It’s the 21stCentury. Everyone is online. Our personal information is digitized and potentially available to anyone with the means to access it, but should we sacrifice our right to personal privacy in return for greater security?
Both rights are crucial but often come at each other’s expense.
An annual report issued by Director of National Intelligence revealed that the NSA (The U.S. National Security Agency) gathered over 151 million records of Americans’ phone calls in 2016, even after Congress limited its ability to do just that.
A fraction of what the NSA used to collect before 2016 through a mechanism designed to identify suspected terrorist actually helped in stopping any potential threats.
Technology is an incredible tool that can drive humanity for you. Here’s an example:
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The most efficient animal on the planet is the condor. One of the most inefficient animals on the planet are humans. But give a human a bicycle, and they become the most efficient animal. And rather sits on your desk with the beauty of a Tensor lamp – the computer is a bicycle for the mind.
This vast potential of computing that was first thought of in the early 1980s is what could be at risk if privacy isn’t a unanimous top priority amongst each of us- because who’s going to want to use a computer any more if they become data loggers of our every activity to be spied on by a government?
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The main argument for the priority of security is one which envisions a justice system, such as the NSA, overseeing the entirety of a population’s electronic activities- and that to keep our computer and telecommunication networks secure, the government will eventually need to monitor and collect intelligence on the vast majority of the public body’s actions in order to help keep a nation secure from potential terrorist threats, and various other crimes.
However, others argue that such an order would set a legal precedent, that would expand the powers of the government and that that could lead to potentially unwanted futures. The dilemma is that if we lose control of our data, we could be putting both our privacy and our safety at risk. Should the government be allowed to track us to the point of recording our personal conversations or monitoring our location 24/7?
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I am of the opinion of privacy being a number one priority. The argument of “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear” is, I believe, a drastic underestimation of the importance that our personal data has- and the impacts confidential records can have on ours and others’ livelihoods. So that’s the topic of Privacy vs Security. Thank You.
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