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Argumentative Essay: The Shadow Factory

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Bamford, James. The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America. New York: Doubleday, 2008. Print. In this excerpt, Ted Senator describes the difficulties NSA faces when trying to discover terrorists, comparing the task to the needle in a haystack analogy, in order to justify their extensive monitoring of the populace. The prompt requires both sides of the argument, so this excerpt will show students the pro-spying attitude, one many of them will likely be unfamiliar with. The student will easily understand the passage due to the pathos and informal attitude. Students could develop several different arguments from this passage, including the necessity of surveillance to compensate for the vast cloud of information to sort through. The student could extend the given analogy, connecting it to source B and C. It could also easily become a counterargument, if the student preached enough about freedom regardless of the circumstances. In essence, a student could gain many ideas from this …show more content…

While the student must bear in mind that these statistics were tallied by the FBI, they can use the numbers in both arguments. One side would entail how ineffective the war of terror has been, since the total number of terrorist attacks have increased many times over. However, the other side would focus on how there needs to be increasing surveillance, since the limited reach the NSA had previously clearly was not enough. Stemming from the two simple uses, the statistics could be used to lead up to whichever argument the student was planning, and its use would increase the student’s logos. The chronological graph also provides the student with an overall view on the actual effects of government surveillance.
Engelhardt, Tom. Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single Superpower World. Chicago: Haymarket, 2014.

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