The NSA, Government Spying, and Privacy - Essay Example

Business records and domestic phone calls got recorded (Lee 1). Snowden also releases that the NSA has been spying on the foreign leaders. From the report, it had targeted at least 35 leaders. The Agency also spies on ordinary people overseas. It has been collecting data from common people, as in Germany and Brazil. The Agency also tracked the telephone location around the world (Lee 1). The agency does not have the authority to target the cell phone users deliberately in the US, but it collected the phone records incidentally.

With nine major internet companies, the PRISM program lets the National Security Agency and access to the private user data on the online services. Snowden reveals that the companies comprise of the Google, Microsoft, YouTube, Facebook, Pal Talk, Yahoo, Skype, Apple, and AOL. The program enables NSA to get private information such as stored documents, Facebook messages, and emails (Lee 1). The NSA uses the Tailored Access Operations in hacking a wide variety of business IT systems and consumer gadgets.

It also taps long distance internet connections. The agency works with countries around the world and taps into fiber optic cables known to carry much fiber optic data. Moreover, NSA has also intercepted the data flowing from Yahoo and Google data centers. From the encryption as one log into Gmail is an example in which the Agency harvested the bulk user data. The agency has also been collecting information on the internet usage of American citizens between the years 2001 to 2011 (Lee 1). NSA has also undermined the security of encryption products by persuading technology companies to make their products exploitable.

Modification of the product was to make them vulnerable to attacks by the agency. The company has also been using tracking cookies in choosing hacking targets. In 2013, the company cracked one of the most popular encryption standards, A5 and intercepted contents of the cell