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someone is able to find out that they are being spied on then they can follow through
with a civil rights lawsuits for the violation of their privacy rights.

Facebook vs NSA
The amount of data being gathered by the NSA is nothing compared to what firms such

as Google or Facebook have collected over the years. A debate in favour of the NSA
has often revolved around the fact that people are so wired in these days. They put a lot

of information on social media sites and blogs etc without a thought for security or

privacy but argue heavily against the NSA when they list information. However, there is
a key difference. Yin says, “Facebook is entirely voluntary. I know a few people who

refused to join Facebook and if they refuse to join Facebook, then Facebook does
nothing about that. So, you can opt out from Facebook, but you can’t really opt out from

the NSA.”
The problem lies in the fact that the NSA cannot and will not exclude people from its

monitoring lists. People can try to be as private as possible but they can’t tell the NSA to

stay out of their data.

Personal Privacy vs National Security
There are double standards at play. President Obama, when he was just a candidate for

presidency, he was almost always talking the same language as civil libertarians. Such

is not the case right now. The reality is that real threats do exist. Yin adds, “It’d be easy
to be extremely critical of the NSA. I’m not saying that I would fully defend what it’s

doing, but I guess I would say that if we saw more of what it is that the NSA is coming
across, we might have a slightly different view of what’s going on.”

The government makes a valid point when it says that it could prevent 9/11 attacks if it

had the proper intel at that time. “If you compare the two like that, the tangible and
immediate [security concerns] tend to win out. But it will always win out if that’s the way

you look at it. Then civil liberties will invariably be compromised,” says Yin.

28 Cyber Warnings E-Magazine – December 2013 Edition
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