Thoughts on Snowden and related article

Edward Snowden is a former CIA employee. In 2013, he copied and leaked classified information from the NSA without prior authorization. He revealed the United States was hacking other countries’ network and surveillance them without permission. He committed the crime, however, he insisted he was doing the right thing in order to protect human privacy.

People think about him in controversy, he has been called a whistleblower and a traitor. Some of people think he did the right thing because the rights of people must be maintained. In contrast, the others think he betrayed his own country because he revealed national secrets. From my respective, there is some truth in both sides. It is necessary to monitor communication in order to increase national security. The U.S. government is able to prevent disaster from happening if they monitored terrorist phone or computer. However, not everyone is a terrorist. Monitoring communication violates people’s rights. According to Snowden, he said NSA has led more than 61,000 hacking operations worldwide and targets contain universities, public officials and business. As a result, many people who suffered surveillance are not terrorists or government leaders. Their privacy rights were violated. In my opinion, surveillance should be operated after investigation. The government should only monitor a person who broke the law or identified as threaten to our society.

I read a relatively recent article related to the topic of surveillance and privacy. It basically talked about the transit’s director defended the use of audio surveillance systems on the trains due to legality of monitoring and ethical underpinnings. The interim executive director Dennis Martin believes audio and video recording is good to “deter criminal activity” and passenger safety.  However, he also has concerns on customer privacy rights.  From my respective, audio surveillance will contribute to ensure customer safety.  In order to ensure customer privacy rights, the rail company should keep the video records classified.  Below is the link of this article:

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2016/04/12/us/ap-us-nj-transit-surveillance-systems.html