First and foremost, contrary to what sensationalists in the media may have told you, the National Security Agency most certainly doesn’t care about you unless you are a terrorist or a serious criminal. Believing otherwise is narcissistic and baseless. 

Ever since Edward Snowden illegally leaked the details of the NSA program PRISM, activists have droned about how this program invades the privacy of everyday Americans.

Seriously consider the claim made by popular political pundits, both liberal and conservative, that the NSA is wasting its time senselessly sifting through the phone calls of regular, everyday Americans hoping that they will come across a terrorist. That sounds pretty stupid, doesn’t it?

When people consider what the PRISM program does, many make the mistake of confusing what it has the ability to do and what it actually does.  It is true that the NSA obtained the phone and Internet records of Americans in order to try and find terrorists. 

However, the way that they did this without violating the privacy of the American people was rather clever. In the PRISM program the NSA collected data from phone calls, such as call durations, phone numbers and times calls were made and stored this data in its databases.

Then they looked at the number of times certain groups of people called each other and more or less constructed social circles of people who communicated with each other. They did this without knowing who these people were or what they said in their calls.

Once they constructed these networks, they identified those within the list of networks who were known terrorists.  This way, they were able to identify potential suspects without having to know information about the people in which they were not interested. 

Any further investigation, such as wiretapping, would require the written consent of a federal judge. In recent cases, there is no reputable evidence to suggest that the NSA acted extra-judicially in this regard.

Other critics acknowledge that the NSA is not really spying on Americans but postulate that the fact that the NSA has the ability to do so is dangerous and a threat to our constitutional rights. After all, absolute power does corrupt absolutely. 

I think this is a somewhat valid point, however, there are things more dangerous than the potential violation of privacy rights, and they just so happen to be the things from which organizations such as the NSA are established to protect us.

The threat of global and domestic terrorism is all too real, and according to NSA Chief Gen. Keith Alexander, PRISM has played an important part in stopping terrorist attacks here at home and abroad.

In a cyber-security conference in Washington, Alexander said PRISM played an integral role in thwarting at least 10 terrorist attacks.

But the threat of terrorism certainly does not excuse any violation of civil liberties, and privacy is still an important right that our lawmakers should serve to protect.

The argument often made by proponents of government spying—that if you don’t have anything to hide, you shouldn’t have to worry if the government is snooping on you—simply holds no weight. 

This argument irrationally assumes that the only things worthy of being hidden are illegal things.

This simply is not true. There are plenty of personal matters worth concealing which have nothing to do with illegal activity.   

That being said, checks and balances are an important part of any government organization, and the absence of them invariably leads to abuse.  However, the NSA is not without oversight—all of its activities are monitored by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act courts.

We can only hope that these provisions will do well to prevent abuses of power from those with the ability to do so. 

If they don’t, and if our security agencies lose their credibility and subsequently their power, the world will undoubtedly be a more dangerous place.