Unfortunately, security and privacy are often in conflict. To provide better security, law enforcement agencies could keep detailed profiles of every citizen and constantly track and monitor your every move. By doing so, would-be thieves, terrorists and or other bad guys could be thwarted before they attack or at least be more easily apprehended. Of course, as citizens, we are not generally willing to sacrifice the security of all just so that the infinitesimally small percentage of the population that are bad guys can be caught.
Instead, our society has come up with various trade-offs that seem reasonable enough to allow for the privacy of the general population while also enabling law enforcement to track bad guys. The 4th amendment of the Constitution protects citizens from unlawful search and seizure of personal property, but it also grants law enforcement the ability to obtain a search warrant if there is enough evidence to suggest that there is probably cause to suspect someone of doing something wrong.
However, in the wake of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, the USA-PATRIOT Act removes many of those safeguards in the interest of national security. Gripped by fear, people accepted the PATRIOT Act as “necessary” without stopping to think of the impact it could have on law-abiding citizens or whether or not the rights they were forfeiting would actually result in a more secure nation. Essentially, the government or law enforcement can simply dub an individual a “person of interest” and the rights afforded by the Constitution are virtually null and void. Changes have been made to reduce the red tape necessary for law enforcement to wire tap or search a suspect and “persons of interest” may be detained indefinitely without being charged and without the benefit of legal counsel.
The government is in favor of protecting your privacy, but only as it relates to other companies or individuals acquiring it. For the most part, they would prefer to have your complete details recorded and reserve the ability to access any part of your life or personal data that suits them.
The NSA (National Security Agency) and the United States government got very testy and even threatened to charge Phil Zimmerman with treason when he created the PGP encryption algorithm and allowed it to be exported internationally via the Internet. They were primarily upset because they couldn’t break the encryption either and they did not want people to be able to encrypt things so well that the government themselves could not access it. There have been bills introduced repeatedly in the past decade trying to mandate some sort of secret back door that grants the government the omnipotent key to bypass any security measures in computer hardware or software.
One of this country’s Founding Fathers and an all-around source of wisdom, Benjamin Franklin, is credited with having said “They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security”.
The problem is that, once a line is drawn, it is never completely erased. The line may be moved left or right depending on societal pressures or who the dominant party in power is, but the danger is in allowing a line to be drawn in the first place. The United States income tax, which began as a temporary means of raising money to support a war-effort, persists over a hundred years later and has morphed into its own bureaucratic juggernaut and spawned an entire industry of lawyers, books, software, and services.
The PATRIOT Act was created as a temporary measure, but almost as soon as it was passed the lobbying began for extending the expiration dates of some of the provisions or just implementing the legislation on an indefinite basis. Now that the power has been granted, it is very difficult to take back. Ostensibly, if you are an upstanding, moral citizen, the removal of basic rights granted by the PATRIOT Act should not affect you. But, who is to say who decides what makes you moral or upstanding? You may be on the right side of the line now, but what happens when the line gets moved and you suddenly find yourself a “person of interest”?