Gettysburg Address Analysis

As famously expressed by Abraham Lincoln in his Gettysburg Address, the American government is “of the people, by the people, for the people”. In accordance with this viewpoint, the government serves the needs of the citizens based on the principals captured in the US Constitution and the Amendments. The Constitution thus functions as a foundation of the free society, restricting the executive and legislative branches of the government from encroaching on the rights of the American citizens. The Tenth Amendment to the Constitution limits the powers of the federal government by stating that “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the

Although this authority was granted in the wake of the terrorist attacks to address the immediate threats, the government quickly began expanding its reach and circumvented the long-standing ban on domestic surveillance. Acting under the new secret rules, the NSA successfully demanded cooperation from the US telecom providers to hand it call-detail records of millions of American citizens, aiming to create a comprehensive database of all calls made in the US [1]. Further, the agency relied on the readiness of major US corporations [2] to furnish it with real time access to the traffic flowing through the Internet backbone and even began cooperating with foreign intelligence services [3] to enhance mass monitoring of the Americans both in the US and abroad. These illicit activities were performed with neither judicial oversight nor a warrant, even though the Fourth Amendment requires one for the search and seizure of personal goods by the government authorities

The first reports of the illegal and secretive NSA activities, published at the end of 2005 [9], were based on the evidence delivered by an AT&T Technician Mark Klein [10]. For the first time, the public became aware of the broad, unsupervised, and illegal monitoring program instituted by the government behind the scenes. These publications and subsequent lawsuits forced the administration to finally admit the existence of monitoring programs and start preparing legal basis for its continued operation. However, despite numerous lawsuits and repeated denials from the government, the mass surveillance programs continued to rapidly