Intruding Privacy

The last few days have been difficult for the Obama administration to control the outrage against allegations, which have now been accepted by the administration, against the NSA 'spying' on foreign nationals (or Americans, unintentionally). Firstly, there was a leaked, of course, document stating that Verizon has been court ordered to provide broad details of any telephonic communication done on their network. Next Washington Post comes along with a few leaked, of course, slides and data about a NSA program called PRISM. PRISM essentially collects data from the big internet companies like Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Apple etc and helps the NSA create a report on foreign nationals and some american nationals, unintentionally of-course.

These revelations have bought utmost outrage against the Government and the NSA. I don't think they deserve it.

Let's say they are onto one's internet trail. They have captured the email transactions, social network activities (which are mostly public already) and bank transfers. I am pretty sure the people at NSA have a better alternative than to read the millions, if not billions, of email sent daily. Nor do they worry about your bank details. They have access to a Fed Bank. They don't care about peanuts in your bank accounts. 

What these programs have to do with the public? They are not meant for the majority of us. They are safety precautions to help NSA (and other abbreviated Govt. organisations) to keep tabs on the law offenders. It is better to be safe than sorry. These are the same people who would have, in some way, helped catch the Boston terrorists in just days. And, such programs cannot be made public. With national security at risk, these are not to be disclosed.

Whenever I read an article on the same lines, I remind myself of one of my favorite quotes :

If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place --- Eric Schmidt

I read the news of Obama defending these arguments of intruding privacy. He terms it as "modest encroachments on privacy". I don't really think they are modest but this shows what they are capable of. But he is right when he says "There are trade-offs invovled".

I would be surprised and happy if we had such programs in India too. Then I would atleast stop uploading all my photos on Dropbox, Google+. Anyways, they will have a copy. And with college students hacking around CBSE ICSE websites, I should be able to access my photos uploads right?