Constitutional Validity of Electronic Surveillance: Balancing privacy and National Security

Abstract

The world was treated to a severe shockwave by an “unknown Edward Snowden in June 2013”1, when he made open a huge number of classified documents that belonged to the “United States”2 “National Security Agency (NSA)”3. Portrayed as a massive whistleblowing episode in United States history, the revealed documents uncovered that the US Government had been unnoticeably gathering phenomenal amounts of surveillance data or information on everybody from its own country’s people to foreign Governments, obviously as a component of its worldwide war against terror. The sheer scale of the surveillance mechanism and the extent of data collected caused global outrage. The aforesaid famous Whistle Blower Edward Snowden also said in one his interviews that “We are living in a society where we are forced to live our lives naked before powers”. The technological sophistication of such surveillance mechanisms affords governments an unprecedented access to communication occurring through electronic means like telephone and internet.