You probably don’t hear this from many liberals, but the NSA has gone way too far. This past week, there were reports concerning the NSA spying on our nation’s closest allies in Europe, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s private cellphone.

The NSA has and will continue to conduct itself in a reckless fashion because there is no accountability. The NSA answers to no one while it prods through our private emails, taps our phone calls and siphons our Internet activity. It runs warrantless and without permission, much like J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. The past week’s developments has many wondering if the United States is willing to spy on known, trusted allies, what exactly is it willing not to do in order to keep the homeland “safe”?

The NSA problem did not stem from zealous politicians, tyrants hell-bent on usurping freedoms or neo-conservatives; the NSA stemmed from the American peoples’ willingness to sacrifice freedom for temporary safety through reliance on the military-industrial complex. As we can tell however, those who sacrifice freedom for safety get neither and end up with an overreaching bureaucratic machine with no accountability.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us of the military-industrial complex and the grave implications it has for American society. We have not guarded ourselves adequately against the unwarranted influences of the military-industrial complex, and we will continue to witness the unrelenting intrusion on our rights, specifically concerning privacy.

I believe the NSA and the military-industrial complex will be one of the biggest problems our generation will face in the coming years. We must realize that our job now is to find a way to return the rights usurped by the bureaucratic machine while safeguarding the freedoms we still enjoy now. We will have to rid ourselves of the disease of apathy before anything can be expected to happen. I urge you to find reliable information on the practices of the NSA and be willing to share that information with all of those around you. It’s time for all of us to become conscientious individuals willing and ready to take the necessary steps to safeguard our freedoms from institutions looking to take them away.