Email Monitoring – How Much Is Too Much
June 17, 2009 by Admin
The National Security Agency has recently been brought to light, as they seem to have gotten a bit overzealous with their work. It appears that several people involved with the NSA feel that privacy issues have been ignored by some, and they are digging too deeply into too many private people.
In an attempt to maintain national security, officials will block off a group of phone numbers and email addresses to monitor incoming and outgoing messages, to ensure safety. Email and phone surveillance has been around a little while now, so it should not be a surprise to you. In theory all of this sounds like a good idea since they are trying to protect us. But how far are they going? CNET helps us better understand some of what is going on.
“Say you get an order to monitor a block of 1,000 e-mail addresses at a big corporation, and instead of just monitoring those, the NSA also monitors another block of 1,000 e-mail addresses at that corporation,” one senior intelligence official said. “That is the kind of problem they had.”
This is not the first time these issues have been of concern.
The recent concerns about NSA’s domestic e-mail collection follow years of unresolved legal and operational concerns within the government over the issue.
Being on the outside, it is difficult to say just how much personal privacy has been violated, and just what they are doing with these messages, but they are apparently not discarding all of the “useless” emails as they ought to be.
In any case, as with anything of great security importance, it’s a touchy and difficult issue to assess. We can only hope that these matters will be smoothed out, and officials will not continue to breach innocent citizens’ privacy. Here’s hoping, as we watch on.
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