Students will assemble at least five scholarly, academic references that will be used to write the paper (refer to the Week 1 tutorial on Scholarly References). Each student will list his or her references using APA format, and will provide a brief explanation of each resource indicating how that resource will be used. The focus should be on the student's specific research assignment. An approximate length of this bibliography is between two and three pages.

9/11 is here! 16 years ago, on September 11th, 2001, the United States government increased the power of its National Security Agency to inspect and gather information on both its citizens and foreign subjects. One such secret program called PRISM was launched under President Bush under the Patriot Act and went ahead to include the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), 2007. PRISM is used by the US government to tap private data of its citizens from internet services like Facebook, Gmail, and Microsoft etc.

Landau, S. (2013). Making Sense from Snowden: What’s Significant in the NSA Surveillance Revelations.

In June 2013, Edward Snowden, a contractor for the NSA, leaked several documents related to PRISM and other secret service activities carried out by the intelligence agencies in the US. He mentioned that although the ' big government' (Berghel, 2013) claims that the private data is collected only after legal approvals, there's a lot of underlying data saved and investigated which goes unaccounted for. In this report, the author has done an extensive research on how Snowden's revelations on the US secret intelligence services do not always take permissions from the FISA for its collection of metadata and content. 'It collects them in its system and it filters them and it analyses them and it measures them and it stores them for periods of time' (Landau, 2013)

Cayford, M. (2014). Surveillance: Ethical issues, Legal limitations, and efficiency. Surveille Paper on Mass Surveillance by the National Security Agency(NSA) of the United States of America .

In accordance to surveillance acts against the 9/11 terrorist attack, the NSA performed various acts of phone tapping, intercepting mail and collecting metadata of its citizens. While this is not new, but NSA's 'massive data mining programs' (Stein, 2013) and the mass surveillance program surely brings to light an advanced method of espionage, which caused an outrage among the people. 'Arguably, the fact that the vast majority of the world's Internet traffic passes through the U.S, giving the NSA access to it, is one of the issues that has made the Snowden files world news and a global concern.' (Cayford, 2014) In this journal, the author talks about the various technical systems that were used for the mass surveillance activities. I will use this information in my technical research part of the thesis.

Jared Naude, L. D. (2015). The adversarial threat posed by the NSA to the integrity of the internet. Potchefstroom, South Africa.

The internet forms the center stage for all the actions undertaken by the NSA. Thus protecting the means, in which data can be tapped from these sources including messages, emails etc, forms a primary concern. In this paper, the author mentions various releases of the Snowden's leaked documents and how PGP, SSL, and other information security tools need to be put into practice if we want our data to be safe.  'Both iOS and Android will soon encrypt users’ data by default and it cannot be decrypted by Apple or Google even with a warrant. This is a move which has been heavily criticized by the FBI which claims that it will hinder their ability to do investigations.' (Jared Naude, 2015) I shall use the findings from this paper in the section where I discuss how these security breaches can be controlled.

(Some parts of the solution has been blurred due to privacy protection policy)