Ever since the attacks of September 11, 2001 and the passage of the Patriot Act, the U.S. government has had virtually unlimited powers of surveillance over its own citizens. This is simply a fact, and it has been done without the consent or awareness of the general public or even most members of Congress. From time to time, the people do learn some details about these programs, such as when the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed that this top secret agency was basically collecting a storing the phone, email and Internet records of millions of citizens. At the same time, the public also learned that the suspects in the Boston bombing case had been quickly identified through phone and computer records as well as surveillance video from public cameras. These are already common in Britain and other foreign countries, and their use has expanded greatly in the U.S. under the Patriot Act. President Barack Obama has defended these types of programs as essential to protect national security and public safety as part of the War on Terror, although if the face of public criticism in the wake of the Snowden revelations he has modified his public position.
My own view is that the primary responsibility of the government is to protect the public from internal and external enemies, which means that personal privacy will have to be sacrificed to some degree. Before the September 11th attacks, I would have given a different answer to questions like these, but these events certainly changed my views on national security. For example, I think passengers should be searched before they board airplanes, and they will have no problems with that policy if they have nothing to hide. Privacy rights are important, but public safety and security are still primary, and it is better that the government have more information about the personal lives of everyone rather than some madman is allowed to set off bombs because the state was afraid to violate his ‘privacy’ rights..
In June 2013, President Obama’s first reaction to the Snowden leaks was to defend the NSA’s mass surveillance programs as necessary for waging the War on Terror. Like other supporters of policies like these, past and present, he “warned that it will be harder to detect threats against the U.S. now that the two top-secret tools to target terrorists have been thoroughly publicized” (Jakes and Superville 2013). Now that Al Qaeda was aware of how these programs worked, they would take steps to increase their own security, and perhaps start using servers outside of the U.S. that were not subject to government control. Of course, this assumes that they had never realized before that they were under constant electronic and satellite surveillance in any case. Obama also claimed that all members of Congress had been fully briefed on the NSA programs, which was completely false since only eight members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees ever receive that kind of detailed information. In Congress, both Democrats and Republicans formed an unlikely coalition demanding more limits and restraints on electronic surveillance, and came very close to passing a bill in the House against the wishes of the leaders of both parties and the Obama administration. Mark Zuckerberg urged “all governments to be more transparent about programs to keep the public safe”, while the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sued the government and supported restrictive legislation (Jakes and Superville 2013).
There has been a long and ongoing debate in U.S. history about privacy rights and the degree to which they should be sacrificed in wartime on the grounds of public safety and national security. After the events of September 11, 2001, public opinion and Congress learned far more on the side of security than privacy, and this attitude was expressed clearly in the Patriot Act. New technological innovations have been used during the War on Terror, as well, and the public has been told that we “need to reduce our expectations of privacy” (Rotenberg 2007). Many people today are rethinking these views in light of the recent revelations about NSA spying, although privacy and every other right would be meaningless without national security. In the 1960s and 1970s, Congress established a number of protections against warrantless wiretapping and eavesdropping, as well as the protection of phone and computer records, while the 1967 Supreme Court decision Katz v. United States held that individuals had a “reasonable expectation of privacy” against electronic surveillance by the government (Stone 2013).
These restrictions were mostly swept away in the era of the Patriot Act and Total Information Awareness policies. For civil liberties advocates, the great danger is always that the powers of the national security state will destroy the “rule of law” and the protections of the courts and cast a “shroud of secrecy over the decisions made by government” (Rotenberg 2007). It is important to protect the “ordinariness of life” from intrusions by Big Brother or Big Business, and to be able to exist day-to-day without the all-pervasive sense of being observed, recorded and analyzed (Stone 2013). On August 9, 2013, after two months of intense public criticism, Obama backtracked slightly in his support for these surveillance programs and made some modest proposals for limiting them. For example, he suggested the appointment of a civil liberties and privacy officer at the NSA and reforming Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which granted very broad authority to government agencies seeking phone and computer records. Obama announced that he was prepared to work with Congress to “put in place greater oversight, greater transparency, and constraints on the use of this authority”, which would be the first limits ever placed on the Patriot Act (Tomasky 2013). He also suggested that the super-secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) should have a more adversarial process instead of being a rubber stamp for the government as it always has been up to now. After all, FISA approved every single one of these electronic surveillance programs without public debate, and indeed the public would have known nothing about them at all except for the Snowden leaks. Time will tell whether any of these reforms will be passed, although Obama’s actual record on transparency to date has been far different from what he promised as a candidate when he first ran for president in 2008.
If we think about it carefully, without national security our individual privacy would not exist. Many people today are having trouble with their rights taken away in order to protect our nation, even though the threat of terrorist attacks is still very real. Had there been more emphasis on security before September 11th and less on the privacy rights of individuals, those attacks might have been prevented. Even so, I also believe that there should be a balance between public security and safety and the rights of individuals, with the primary emphasis being on protecting the nation from horrific attacks. People should generally be free to do what they like in their own homes without interference by the state, but those rights end when there is a danger to public safety. Even with all the surveillance and tight security measures in the wake of September 11th, there have still been many terrorist plots as well as just mass shootings in schools, churches and movie theaters. Of course people’s constitutional rights should be respected unless they are a danger to society, and the police should have the power to stop and search suspicious persons. There should be proof that an individual is dangerous, though, before they are questioned or put under surveillance. My standard would be like that of the brothers responsible for the Boston bombings, with the police being about to study their phone and computer records and public video footage of them because this “may reveal useful information in criminal investigation” (Stone 2013).
WORKS CITED
Jakes, Lara and Darlene Superville. “Obama Defends NSA, Says America Has To Make Choices between Privacy And Security”. Huffington Post, June 7, 2013
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/07/obama-defends-nsa_n_3406448.html
Rotenberg, Marc. “Privacy vs. Security? Privacy.” Huffington Post, November 9, 2007.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marc-rotenberg/privacy-vs-security-priva_b_71806.html
Stone, Geoffrey R. “The Boston Bombing, The Right of Privacy and Surveillance Cameras.” Huffington Post, May 6, 2013.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/geoffrey-r-stone/the-boston-bombing-the-ri_b_3223871.html
Tomasky, Michael. “Obama Is Giving Up Some Executive Power, and He’ll Still Get No Credit.” Daily Beast, August 12, 2013.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/08/12/obama-is-giving-up-some-executive-power-and-he-ll-still-get-no-credit.htmlhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/marc-rotenberg/privacy-vs-security-priva_b_71806.html
