Government tracking is beneficial because it allows for law enforcement to quickly hunt down criminals. In the article titled “Surveillance” from Wikipedia, it states “Billions of dollars are spent each year, by agencies such as the Information Awareness Office, NSA, and the FBI, to develop, purchase, implement, and operate systems such as Carnivore, NarusInsight, and ECHELON to intercept and analyze all of this data, and extract only the information which is useful to law enforcement and intelligence agencies” (“Surveillance” 1). Here, they are saying that they sort through the information to determine whether it truly is necessary in the hunt to find whomever they are looking for. If billions of dollars are being spent on this project, one of their number one priorities as national investigation services is supposed to be to protect the public’s privacy. They cannot carry out their plans without ensuring that the information they collect secretly is being used for legal causes only.
While acknowledging that they do use third-party companies to shadow the lives of criminals and those who have wronged justice, they don’t mean to follow someone else as well. The author of the article “Your Cell Phone is Spying on You”, Ronald Bailey, writes “The police merely select the individuals to be monitored, while the actual surveillance is performed by third-parties: often, the same email providers, search engines, and telephone companies to whom consumers have entrusted their private data” (Bailey 3). Even though the consumer’s privacy rights might be violated, under the “Communications Assistance For Law Enforcement Act, all phone calls and broadband internet traffic (emails, web traffic, instant messaging,etc.) are required to be available for unimpeded real-time monitoring by Federal law enforcement agencies” (“Surveillance” 2). The law allows them to ask for anyone’s personal information if it is beneficial to the case and courts allow the use of collected evidence to be present in a case. Nothing illegal is happening, and whomever the police are trying to hunt down, the public would definitely be at advantage if that harmful person is locked away.
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Written By: Saksham Bhardwaj
Date Published: 11/23/2022
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