Selfie Surveillance

A new piece of information that came out just this past week from Edward Snowden, former N.S.A. agency contractor, was that the N.S.A. is now using collecting millions of digital images, intercepted from social media and texts and online interaction. I can relate extremely well to this, as I am a teenager living in the era of the "selfie," where many students take pictures of themselves many times a day and send them out to friends around them. There are social media sites dedicated just to posting pictures of yourself for your friends to see, phone calls are now allowing you to show your face with Apple's "Facetime"software and there are applications on the app store dedicated to the sending of your face to your friends, like "snapchat." You could say we are a generation that is obsessed with our faces.

That is why this new N.S.A. campaign will affect so many people, and with something of such great an impact, I wondered what kind of impact it will have on people like me, as I myself am an avid selfie taker. I questioned how much of this goes against my right to privacy, and as it turns out, we don't have much right to privacy at all when it comes to the sharing of digital images. According to a New York Times article, congress has largely ignored the issue, and, "unfortunately, our privacy laws provide no express protections for facial recognition data," as stated by Senator Al Franken of Minnesota. This is too bad because although the N.S.A. has not technically done anything illegal, they have overstepped their moral bounds in my opinion, because many people have pictures of themselves that they would not like to be publicly collected by a government agency. For example, "they have intercepted Webcam images, including sexually explicit material, from Yahoo users." Although I am not a proponent of exposing yourself to others online, I do think those who do make the choice to participate in that should have the right to keep that private material private. 

It worries me that since there are no regulations at all now and the N.S.A. has already gone to the extent of taking Webcam photos, what is stopping them from trespassing even further onto private property?