After 9/11, many Americans accepted that the government and national security were taking aggressive surveillance action to prevent another terrorist attack. However, what the government and national security do is gather as much information as possible to use it later against the very people they claim to protect. What type of information does government and national security collect? How does this mass surveillance protect US citizens? Is it worth giving up privacy for security that, after all, may not protect anyone? Recently, Edward Snowden, a former National Security Agent (NSA), said that the reason he leaked government information was to warn American citizens of the danger they faced. government surveillance programs. According to Snowden, the NSA gathers contextual information from phone calls and the Internet about every American, storing this mass of information for use in the future against the people they are supposed to protect. The government says it has received an order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) that allows it to collect metadata from the telephone company Verizon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and others, in order to analyze this information for purposes of a possible threat to the United States. The problem is that the government's collection of information on all Americans violates the Fourth and Fifth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution, which protect Americans from government intrusion into their privacy. In a recent article by Julian Sanchez, a researcher at Cato Institute said of a recent cyberattack on Google: "Google hackers appear to have been interested in...information gathering... middle of paper ...but fear that the government that is supposed to protect them will turn around and use this information against them in the future. It is important that the government finds a solution to protect the privacy and security of all Americans without violating the law. Works Cited McQuade, Samuel C. "Government Intelligence Programs." " Issues: Understanding controversy and society. ABC-CLIO, 2014. Web. April 19, 2014. "Securing our freedom." Commonweal 140.12 (2013): 5. Opposing viewpoints in context. Web. April 9, 2014. Sanchez , Julian. “Surveillance cannot secure us.” Rep. Noël Mérinos: Greenhaven Press, 2013. Opposing viewpoints. context. Internet. April 7, 2014. Watts, Tim J. “Edward Snowden, 2014. Web.. 2014.