How Much Surveillance Is Legitimate?

This chapter deals with the issues following the disclosures in 2013 about two surveillance programs the NSA is conducting. One is known as “Bulk Collection of Telephone Metadata,” which collects, stores, and analyzes the records of a significant portion of the phone calls made and received in the United States (from here on “phone surveillance”). The other, known as PRISM, collects private electronic communications from a number of major online providers such as Google and Facebook and is focused on non-Americans. ¹ This chapter focuses on the specific issues raised by these two programs, although they have attributes and raise issues that are also relevant to other national security programs. The chapter draws on a liberal communitarian approach in assessing the issues at hand. This approach will be discussed in part I of this chapter. Part II responds to critics of the programs who hold that such surveillance is neither needed nor effective. Part III examines major specific grounds on which phone surveillance has been criticized and justified. Part IV lays out similar analysis regarding the PRISM program. Part V examines the alternative ways both surveillance programs may be better controlled, on the grounds that the more the government surveils, the more it needs to be surveiled. Part VI closes the chapter with a discussion about the potential danger these program pose if the US government is overtaken by a McCarthy-like figure or even a tyrant.