2; Dozier, 2013, para. 10). Many of their operations and actions go unnoticed by the public; this is because of their authorization to accomplish their missions through clandestine means: a way of carrying out an operation while maintaining secrecy to the public, according to the Department of Defense (DoD Dictionary, 2013). The NSA plays the most important role in government surveillance throughout the country, which is the reason the government allows the NSA to operate by clandestine means. This has caused them to receive the bulk of the attention and criticism when it comes to controversial privacy snooping among Americans, especially when leaks are revealed from the inside. .
Most of the scrutiny the NSA has been put under is a direct effect of several leaks within the agency and government. Widely known as not only one of the most significant leaks within the agency recently, but the most significant leak of all-time within the United States government, Edward Snowden released around 200,000 highly classified documents in early 2013 detailing information on NSA surveillance to the British newspaper The Guardian and American newspaper The Washington Post (Greenwald, 2013, para. 4). Snowden, a former high-ranked employee that had "highly - privileged access" within the NSA as a computer specialist and now a fugitive taking asylum in China, plotted to disclose these documents with intentions to expose the controversial surveillance practices. He believes that it has reach a major tipping point: the public should determine these practices, not the leaders within the NSA" (Greenwald, 2013, para. 12). Snowden had access to nearly all cases and instances where tracking and spying occurred, along with all secret and major plans to launch surveillance and data collections. .
According to him in an interview with The Guardian, the NSA will gain intelligence "by any means necessary," " including specifically targeting the communications of everyone by default " within the United States.