Surveillance and Privacy Issues

1006 Words3 Pages

2) It is getting ever easier to record anything, or everything, that you see. This opens fascinating possibilities-and alarming ones.”

The Economist, Nov. 16, 2013

Discuss this statement in the light of the medias recent preoccupation with surveillance and privacy issues. Include government surveillance and social media. For example the young woman who accused Florida state quarterback jameis Winston of rape was identified by football fans on social media and had ugly anonymous things posted about her.

Nearly every major international agreement on human rights protects the right of individuals to be free from unwarranted surveillance. This guarantee has trickled down into national constitutional or legal provisions, protecting the privacy of communications.

Most democratic countries usually have the ability to engage in intercepts of telephone and digital communications, but only after law enforcement or intelligence agencies have approval by a judge, and only during the investigation of serious crimes.

However, government agencies, especially in America, continue to lobby for increased surveillance capabilities, particularly as technologies change and move in the direction of social media. Communications surveillance has extended to Internet and digital communications. law enforcement agencies, like the NSA, have required internet providers and telecommunications companies to monitor users’ traffic. Many of these activities are performed under ambiguous legal basis and remain unknown to the general public, although the media’s recent preoccupation with these surveillance and privacy issues is a setting a trending agenda.

Today, we still don’t know how to treat Internet privacy. Legislation is being formulat...

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...wasn’t charged because of her memory lapses of the night, but the fact remains that social media had a large part in influencing the public opinion on who was right and who was wrong. In the publics eye and on social media, the young woman was a liar and Winston was a saint.

Perhaps the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, said it best when he claimed that privacy is no longer a “social norm.” Virtually everyone has a smart phone and everyone has social media. We continue to disclose private information willingly and the private information we’re not disclosing willingly is being extracted from our accounts anyway. Technology certainly makes these things possible. However, there is an urgent need to make laws and regulations to protect against the stuff we’re not personally disclosing. It’s unsettling to think we are living in 1984 in the 21st century.

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