With the disclosure by the National Security Agency (NSA) that it conducted both domestic and international spying on United States citizens and foreign leaders in the past year, the right of privacy in technology use has been the subject of national debate.

­“We’d like to think that when we do a Google search, it’s between Google and you,” said history professor Dr. Lori Clune. “I think we should always assume that everyone is watching.”

Professors caution students about what they put online since future employers could find out anything about their interviewees with one click of a button, Clune said.

“I don’t think we can assume that anything that happens on your smartphone, on the Internet, on your private texts, is private,” Clune said. “The director of the CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] had to quit because he had an extramarital affair that he couldn’t even hide. If the director of the CIA can’t do it, we can’t either.”

Dr. Kenneth Hansen, an associate professor in the political science department, said domestic spying and wiretapping by the NSA on Americans violated their rights.

“If they can listen to your phone calls and read all your emails, then what privacy do you have?” Hansen said. “I think it’s a huge human rights violation, and the entire country should be angry about it.”

Similar to Clune, Hansen advised everyone to be cautious of what goes online, although he believed that government technology might be 10 years behind private sectors.

“If you’re not particularly concerned about the government surveilling you because you’re not up to anything bad, keep in mind perspective employers might get the information that the corporation and government has access to,” Hansen said.

Both Clune and Hansen said the government put itself in a bad position once the news of the NSA spying on foreign leaders from ally countries became public in October.

“Since the end of October’s revelation that we’re spying on foreign leaders, which was not a huge surprise, but we don’t usually spy on our allies quite this much,” Clune said. “So now we’re pissing people off in France, in Brazil, in Germany, in Spain and who knows how many other countries because they’re finding out about the documents we’ve been tapping in.”

Hansen said that it was not uncommon for countries to spy on each other, however he thought that the United States ended up doing a poor job of it.

“Israel is supposed to be one of U.S.’s closest allies, but they spied on us all the time and, in fact, they are better at that sort of thing than we are,” Hansen said. “The U.S. spying on France, Germany and Mexico is not really acceptable, at least not if you want to keep allies.”

The NSA was created in 1952 as a place to carry out cryptographic security research during the Cold War, Clune said. In the beginning, tapping phones and intercepting telegrams were mostly done by the NSA with the approval of communication companies who provided the information.

The NSA’s main role was to monitor, collect, decode, translate and analyze domestic and global information, Clune said. Predominantly, it was focusing on communications between the United States and foreign countries.

“If you look at the history of NSA, what they’re doing now is what they’ve been doing since they were created in 1952, except this is on an unprecedented scale,” Clune said. “In our perspective, this is certainly more abusive than the time during the early Cold War when they got the agreement of companies.”

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act required the NSA to obtain a court order for any wiretaps on citizens, Clune said. But changes in the court in 2008 undermined the judicial oversight of the act, making it easier to get mass wiretapping approved.

“That’s a slippery slope,” Clune said. “Now you’re into an area where you might be violating somebody’s rights.”

The NSA argued that the information gathered was only part of metadata, not the actual content of the communications. Metadata summarizes information gathered about other data and, since it does not focus on specific individuals, it does not impact individual rights, Clune said.

What changed since the NSA’s creation was the technology.

“Because we’ve got the Internet, smartphones, the NSA has the ability to tap into these stuff without permission — they can hack in,” Clune said.

It was revealed that the NSA has a budget of $10.8 billion a year, employed around 35,000 people and is probably the largest employer of mathematicians in the U.S.

“In a democracy, wouldn’t it be nice to know where our tax dollars are going?” Clune said. “If it weren’t for Edward Snowden, we would not know that it’s costing us $10.8 billion a year. We haven’t, as a democracy, had that conversation whether it was worth it because we didn’t know.”

The NSA defended itself and said that this type of spying was the only way to protect the U.S. from terrorists.

“We’ve been sold a poor bill of goods,” Hansen said. “They told us to give up our freedom and we’ll be safe, but that’s not the case. I’d rather have my freedom back and take my chances with bad things happening.”

Clune said the government has to find a balance on what is acceptable and what is not.

“I think, in general, not violating the law is a good idea,” Clune said. “I think in general, protecting the Constitution is a good idea. I think, in general, not alienating friends and allies around the world is a really good idea. We’re doing something that’s pissing off countries that we work best with, that should cause pause. That should cause us to stop and say well wait a second, maybe this is too high a price to pay.”