Congress concerned about Public Surveillance

I was reading the New York Times (like i usually do) and i found this quite unsettling. Congress has recently been looking into the practices of the N.S.A., National Security Agency, due to improper and unethical use of email and telephone surveillance. The N.S.A. exists as security to the American people, warding off possible terrorists threats and other critical nuisances to the lives of the American people.

Several congressional committees are looking to reign in and reduce what the N.S.A. calls inadvertent overcollection. A lot of emails, domestic and foreign, pass through U.S. servers and often times it is difficult to ascertain their orgin or destination; this is why the Bush administration asked for more leeway when collecting. The N.S.A. attains court orders from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to collect emails based upon reasonable assumptions of terrorist communication and activity, but in 8 of 10 court orders reviewed, the N.S.A. is believed to have crossed legal boundaries designed to protect Americans. Rush Holt, a senator from New Jersey stated, "Some actions are so flagrant they can't be accidental." If one wants to know how it works an official offered a rudimentary explanation: "Say you get an order to monitor a block of 1,000 e-mail addresses at a big corporation, and instead of just monitoring those, the N.S.A. also monitors another block of 1,000 e-mail addresses at that corporation...that is one kind of problem they had."

One of the problems Congress is having is that the legislative bodies do not understand the nuances of the software and programs enough as to where they can produce laws corralling the N.S.A., therefore very few can challenge the statements of the N.S.A. According to the NY Times article, this is part of the concerns the Obama administration inherited from Bush, along with torturing at Guantanamo Bay and others. The N.S.A. insists they are taking measures to rectify and improve software and practices, but that too may be a myth as one former N.S.A. analyst recalls in what is described as "a series of interviews", that he was trained for a program in 2005 that repeatedly examined a large volume of Americans emails messages without court warrants. Two officials confirmed that program is still in operation.

I hope that they can work this out before it gets exponentially louder in the public sector. Perhaps now that the coals are hot and the fire is going the N.S.A. will operate as intended. I think that it is extremely important that they monitor and protect the U.S. citizens but i think protecting Americans privacy is paramount.