Argumentative Essay: Liberty Vs. Security

The passage of the Patriot Act ushered in a new phase of the debate of what is more important, liberty or security. It is well known that Benjamin Franklin once wrote, “Those who would trade liberty for temporary security deserve neither.” The quick growth of technology across the world has led to new security concerns, as the potential threats to global and national security have risen during the past four decades and exponentially since the 9/11 attacks, and the government has responded by increasing security measures that many believe to be too extreme in counteracting terror. The Transportation Security Administration, for example, has never caught a terrorist despite being a massive inconvenience to travelers. The NSA, widely believed

To begin with, American society was founded on the idea that people are innocent until proven guilty. The overall acceptance of NSA programs reveals that Americans are becoming increasingly more comfortable with trading liberty for security. The counterargument to this has always been that if one has done nothing wrong, they have nothing to fear. However, that defies the very idea of liberty. The traditional, Webster definition of liberty is, “the state of being free within society from oppressive restrictions imposed by authority on one's way of life, behavior, or political views.” The government has shown its ineptitude in matters of the law, and indeed, governments around the world for centuries have imprisoned those that think differently or disagree politically. In a secret courtroom where one is not judged by one’s peers but by judges whom the public will never see, liberty is absent from the process. The Founding Fathers envisioned a governing system where the government fears the people, and not the people fearing the government. This is part of the reason why the Second Amendment was added, and why the freedom of the press was included in the First