Today's world is one with an abundance of available, convenient technology, yet it also is becoming one with an abundance of surveillance. Consumer electronic devices have become more abundant since the turn of the century, to the point where many people carry one of these devices with them throughout the course of the day. While these devices are convenient and essential to a modern lifestyle in this day and age, it is beginning to be the epicenter for data collection for data mining by many organizations, which includes the American government. This poses a question: Is it necessary for the American government to collect data from the general public? Based on our government's history with citizens' civil liberties, employing the use of surveillance in consumer electronics by the American Government is not only unnecessary, but also has many implications for the security of those users.

There is a complex legal net that this spying hides behind. On the cloudtweaks.com website, Evelyn de Souza uses the example of an Internet of Things device being "subpoenaed to testify against" a user (Souza). She uses the reference of George Orwell's dystopian future novel, 1984, to illustrate the depth of the issue of government spying, alluding to what it could become. These Internet of Things devices can come in the form of wearables, household objects, among other Internet-connected devices. These devices create or gather data to pass on to other computers or devices, such as the server for a website, where one could access the data online, or even have the device send data to a user's cell phone. At first this doesn't sound as if it could be harmful. However the data itself is not always kept strictly between the user and the devices. Most of the "analysis of the data isn't carried out on the device and is analyzed and often shared with third party data brokers" via some backend measure (Souza). This data is used to create profiles on the users which is usually used for marketing purposes, but could easily be used for others, such as for insurance purposes or law enforcement (Souza). The danger in this is that if a governmental body suddenly made the decision that a certain activity or something like a certain religion is no longer acceptable and will no longer be tolerated by that administration, then the government which has been collecting this data from cell phones and servers suddenly has a large amount of possibly incriminating information in their hands and there is nothing that the average person can do to stop this. Whatever this data is being used for, usually isn't made clear to the consumer and in most cases isn't listed anywhere publicly. Most consumers are unaware that their data may be used in such ways, as they tend to skim over the EULA (or End User License Agreement) or not even read it at all. While these devices can be extremely convenient, there is little promise as to how these third parties are transmitting and handling this data. Souza points out that users must press these manufacturers to answer important questions on how their data is being handled, how the data is being transmitted, who has access to that data, and also to figure out their device's privacy settings. While this article talks mainly about these Internet of Things devices, what is to say that if the US Government could do the same in the data collection from consumer electronic devices, such as cell phones or personal computers? These devices are full of data, such as previous locations, pictures, internet history, call logs, text messages, etc. and would be a great place to mine data for uses such as advertising, or figuring out who this person was last with, where this person is now, what this person is planning on doing later, among other things.

On the subject of third parties intercepting data, an article on deepdotweb.com (a website dedicated to news surrounding the "Deep Net", or hidden websites as well as being anonymous online), posted by the author whose actual name could not be located and whose username is "Fuzzy" outlines how Baltimore Police used a Stingray device in order to track down Kerron Andrews, of whom they had an arrest warrant for attempted murder. While he was to be arrested either way, the method by which the police used to locate him, the Hailstorm device, which is a type of Stingray) which acts as a cellphone tower. It is essentially an ISMI-catcher, which  acts like a mobile phone tower and intercepts the signals sent to them (Deep Dot Web). Since mobile phones ping the cell phone towers about every 7 seconds, or so, it is able to detect if a person's phone is nearby, which can be traced back to the owner of the device (or at least the mobile phone plan for it). A huge issue with this Hailstorm device, however, is indiscriminate between the cell phones that it intercepts the signals of, and so it easily can capture information sent from an innocent bystander's phone (Deep Dot Web).  The state's logic was that since this person left his cell phone turned on, he was voluntarily sharing his location with the authorities (Deep Dot Web). What this boils down to is that if one decides to keep one of these devices turned on, a person would essentially be giving the government free reign to track them, which, in the words of the author himself, "is completely absurd."  Even though the government had a warrant for his arrest, the method by which they executed the warrant presents a danger to the modern society and the technology industry, as it allows for the collection of innocent people's data in order to locate a criminal, and these people have no choice but to submit to the location tracking, since these cell phones have become a major part of modern society. While there is the option to power off the phone and leave it off of one's person, a person cannot protect their self from being tracked if they need to use and have that type of device on their person.

While this example only shows how the technology can catch a criminal, this is just one case where this technology succeeded in helping a governmental entity locate a wanted man. The gathering and mining of this data still presents a threat, albeit in the future, to our society. Tracking location is just the tip of the iceberg in the whole subject of government surveillance, the privatization of internet resources plays a role in this. Victoria D. Baranetsky's article "Social Media and the Internet: A Story of Privatization" gives some insight into how much this privatization affects the technology industry. Baranetsky uses the analogy of how various parts of the government were transferred from public to private oversight beginning around the 1980s, causing an increase in productivity, but at the cost of some civil liberties of the citizens. The same thing is beginning to happen with the internet. The Internet itself started as a military tool, and then private organizations were let into the scene. The author mentions the NSA spying scandal, where Edward Snowden, a former government contractor and how the government requests data from private databases within these private entities (Baranetsky). 

A large driving factor behind the government surveillance scene is terrorism. In recent times, in the city of San Bernardino, California, two people opened fire on a hospital. The FBI took one of their phones and demanded that Apple help to unlock the phone, specifically an iPhone 5C. There is a security feature on Apple iPhones that allows the phone to erase all of its data if an incorrect passcode is put in a certain number of times, which is usually about 10. Besides that, there was no other way into the phone, not even connecting it to a computer to access the data without the passcode. The FBI wanted access to the phone's data in order to investigate possible connections with the Islamic State, a prevalent Islam Extremist group in the Middle East, according to a Reuters.com article (Volz). However, due to the way that the iPhone was engineered, it would be unlikely for the FBI to extract the encrypted data from the iPhone without the automatic data wiping feature kicking in. Because of this, the FBI demanded that Apple give them technical assistance so as to disable the automatic wiping feature and be able to extract data from the iPhone. However, Apple refused to help with Tim Cook, the current CEO of Apple saying that it "has implications far beyond the legal case at hand" (Cook, Apple). What he is referring to here is the fact that if Apple did comply and build a custom firmware allowing for a backdoor to be installed on this iPhone, there was a good potential that the FBI and other government organizations could push this "update" to all iPhones and therefore compromise their security for the sake of surveillance. This proposed backdoor would not only give the government unfiltered access to a user's phone, but it would also open up the potential for a hacker to access the device as well. Assuming that this backdoor would be built to let a government entity be able to transparently connect to and look inside of the phone without any trace, it would be extremely hard to discern if a hacker has somehow broken into a user's device, and if this backdoor has access to all data stored in the phone, it could lead to something such as identity theft of this individual, stealing bank account information, among other things. Apple directly acknowledges this in their Customer Letter (https://www.apple.com/customer-letter/), and that such a software with the backdoor in the wrong hands "which does not exist today  --  would have the potential to unlock any iPhone in someone's physical possession." Apple also acknowledges that "while the government may argue that its use would be limited to this case, there is no way to guarantee such control" (Tim Cook, Apple). Because this backdoor would be essentially unlocking the iPhone itself by bypassing the security features built into the operating system, it would be like Apple making a master key that can access any iPhone, much like if the FBI had a master key "capable of opening hundreds of millions of locks  --  from restaurants and banks to stores and homes" (Cook, Apple). While this would be an effective method of being able to gather data from a criminal, it is an "unprecedented use of the All Writs Act of 1789 to justify an expansion of [the FBI's] authority" (Cook, Apple), and would have a chilling effect on the entire user-base of smartphones in the US, since people act differently if they know that they are being watched.

