Internet Tracking

Justin Miles

September 26, 2013

PAD 2258

Should your ISP and/or social media outlet (Google, MSN, Yahoo, Facebook) be required to let the FBI track your Internet usage?

Despite mankind’s constant want to feel protected & secured we also want our privacy. We criticize the government whenever they fail to protect however, we feel that the government is overbearing suffocating and at times serious violators of our personal space. Do we even know what we want or are we entrapped in this parent – child relationship? We’re told that our lives are private but in reality we’ve been lied to overexposed & the only secrets we may possess are the ones that we never told a soul, the ones that we never posted on the Internet.

Interestingly enough, when Facebook first launched it was limited to only to students of Harvard, it later expanded to other universities & eventually to high schools & large companies. The initial purpose of Facebook was to create a private network between students and or coworkers to connect. When it became more popular you were able to connect with others from differentiating schools or places of employment as long as you had their full name and/or email. Present-day Facebook has gone through many updates & patches, many of them were supposed security & privacy related patches however Facebook has allowed its users more easily accessible by public & more importantly by the government.

So, the question is why would Facebook or any other social media outlet release info that we deem as private? One word, PRISM. PRISM is essentially a surveillance program launched by the NSA in 2007 to acquire data that may be encrypted or not surfing around the Internet. Of course, PRISM was launched to help protect America & secure our lives in this world, but how far is too far, how much information do they really have about us, the consumer on the web. Well, initial public statements from companies such as Microsoft, Yahoo! Facebook, Google & even Apple claimed that they do not & will not release data to government agencies, many of them even going as far as to say that only under a court order may they possibly release any data.

So we’ve retained our privacy, because we were told that our privacy wouldn’t be exposed right? Unfortunately, that’s not the case Images and information leaked about PRISM states that all of those companies are releasing the information to the NSA that has been attained by other means, this data ranges from voice/video chat to file transfers to even your login credentials to sites. Protection or outright violation of space?

No government agency should be allowed by any means any access to the vast amount of information at will. People think that they want a utopian

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