Three years ago, Edward Snowden began leaking National Security Agency documents that detailed widespread and systemic U.S. government spying on American people.
Among the surveillance programs Snowden revealed were “PRISM,” which mass collects the e-mail, voice, text, and video chats from tech companies, “XKeyscore,” which allows government analysts to search through massive databases of emails, online chats, and browsing histories, and “Dishfire,” which intercepts about 200 million text messages every day.
In the Learn Liberty video below, Cindy Cohn, Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Ronald Sievert of Texas A&M University, debate whether NSA surveillance goes too far. Is the violation of privacy simply the price of security? Or is privacy a liberty that shouldn’t be thrown away for fleeting moments of security?
It’s shaping up to be one of the defining debates of the century.