Public Safety And Security Essay

Introduction

The tragedy of 9/11 has heightened the fear of people as well as their concerns over the growing threats like organized crimes and terrorism. It is undeniable that these negative influences accompany the development of the human society. Hence, there is a strong need for us to employ the fruits of technological products to deter these menaces from happening. Western governments have relied substantially on surveillance-oriented security technologies to foster a proactive attitude towards terror and crime (Pavone and Esposti, 2010). However, despite their prospects on the public safety, these advanced types of machinery, in fact, expose civilians to federal monitoring, diminishing their privacy and constraining civil rights. As

Installing surveillance cameras in public places such as shopping malls and libraries would capture the movements of streetwalkers at every moment, leaving little to private spaces. Moreover, it is likely that the personals obtained from monitoring may be manipulated for wicked intentions, primarily political. Hiran (2005) cited the example of the data-aggregation company ChoicePoint revealed that since February 2005, scammers had tricked it into providing them with the private financial records of 163000 people, at least 88 million individual records held by the government or private companies have been exposed to possible theft. “People were getting worried that the government could spy on us anytime and easily control us,” Pavone and Esposti pointed out

It has been a long-term unsolved problem that preservation of privacy and personal data is not conveyed within the current legal schemes imposed on the surveillance-oriented practices. Having full access to a vast scale of personals make civilians vulnerable to illegal exploitation. The expansion of databases gives rise to the issue on which a customer could be mistakenly identified as ‘potential suspect,’ leading to its unique treatment and restriction on specific services. Hence, a more organized form of administration and supervision is required to protect the civil rights of