Just a couple of years ago I would have thought that conspiracy theorists who claim that the government is listening to our conversations were simply crazy and delusional. It turns out those crazy people weren't actually too far from the truth. The National Security Agency (NSA) has recently been put in the spotlight by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. The NSA intercepted all cellular and internet activity in the United States and paid foreign officials around the world to conduct surveillance in their government and on their people. Being able to carry out large-scale surveillance around the world requires a lot of power and influence, so how did the NSA manage to carry out such a heavy task? How did they become a ubiquitous surveillance agency? Now that everyone knows about the NSA's operations, is it worth maintaining global surveillance to improve government security at the cost of worsening foreign and domestic relations? The key to the heavy lifting of surveillance within the borders of the United States must be attributed to the highly complex program called PRISM. PRISM is a program that screens all metadata, a set of data that describes and provides information about other data, for keywords hostile to government security. The metadata comes from well-known and used companies that were paid millions of dollars to transmit all activity under their supervision to the NSA for analysis. The creation of PRISM came from a specific part of the NSA called NSA's Tailored Access Operations (TAO). TAO is responsible for creating new hacking programs and wiretap software (more NSA revelations: backdoors, snooping tools and worldwide reactions) and has been responsible for things like bugging all iPhones. As Martin Luther King said: “There comes a time… in the middle of the paper… distributed by Obama, which allows wiretaps, searches of corporate records, and surveillance of individuals (ONLY) suspected of being a terrorist or linked to terrorist activities. It turns out that those "crazy" people weren't crazy enough to imagine what the NSA was actually capable of. There was the rise to power of the NSA, which used 9/11 to exploit our nation's fear and strengthen itself. At the moment foreign relations remain stable, but as time goes on huge global politics could change as Edward Snowden and further investigations could reveal more secrets about the NSA. Furthermore, the burning controversy over whether compromising the privacy of millions of people is worth ensuring government security is still up for debate. Many are outraged by new discoveries about the NSA's dark secrets and are pushing for new privacy rights to combat NSA surveillance.