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What the Average Joe should know about NSA

The National Security Agency has attracted the ire of the public recently. The actions of

the organization have been justified time and again by officials, but the dust has hardly

settled. Now civil libertarians and tech firms have started taking a stand against the
organization and have asked the government for tighter rules and regulations. But what

of the common man? Prof. Tung Yin, in a recent interview, highlighted many aspects
that every American should keep in mind about the NSA.

The Patriot Act

A lot of ambiguity exists on where to draw the line with the Patriot Act. Many times a lot

of what people feel relates to the act has nothing to do with it at all. As a piece of
legislation, the Patriot Act needs some reformation, but its removal is not warranted. In

the context of the NSA, Yin believes that “there are parts of the Patriot Act that made it
easier for the government to get and to share what we call foreign intelligence

information and this is a lot of what the NSA is going after. But you can see the issue

here is that the police or the government has to have a probable cause to believe that
the person has already committed a crime. And the NSA is not going to be in that

position. They are in the position of trying to figure out, if we think this is what they are
doing, who may be planning terrorist attacks or whatever. And they’re doing a big

dragnet of everybody, trying to figure out among everybody ‘who should we be

spending more time on’. So they can’t possibly meet that probable cause standard.”

LOVEINT: what you should know
When news broke that NSA employees had been tracking their exes and significant

others through the database, it surprised no one. It is enough to make anyone paranoid,
but there isn’t much you can do about it. Yin highlights that one wouldn’t know that the

NSA had any data on them unless they were being dragged out into a criminal court

case. And in that case anyone would have bigger problems to deal with than whether or
not their lovelorn communication had been seen by government. But by some fluke if

27 Cyber Warnings E-Magazine – December 2013 Edition
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