"RESOLVED: Privacy should be sacrificed for the sake of national security"

"RESOLVED: Privacy should be sacrificed for the sake of national security"

1. Privacy is a democratic fundamental and this policy is not justified

Privacy is the principle that guarantees that your private information are yours and yours only. Information, though intangible, is no different from any other property. Your personal property, or your personal objects, are unquestionably yours, and is protected from any other individual, or even the state, from taking it away from you. A less material and more intangible parallel would be with intellectual property rights, that are most fiercely defended by not only the United States but organizations around the world. Private information is no different. Just like you have a choice to determine how much of yourself to reveal in the stages of getting to know someone, the choice to choose when and where information regarding yourself might be communicated is an individual choice.

The government’s policy is unjust because it violates this fundamental right, but not only that, it has the added problem of assuming all citizens to be suspect. One of the most important principles in any system of law, is the “presumption of innocence,” or Ei incumbit probatio qui dicit, non qui negat, which translates as: the burden of proof is on he who declares, not on he who denies. Based on this idea, courts must prove a person’s guilt before they can declare him a convict, and similarly, when trying to search for evidence, must get  warrant first, in the case that the individual refuses, prove there is enough cause for suspicion that the individual refuses. What is evident in both cases, is that the state must regard all citizens as innocent, and only in the cases where it may prove there are some legitimate reasons to question his innocence, then the state may search their information.

This resolution essentially presumes all people to be guilty, and then search their most private and personal information without legitimate cause. Even though terrorism may be a dangerous threat, there is absolutely no reason to suggest that every single citizen is a potential terrorist. And yet, the government searches everyone’s information indiscriminately, and this is wrong.

2. It is ineffective

Not only is this model unjust, but it is ineffective, and disproportionately harmful.

Because first, the most serious terrorists will steer clear of the most obvious platforms such as major cell networks, Google, Skype, and Facebook. As Bloomberg puts it, "the infrastructure set up by the NSA … may only be good for gathering information on the stupidest, lowest-ranking of terrorists. The PRISM surveillance program focuses on access to the servers of America's largest Internet companies, which support such popular services as Skype, Gmail and iCloud. These are not the services that truly dangerous elements typically use." Rather, they take extensive measures to hide their activities, through data encryption and other means, especially because now that the US government’s surveillance programs are publicly known, anyone with enough brains and experience will know to avoid the most obvious platforms.

In fact, recent data reveals that only a fraction of the foiled terrorist plots since the September 11 attacks were found out as a result of NSA programs, and the majority were through other means. According to the New America Foundation (a non-profit think tank)  - of the 227 Al Qaeda-affiliated people or groups that have been charged for committing an act of terrorism in the US since 9/11, just 17 of the cases were credited to NSA surveillance, and just one conviction came out of the government's extra-controverisal practice of spying on its own citizens. That charge was against San Diego cab driver Basaaly Moalin, for sending money to a terrorist organization in Somalia. There was no threat of an actual attack.

Furthermore, it is very difficult to quantify how well the Patriot Act has worked in preventing terror attacks, especially when you find that in many of these plots that were broken up the Feds bated suspects, offered in many cases to buy weapons or explosives, and then once that suspect agreed to take part in the plot, they were arrested. This is entrapment, with the government leading its citizens on into muddy waters, and catching them for doing the very things the government itself lead them to do.