The news regarding United States surveillance programs and potential to violate privacy continues to show the tip of the ice burg. The Edward Snowden case has revealed new questionable abuses of power by the NSA.
Facebook and the phenomenon of social media, where many of us post our thoughts, photos, check in locations, plan events, and make connections, is now part of The NSA espionage tactics as revealed the week of September 28th 2013. It appears that NSA uses massive collections of electronic data to create a graphic analysis of some American citizen’s social connections, which includes travel, location, associates, as well as Facebook.
Even Mark Zuckerberg reacted to the revelations with NBC summarizing his point of view that “revelations about U.S. government surveillance hurt users’ trust in Internet companies and that knowing more about the programs would help relieve some of the public concerns.”
There are growing and relevant concerns about the NSA prying into our communications and social media. Foremost among then is the potential for abuse and Facebook, with its ability to illustrate a picture of persons life, past, present and future, as well as the converging amount of personal information, definitely seems like a paramount target for abuse.
As also reported by NBC News, revelations recently surfaced that NSA employees were actively abusing their power and privileges by spying on the communications of their significant others, completely violating their own work agenda and proper conduct to use their tools in order to spy on terrorist suspects and international criminals.
Again, this raises the question of how far governments are willing to go, and how easily people in power can give into the temptations that come with power. It’s likely that spying on significant others is more wide spread than what has been revealed by the NSA and in any case, the public’s privacy continues to be undermined, questioned and most likely abused.
People should also question what information companies like Facebook are willing to sell or give the government as well as private entities.Perhaps the more ominous question is if the country or world were induced into a state of emergency or another 9/11 like attacked occurred, how many people would become innocent victims of the onslaught of privacy? Would people be detained on partial or circumstantial evidence based on Facebook connections?
The public should be questioning both the United States government and Facebook in regards to privacy, transparency and their right especially at time when so much information is coming forth because if left unchecked, personal privacy make become a victim of circumstance at the cost of many whether innocent or guilty.