The National Security Agency is Key in Keeping Crime Rates Low
For years, the National Security Agency (NSA) has been essential in lowering crime rates through its surveillance.
The NSA conducts surveillance of almost every virtual platform, including search history, phone calls, and social media platforms. It provides this information to other government branches such as the CIA to use in locating criminal activity.
Another government branch that this information is supplied to is known as the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). The agency is in charge of combating drug trafficking and distribution throughout the United States and conducting major investigations against drug cartels, criminal organizations that run drug trafficking operations and distribute drugs throughout large territories. The DEA is, in fact, very successful at its job, arresting over 30,000 federal drug offenders and assisting local law enforcement in the arrest of over a million suspects for local drug offenses in just 2012 alone [1].
However, most of the DEA’s success can be attributed to the NSA — the NSA provides irreplaceable information to the DEA [2]. The NSA is the only agency that provides this necessary information because it is the only government agency with skilled enough programmers, a proper budget, and efficient tools to run effective cyber-surveillance [3]. Without the NSA, the DEA wouldn’t be able to efficiently do its job, and we’d see drug crime rates skyrocket.
The National Security Agency definitely has its benefits and harms (harms can be found in my previous article The National Security Agency’s Surveillance Hurts National Security!). The question pressing question is whether these benefits outweigh the harms.
