Are We Being Spied on? The NSA and Mass Surveillance

Today, the NSA is one of the most powerful intelligence gathering agencies in the world. But at what point does the agency’s mass surveillance programs amount to an infringement on the democratic values it was created to defend? In an era when almost all of our communications are digital and all of our security threats are global, what expectations of privacy are even reasonable? Is it possible to protect individual privacy without sacrificing the intelligence capabilities needed to keep the U.S. and our allies safe?

Timothy H. Edgar, a long-time civil liberties activist who worked inside both the Bush and Obama intelligence communities, argues that the only way to protect Americans’ privacy is to do a better job of protecting everyone’s privacy. What must be done to bring transparency, accountability, privacy and human rights protections into comprehensive programs of intelligence collection?