John-Nicholas Furst

Ms. Hallinan
Honors Intro. to Lit., C Block
5 June 2006
Final Essay
Who’s Listening to Your Conversations?

Do you ever think that someone may be listening to your phone conversation? The

National Security Agency (NSA) has been tapping phones and e-mails without warrants, and is

collecting huge databases of calls made since the September 11th 2001 terrorist attacks. The NSA

is collecting the calls with the hope of getting every call that originates or terminates in U.S.

borders into their database. (Cauley). They have been wiretapping in hopes of catching terrorists

before they commit their actions. Some people believe that the wiretapping is good because it is

preventing another terrorist attack. However preventing a terrorist attack this way is just

unacceptable. The people whose phones are being tapped, and conversations recorded, are being

treated unjustly because their privacy is being invaded by the NSA’s illegal conduct.

The NSA is involved in illegal conduct in two ways: first, the NSA has been conducting

wiretaps without warrants, and second, it has forced telecoms to turnover information about the

calling patterns of their customers. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) was created

to give limits and checks to what the U.S. government can do involving spying on people’s

conversations, whether they are in the U.S. or outside of it. (Holzer). Not only is the NSA

listening in on people’s conversations but they are also forcing telecoms to give up databases that

have records of calls made and received. “Section 222 of the 1934 Communications Act forbids

phone companies from giving out data on the calling patterns of their customers.” (Holzer). The

NSA is forcing the telecoms to break the law and the NSA is also breaking the law by its

warrantless wiretaps. If the NSA continues tapping people’s phones and e-mails without

permission or authorization it is violating the FISA, as amended in 2001. The FISA was created
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to make the NSA get authorization before it puts taps on people’s communications. The NSA is

going against the law when they put in wiretaps without authorization. The NSA is defending

their actions by saying that throughout U.S. history government organizations have intercepted

and listened to people’s conversations in times of war. Many groups have come out saying that

doesn’t matter because when that was happening in the past people’s rights were not as clearly

protected as they are since 2001 by the FISA. But doing it now violates people’s rights. Not only

is tapping people’s phones without warrants illegal, but it also invades people’s privacy when

they may be talking about something that is privileged or of a personal nature.

People deserve a right to privacy. There are U.S. laws and bills that protect people’s

rights, including the right to privacy. The NSA’s wiretapping headquarters are located in AT&T’s

switching office in San Francisco. They have the power to recreate any communications that

come through their Internet Protocol (IP) network. “Anything that comes through (an IP

network), we can record...We can reconstruct all of their e-mails along with attachments, see

what web pages they clicked on, we can even reconstruct their VOIP [Voice Over IP] calls”

(Earnest). President Bush said “We're not mining or trolling through the personal lives of

millions of innocent Americans.” There is no evidence to support Bush’s statement. Numerous

news agencies have reported that three major telecoms, AT&T, Verizon, and Bellsouth, have been

forced into giving up records of tens of millions of phone conversations to the NSA so they can

look for “suspicious patterns” (Forbes.com). When the NSA taps a phone line they could be

easily listening to a criminal talking to his lawyer about his case and that would be something

privileged that no one else has the right to hear about. The NSA records all of the conversations it

listens to, and if a recording gets leaked out of the NSA, the person may be convicted of a crime.

If his conversation had not been listened to by the NSA, he may have won his case and not been
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convicted. The NSA is not only invading legally privileged conversations, they may be

infringing on personal conversations.

The NSA could also be listening to people’s personal conversations. When people are

talking about topics of a personal nature over the telephone, they don’t expect their conversations

to be listened to by a third party or recorded without their knowledge. “The NSA has shown

absolutely no regard for people’s personal privacy” (Coder). When a person is on the phone he

expects that the only person who can hear his conversation is the other person on the line. People

have the reasonable belief that whatever they say will stay between the two parties and because

of this belief they are willing to share more personal things over the telephone. For example, a

person may be calling someone with whom he had slept because he has just recently discovered

he had AIDS, and he wants the other person to go and get a check up to make sure the other

person doesn’t have it also. The person calling doesn’t want anyone else to know he has AIDS,

and if his conversation was being listened to and recorded it could possibly ruin his career.

People are being treated unjustly because their phones are being tapped, and calling

patterns are being monitored, and their privacy is being invaded. People’s privacy and personal

lives are being invaded by the warrantless NSA wiretappings which are illegal yet they continue

to occur. Currently this is a very large issue. The government wants to continue using warrantless

wiretappings to attempt to catch terrorists, but American society, for the most part, disagrees with

the ways it is going about it. To help stop the warrantless wiretappings one should join a group

that is opposed to tappings and is working to stop them. The major group that is working to stop

the warrantless wiretappings is the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

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Cauley, Leslie. "NSA has massive database of Americans' phone calls." USA

Today 5 11 2006. 13 Jun. 2006 <http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-05-10-

nsa_x.htm>.

Holzer, Jessica. "Did The NSA Break The Law?." Forbes 05 11 2006: 4 Jun.

2006 <http://www.forbes.com/2006/05/11/nsa-wiretap-bush_cx_jh_0511NSA.html>.

Oswald, Ed. FCC Won't Investigate NSA Phone Logs. Beta News. 24 May 2006. 4 Jun.

2006 <http://www.betanews.com/article/FCC_Wont_Investigate_NSA_Phone_Logs/1148

485604>.