Americans under a watchful eye

A few days ago I stumbled upon a piece at nytimes.com about government eavesdropping. I think it’s pretty much accepted, understood or perhaps expected that when governments suspect criminal behavior they’re going to carry out some surveillance. With technology today, that would naturally include telephone communications as well as email exchanges.

I wasn’t aware however, that some committees in Congress have been investigating the over use of intercepts of private communications. While reading James Risen’s and Eric Lichtblau’s piece, "E-Mail Surveillance renews concerns in Congress", I learned that one N.S.A. analyst said he was trained for a program that routinely scrutinized – without court warrants – the emails of many Americans. It makes you wonder if any of those many messages could be one (or a few) of your own.

Privacy concerns that result from the "overcollecting" of emails stem from the fact that, as the article points out, "e-mail traffic from all over the world often flows through Internet service providers based in the United States. And when the N.S.A. monitors a foreign e-mail address, it has no idea when the person using that address will send messages to someone inside the United States."

That said, I do believe as a nation we must – as nations always have had to – keep abreast and ahead of criminals and criminal activity wherever possible. Sadly, in the technological age, that sometimes means surveillance has to extend over into the sphere of private communications. That is because it may be impossible to differentiate between innocent and criminal exchanges without scrutiny. Finding the balance between real and perceived threats is the challenge before us. No wonder there is so much dispute as to where to draw the line between what we’ll allow our government to collect (then examine) and what they should just ignore.