This is the last entry you can comment on for February.
Is it acceptable for the government to gather
information on its citizens and/or resident foreigners? What is the motivation for gathering more
than is necessary, as governments often seem to do? Does the context (terrorism instead of the cold war) change
anything?
Privacy is one of the basic rights of human. And it is one of the most important ones. It should not be violated by other people neither state government. As it was mentioned in the article, it is illegal to spy on people but nobody cares when government does it. People can just complain and nobody will listen to them. Actually, they will listen and know everything what people say.
ReplyDeleteDespite the fact that those agencies want to find dangerous people or terrorists, the amount of valuable information is negligible. The rest is information about innocent people who are spied. Just like pretences for spying are changing, so the ways of it do. In the past it was fear of communists and cold war, now it is terrorism. But amount of available information about people has terribly increased. Now we have emails, facebook and many other sources of information about us on the internet. And if you do not turn off GPS in your mobile phone, it records every place where you were. And it is not so difficult for agencies to get these data. For me it is a bit terrifying.
But on the other hand, they can obtain important info about coming terroristic attack and save a lot of people. Terrorism is nowadays number one danger for develop world. It is hard to find hints about upcoming attacks and it contains also spying the innocent. But despite saving many people, they should not spy on innocent people.
In conclusion, I definitely agree with author of this article. And as it is said in the article, even though we live in democratic and developed countries, the government will always spy on us. In my opinion, they will always find pretence for doing it. It used to be cold war and now it is terrorism.
Despite I understand Tomáš's opinion, I don't entirely agree with it. I believe domestic surveillance does help preventing terrorism - eg. no terrorist group have managed to organize a 9/11 scale attack. I do not think attacks can not happen, but big scale attacks require a lot or organisation. This is when surveillance comes in. And I strongly believe many innocent victims of terrorism and their families would rather experience being spied on than suffering. As mentioned, cell phones can record your position, but it is by far the only device capable of this - in central London, there are so many cameras, they can track you wherever you go. And it is almost impossible to do anything with it. What I definitely agree on is that the government will always spy on us and there will never be a world-wide unity on the level of it.
Delete"The Government is spying on us. As usual" - a thing we all hear on an almost daily basis. It does not matter if you live in the US, Canada, Britain, Russia or Slovakia.
ReplyDeleteAs P. Goffin wrote, domestic surveillance has always been here. Labor movements, communists, Russian spies in the west, American spies in the east, allied spies, terrorists... To prevent crimes. To secure the state. To protect the citizens. Or do they?
9/11 shocked the whole world. The Americans were angered, but most of all frightened. And they did have a reason to be. As well as the rest of the western world. "[after 9/11] it [surveillance] has all gone crazy again". But when you realize terrorist have since tried to accomplish a similar carnage, domestic surveillance does have a reason. However, there will never be a precise number of how many attacks the CSIS or NSA actually prevented, as many are prevented even before being completely planned by the terrorists, and others could accidentally give out classified information by being published.
The problem comes with the number of people being monitored. Terrorists rarely act individually, and if the surveillance is to be successful, it has to identify all the other members of every terrorist cell. This of course means that all people related to a monitored suspect will therefore be monitored to some extent as well. By knowing someone who is in close contact with a suspect, even if you never heard of him, can prompt the agency to look at "where you are, where you've been, who you've been speaking with". Quite scary, isn't it?
Generally, I would not care being "incidentally" monitored if I knew the surveillance was needed, it did its job in securing the state and my personal information remained secure. But can I be calm? As a student, I can not think of anything significant to be data-mined from my surveillance. But businessmen, politicians, or even judges work with confidential and classified data. By monitoring businessmen, you could invest into the right firms and earn billions. Illegal, but possible.
Controlling a force so strong as a government security agency is almost impossible. To make surveillance democratic, several people should restrain each and every case. But the more people involved, the higher the chance of a security breach. This proves the topic to be very complex and no one solution is eternally correct. Working with private data will always be a matter of discussion and the level of it should differ according to the need of each individual country.
First of all I do agree on the fact that surveillance is the best way to prevent terrorism and threats which come with it, the statistics show that the fight against terrorism has really improved since these measures were taken. However, what really concerns me as an individual living an ordinary life is the plausible damage caused to the society by the intelligence parties involved. Lets just imagine a hypothetical situation. With stable regime, which can be previously democratic and straight in its goals and aims, which is to protect people, could result in drastic change. Political parties in power change in five years usually, which creates an unstable situation when it comes to the handling of intelligence, let me explain. In my hypothetical world this poses a threat to people who might be against the policies of a current government. The actions of these people might not be even against legal standards however they might be against parties from ideological point of view. The point I am trying to make is, that once democratic and passive government is replaced by the total opposite it could cause the gathered information about citizens to be used against them in the future. I am not trying to draw a dystopic picture where every single civilian would be charged for having certain opinions on certain regime or government, however some people can be harmed by this in a massive extend. To conclude this is only a fear from far future, but for me it definitely makes an interesting dilemma.
DeleteHere is a comment from Roman Znava:
ReplyDeleteYou are walking down the street with your spouse. You hear the birds singing, kids laughing and you are thinking how you finally understand what Armstrong meant by wonderful world. And suddenly there is huge boom and everything previously mentioned is gone. It was a bomb exploding in the middle of the street. Of course you would not want something like this to happen. Now consider other scenario. You are walking with your spouse and you have just decided to tell her the thing that you had never told anyone. You have thought that you would not tell this thing to anyone. Ever. But now you feel comfortable enough to tell the secret to your partner who has earned your trust after so much time spend together. And as you start talking you have no idea that there is a man in a van with his headphone on, listening to every single word you say. Does not seem right, does it? Unfortunately we might have to decide between these two.
It is not hard to understand why the Canadian government started a big surveillance on their citizens in the first half of twentieth century. We all know how unbeatable could communistic parties become could once they had come to power. By all I also mean Canadian officials who knew that if there had been threat of communist becoming too popular they had to fight it while it their party was still in the bud. The life in democracy is not perfect but it is far better than the life under communistic rule. Therefore there had to be taken some measures to protect Canadian citizens, including surveillance.
Today we do not fear communism so badly anymore. However we do not have one less fear because the original dreads were replaced by the new ones. One of the dreads that evoke a huge distress in many of us is terrorism. Terrorist groups consist of people capable of literally anything for their cause what is so scary because with these people around we can never be completely sure if the person sitting next to us on a bus will not blow up. Fortunately there is someone who is here to protect us. And that somebody is called our government. If we want the protection to be effective we have to let our government to spy on us because otherwise it would be almost impossible to expose terrorist plans and networks.
Therefore I think that today we have to sacrifice our privacy for security. Of course there is still a huge problem which creates so much controversy. This problem is that if our government has so many informations it also has gigantic power. As uncle Ben said, “With great power comes great responsibility.” The issue is that practices like surveillance are done in the shadows so we can never be sure if the government handles this power as responsibly as it should. The solution is having really strict institutions which would control what the security agencies do and holding accountable individuals who exceed their power. It is not easy to get to the point when we can fully trust security agencies which fall under the government but when we get there we can feel secure and be sure that our informations will not be misused. That is the reason why we should strive to achieve this goal.