Title: “Google:
'Government surveillance is on the rise'”
Author: Heather Kelly, CNN
Date: Wednesday, November 14, 2012
After the David Petraeus-Paula Broadwell scandal that has been the
highlight of the new for the past few weeks, it has become increasingly obvious
to the American people how easy it is for the U.S. government to have access to
emails and personal information. The FBI
requested access to Paula Broadwell’s personal g-mail account earlier this
year, and this request was only one of 7,969 similar requests from the
government just in the first half of 2012.
Google released the statement that they provided access to the
government for approximately 90% of the requests. Google also informed the American people that
the count of requests was 18,257 in 2011, and has increased to 20,938 in 2012
and counting. Little do many people
realize, but Google doesn’t only have access to your email, but also they can
tap into your IP address to obtain your location, as well as personal
information like credit card numbers. It
is widely accepted that the law that went into affect in 1986, the Electronic
Communications Privacy Act protects these types of privacy breeches, but
unfortunately this act is so outdated that there are many loopholes that the
government uses to access the information without warrants. For example, in the 1986 draft of this act,
e-mails, cellphones, and information stored on the “cloud” were not included 26
years ago. Clearly, there needs to be
some sort of update to this act to make the guidelines for accessing citizens
personal information, but the United States Department of Justice has made it
clear that they are opposed to any further updates to the process of obtaining
warrants for these types of things.
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