Documentary Citizenfour Thesis Statement

After the gruesome attacks of 9/11, the United States government passed a legislation called the Patriot Act in attempt to cut down on the terror attacks. This act gives the NSA, or National Security Agency, the ability to oversee our actions. The NSA’s approach to surveilling the population is obtaining the information by tapping into technology, such as phone calls, internet pages and searches, and viewing emails and texts. Thus, controversy has triggered due to the fact that these actions are unconstitutional, and much terrorism that remains. The NSA should be greatly altered because they invade the privacy of Americans, unlawfully goes against the constitution, and we lose our rights.

It is very important to use surveillance, but if you use it unjustly it can give more power to public order than individual rights. It causes a similar problem as the ones mentioned before, that it can prove challenging to identify if you had a good reason to use surveillance. You might not always know if you have a good enough reason to use surveillance, but you should exercise your best judgement to decide whether or not to use

(AGG) As Daniel J. Boorstin had clarified, “The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.” (Goodreads) This relates to the government form Fahrenheit 451 trying to hide the truth from the society, and had eventually killed them. (BS-1) The government tries to control the amount of knowledge and take advantage of the lack of knowledge.

This allowed citizens to obtain rights that threatened the government’s power. “That it is the right of the subjects to petition the king, and all commitments and prosecutions for such petitioning are illegal” (English Bill of Rights). The Constitution similarly allows for petitioning of the government, this can be seen as a way to gather constructive criticism from the general public even if it does weaken the integrity of the government (U.S. Constitution Amendment I). The English Bill of Rights and the Constitution both allow for citizens to own arms. (U.S. Constitution Amendment II)

With the advancement of surveillance technology, many citizens feel that their privacy rights have been violated due to homeland security and the threat of terrorism. Throughout history our government has implemented domestic and international surveillance as a way to safeguard our society from other countries. Now the question that seems to arise within our society is if the government is infringing on our civil liberties? Or is this indeed protecting our nation from imminent danger?

Governments need some sorts of censorships in place to keep things that are meant to be kept secret secret (Blankley). Certain government missions have been compromised because media sources have gotten wind of the mission(Panetta). Leon E. Panetta (director of the CIA from February 2009 to June 2011) said this about leaks of classified information “When information about our intelligence, our people, or our operations appears in the media, it does incredible damage to our nation’s security and our ability to do our job of protecting the nation. More importantly, it could jeopardize lives. For this reason, such leaks cannot be tolerated.

The nation can only protect itself to a certain extent but when it comes to terrorist they cannot protect themselves from such people so it is the duty of National Security to step in and to do so they use certain procedures like torture to gain information from the terrorists. If National Security did not use torture to retrieve some of the information it has, then many citizens would be in danger because of timed bombing, assassinations and planned attacks. Not using torture only makes it difficult for National Security to attain information because nobody would be afraid of the treatment they would receive from withholding important information and not only making it difficult but the process of attaining the information without using torture would take longer and for all we know there could be a ticking bomb. Torture is an advanced interrogation technique and people need to understand this. The world is developing and techniques will always change and become better just like technology does.

All the American people has been talking about this scandal and some of them think that it´s great for the national security but other people say that it's a crime because the government its violation a fundamental law that is the privacy law, I include

They criticize the government and condemn the security measures. However, they don't want to admit that many terrorist attacks were prevented by wiretapping, monitoring the internet, and so on. Professor Levinson states that it is “spying”. I would call it “a desire to defend the people, to protect their lives and health from the terrorist

Torture When it comes to the topic of torture, some of us will readily agree that torture is necessary when dealing with terrorists. Where this agreement usually ends, however, is on the question of receiving false information. Whereas some are convinced that torture is the only way to get information out of terrorist who are threatening to put thousands of innocent lives in danger. Others maintain that doing this will violate laws such as the Bill Of Rights which forbids cruel and unusual punishment. My own view, however, is that terrorism aims to spread and increase fear within civil society in order to achieve certain political goals.

Government Surveillance violates our Bill of Right The Fourth Amendment protects the people from unreasonable searches from the police or any other government official. I agree with Christopher Soghoian, technology can in fact be a civil rights issue due to government surveillance. Invading our civil rights by government officials has been attempted more than once before.

The patriotic Act has been highly controversial and widely citied The act provides sweeping power to government agencies. That is in monitoring the personal habits of terrorism suspects and anyone residing in the United States, or a U.S. citizen residing abroad. Individuals fear that this can be power can be abused.

The patriot act has in my opion violated the 4th amendment. It has its advantages as far as terrorizim but to normal citzens this is a complete violation of our privacy. bThe late Benjermin Franklin warned us about trading our liberty for sucureity. This act has taken away a lot of our liberties it gives the government way too much power to invade our privacy. They now have unprecedented power to monitor the phone calls, e-mails, without a warrant.

In spying on its citizens America would be enabling the abuse of citizens through controlling their actions exploiting their lives. A way this could be observed is by bugging phones to listen in on conversations. “We must not ignore the costs to liberty and privacy of intercepting phone calls and other electronic communications”, (Posner 2). Although public safety is a concern, the greater threat comes from denying citizens their rights and protecting them from tyrannical leaders. First citizens will lose their independence, then they will be stripped of their freedom by restraining their actions.

And also in the book “63 Documents the government Doesn’t Want you to read” has some of the documents that have also been blanked out in certain parts of it, maybe also this book is considered as threat to the national security like “Operationq1. This is a type of censorship, and proof of how we do not actually have freedom of speech. One of the “classified” documents that was leaked was an assassination plan.