Massive information gathering systems inside the NSA
Targeted Individuals
To sift out the facts and fictions of why the National Security Agency should gather intelligence of citizens, one must eventually face the inevitable fact of the targeted civilians. The Director of the Agency, Keith Alexander, stated, “This is not about intercepting conversations between people in the United States. This is a hot pursuit of communications…associated with Al Qaeda.”(Alexander 4). The NSA does not target or monitor civilians in any way; they are only interested in civilians associated with terrorism. In fact, after the controversial Snowden Revelations, the NSA publicly announced that the Agency uses a complex technological process called “minimization” to sift out any useless and irrelevant messages. This way, the only communications - that even the top-secret NSA employees have access to - are the code-red ones, which can potentially harm the United States. Then, the Agency’s job is to eliminate these threats indirectly, and most of these communications are transferred to the Federal Bureau of Investigation(FBI) for further processing. If, for reasons unknown, the NSA somehow does accidentally get a hold of innocent citizens’ information, the employees are to automatically destroy it report the incident (It is their policy). This way, citizens’ privacies and well-being will be intruded to a minimum, if any at all. Thus, by utilizing modern technology, the algorithm-based complexities will replace humans, and the term “human errors” will soon become rare and obsolete.