In addition to these Supreme Court rulings, the US Congress took it further with modifications done to the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968. In general, only wiretaps granted by court were legally viable. This constituted a specific list of offenses as denoted by the Supreme Court. A duration of up to 30 days would be the maximum length of a wiretap. The wiretap’s topic of interest also needed to be divulged within the 90 day time period.
By the end of the 1900s, Congress broadened the law’s reach in terms of wiretapping to that of electronic mail. The Electronic Communications Privacy Act was instituted, also known as the Wiretap Act. This made it unlawful for the reading of an individual’s private email. A great deal of unrest resulted from this Act, as it did not prevent the Government from obtaining data from online service providers.
Snowden, as a whistle blower, made it clear that the NSA was in violation of these protected privacy laws, freedoms guaranteed under the Constitution and reinforced by Supreme Court rulings. And yet he also gave up Intelligence and Security secrets.
Thus the question arises, was he a hero or a villain? Was this civil disobedience, bringing to the public eye the snooping of the government on its people? Or was it a massive and illegal invasion of the privacy of individuals, an end-run around the law posing under the guise of national security? After all, how could so many private conversations really have to do with National Security?
These are difficult questions. Some see Snowden as guilty of espionage; others as a hero to be celebrated, a whistleblower who exposed wrongdoing. Yet no arguments are made against those who blew the whistle on Enron or Wells Fargo or the financial institutions that caused the housing crisis. All of these were based on digital data coming to light, exposing illegal events. Bad versus good in these cases can be a conundrum: is getting the data and making it public, for the public good, even by questionable means, good or bad?
This may be a more difficult issue than how one might protect their data from hackers gaining access to their devices.
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