Privacy, SEcurity and Our Freedom
This one is tricky. People are very easily motivated by fear. Fear of an enemy that seems more powerful in the shadows. It is much easier to take away freedom and destroy privacy to insure peace, but peace at the cost of our freedom is not a peace that I am interested in.
Currently, our National Security Agency collects all of our emails, phone conversations, web searches, book purchases and library activities. This surely makes us safer, but in my opinion the cost of our freedom to be who we are in our own way on our own time is too great to trade for safety.
We must be bold in protecting the very American ideals for which we fought the Revolutionary War. We must not collect all data and then if something goes wrong dive into the vast net of humanity that we have captured, for doing so destroys the very humanity and its right to have personal and private matters, outside of government control or awareness.
Sure it is easier to catch a criminal if we have a police officer living in everyone's home or on everyone's Google search, but that is the very thing we fought against when the British put soldiers in our citizens home during the American Revolution. We fought to protect our individual freedoms and our privacy when it was being taken away in the name of law enforcement and safety. I do not feel safe if the government has access to everything I say, think or do and I will die to defend that right to privacy.
No one said safety, protection from terrorists would be easy, but if we sacrifice all that we are to protect ourselves from those whom we fear, than what are we really gamning.
I certainly believe that some individual's information should be monitored, but I believe to my core that the American government is far too powerful to allow any one of its branches to determine who is a suspect. That is why we divided the power of our government into three branches: the legislative, the executive and the judicial branches. We divided the power that we have given to our government because we understood then and hopefully still understand now that to give the power to accuse and arrest citizens that we suspect have commited a crime to one branch is quite the same as the power we broke free from with King George of Great Britain. The reason our 4th amendment demands that our executive branch get a search warrant from its sister branch, the judicial, is because the forefathers knew that absolute power corrupts absolutely, so they put the mechanism of checks and balances into to place to diffuse that power.
Our current government's executive branch and its National Security Agency is operating as our King once did, as judge, jury and executioner. I have no problem with our government spying on people that we need to, those citizens or foreigners who have demonstrated that they may have committed a crime. The problem I have is allowing the executive branch to investigate those suspect without a judicial branch search warrant. Without that warrant, our own government is violating the 4th amendment and we need to insure that our Constitution survives, in spite of and in the face of terrorism. That is the only way we can beat the terrorists in both the short and the long term: by having our checks and balances working the way our founders intended; having the judicial branch issue search warrants for people suspecting of committing crimes and having the executive branch, on the basis of those warrants investigate and prosecute crimes where they are committed.
Without judicial oversight of our executive branch, we no longer have the very democracy that our Founding Fathers created. We have something much more akin to the very government that we broke free from and demanded our individual rights and liberties.
To allow our privacy to be destroyed in the name of protecting our freedom is not freedom at all. In my mind, it is cowardice and an effort to by-pass our Constitution in the name of a battle cry that, ironically is destroying what we fought for in the very inception of our country: freedom.