Illegal surveillance by government agencies that tap civilian phone lines and emails of American citizens is just plain wrong.

Our phone lines are being tapped without our permission, even though few of us are terrorists or in contact with terrorists. Even if the phone tapping is being done under the false guise of providing safety and security for our nation, what it really does is increase government control over all of our citizens.

We did not know it, but the National Security Agency has been doing just that for many years, both domestically and internationally. The NSA oversees a network of global monitoring. Its mission is to spy on people and collect and decode data for counter intelligence. Its agents say that they use what they learn to track and target terrorist groups or individuals, by compromising electronic systems that are accessed by radio, wire or electromagnetic means.

The NSA accumulates copies of credit card purchases and text messages as well as tracking phone calls. Recently, we learned that the private phone calls and lists of tens of millions of American individuals were invaded and stored for many years, as revealed in leaked documents released by former NSA subcontractor, Edward Snowden.

NSA’s main mission is to fight terrorism, both in the United States and overseas. The information it accesses supports and protects our military overseas, controls foreign nuclear threats and tracks hard targets. But issues have surfaced on many other NSA activities, which include spying on American citizens’ phone calls.

A former head of the NSA and the Central Intelligence Agency, Gen. Michael Hayden spoke about White House knowledge about such activities, on several television news shows last weekend. The general headed the agencies in the 1990s, but believes the protocols would still be similar.

When asked who authorizes the NSA to investigate various people or issues, he stated that senior administration officials would have to approve the procedures or know about what is being done, to have the NSA do its job. When asked if the president was involved in orders directing NSA action, the general said that he could not be sure, but implied he wouldn’t be surprised if President Obama hadn’t been informed.

Some of the reasons for tapping phones abroad might be to confirm specific financial issues, or support that other nations might be giving to countries whose weapons or military activities could be potentially dangerous to the U.S.

Undoubtedly, the White House administration wants to know what our allies would agree or disagree on future policies to institute, especially foreign political powers like Germany, France, Italy and Brazil, among others. In that way, our administration would be able to collaborate cooperatively on confidential matters of mutual interest in dealing with international issues.

Nevertheless, tapping phones of friendly foreign leaders could cause a huge political risk in cooling relationships that countries have with each other. A good example was NSA’s secret phone monitoring for many years by eavesdropping on personal conversations of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has been a friend of our administration. It was Snowden who released the information on her phone tapping. Both the United States and Germany were embarrassed because of this situation. Germany replied immediately by sending a formal state delegation to Washington, D.C. to discuss the issue.

 Most governments do spy on each other, when they can. We do it to gain information to help protect the American people.

But while phone taps have some use, the NSA taps did not stop the gas attacks in Syria, the 9/11 airline terrorist attacks or the Boston Marathon bombing. NSA had too much data stockpiled to find solutions in time to prevent these attacks.

Changes are needed for better oversight of the NSA activities. Rules need to be clear and reinforced for our intelligence agencies to properly protect our citizens. We need closer scrutiny of NSA’s top-secret surveillance programs that collect data by mass surveillance, which includes phone tapping tens of millions of U.S. citizens, not connected with terrorists in our country or overseas.

Congress needs to exercise more oversight on the NSA, to restore public trust in the agency. The elimination of unnecessary civilian phone tapping should be our first priority.

We need to protect our freedom from government intrusion into our private lives, by stopping irresponsible phone tapping on our private citizens’ phone calls. We don’t need Big Brother watching our every move.

— Bernard Featherman is a business columnist for the Journal Tribune and former president of the Biddeford-Saco Chamber of Commerce.