramatically since 9/11. According to a website called Democracy Now, which you can tell from the name is probably bias towards decrease in national security, and therefore the stretch of NSA coverage, "Through a program called "Prefer," the NSA uses text messages to gather data such as travel plans, contacts and credit card information." This is an insane amount of data collection, and to what end? What can be so interesting in these millions of text messages except someone saying, "OMG! so pumped to travel to Florida this weekend!" It seems a little pointless to me to go to these extremes.

 However, they areI, and because of this I can see why they would need to hire so many new tech-savy people like my cousin. I just hope they are not totally disregarding the rights of American citizens in the process. Because in America privacy is a thing that is highly valued. Even in the Declaration it originally preached, "Life, liberty and property," as core American values. And in "property," it was specifically referencing private property because owning something that you can say belongs to you and you only is a major part of individualism, which is the backbone of American ideals.