Government Surveillance Essay

On the other hand privacy is an essential right and is essential to any democratic society. Without it, there is no information and no protection of medical or professional secrets. We all have something to hide from someone an employer, colleagues, friends, family, a wife or husband. That does not mean it is something bad, just something private. And even things we do not think are worth hiding today might later be used against us. An attack on our privacy also hurts the privacy of people we communicate with. When we know we might be under surveillance our behavior changes. We might decide not to go to a political meeting, to censor what we tell friends, family, and colleagues thinking it might fall in the wrong hands or simply be made public.

Its application becomes taken for granted and its consequences go unnoticed. As data travel silently across international boundaries and within transnational corporations the impact of surveillance becomes even harder to identify and regulate. .The United States applies multiple tactics to spy on ordinary citizens; the bottom line is that all these surveillance techniques share the same sole purpose which is to collect information for offensive or defensive purposes. The prevention of terrorists attacks on US and foreign soil is clearly a benefit. However, the over use of surveillance is unconstitutional. Surveillance cannot be an advantage if it breaches civil rights to a high degree. In addition, allowing surreptitious surveillance of one form, even in limited scope and for a particular contingency, encourages government to expand such surveillance programs in the future. When data is collected, whether such data remains used for its stated purpose or not after its collection has been called into question, even by government officials. The European Data Protection Supervisor has acknowledged that even when two databases of information are created for specific and distinct purposes, they could be combined with one another to form a third with a purpose for which the first two were not. This immutability of information provides great potential for abuse by individuals and