ASNE Memo on the Patriot Act 2

Tony Tran

Week 6

Section 2

In the ASNE Memo on the Patriot Act 2, I relearned the whole fuss about the Snowden leaking issue. It talked about how the government can essentially surveillance all of US if it wanted to. To me, this is quite an alarming fact. But the question is if we give a shit (thats right I said it) about domestic surveillance. This had me asking my roommates about this issue and one of them referred me to John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight talk show particularly focusing on Government Surveillance. What I learned was that the majority of the people don’t understand the US government and are essentially ignorant on many issues that are actually serious. I can relate b/c I myself actually just mentally want to be ignorant because we each have our own micro problems that we need to take care first. However, this cannot mean that US citizens aren’t exempt from making tough decisions and just find some place or people to blame. In the talk show, they stated that we cannot have perfect privacy and perfect safety, which is something that is simply true. There must be some restrictions; however, it is up to not only the government, but the citizens themselves as well, to reform and make sure we have a reasonable amount of both security and privacy. And this is something that actually pertains to us because as Snowden explains in the show, “The government has a gun at your head. I’m not going to pull the trigger. You just need to trust me.” So how much faith do you have in that? What will we do to change this?

Question: So how much privacy are we willing to sacrifice for the security of the US?