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National Security or Citizen Privacy
Advancement in technology has stepped up the concerns of insecurity. People have
disagreed with the policies that prioritize national security to privacy of citizen. Occasional
attacks in United States compel citizen to back citizen privacy rather than supporting national
security. The major attacks from hijack of planes to the attacks made in metropolitan places
claiming large number of individuals cause a debatable concern. In the year 2001, terrorist attack
that claimed more than two thousand lives questioned government’s responsibility to
contribution to national security. The unseen tragedy sent out message globally to the need of
prioritizing national security. It affirmed the importance of investing into national security of a
nation. Adopting strategies to check national security violates the privacy to citien.After the
hijack of the planes, policies put across subject every plane user to thorough check.
Technologically, nations have started to adopt policies and regulations to subject every citizen
who accesses the internet to random searches to information they relay to others. The easy to
retrieve personal records, including any activity in the internet. Privacy of a citizen seems to be
loosely protected since security policies allow agents to randomly read through owned platforms
to check on threats.
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Freedom has impacted to security. The easiest schemes of attacks have been planned
through technology. When one abuses privacy there is a probability to produce a mission that
threatens national security.
The basic reason to any government is to protect its citizen from attacks. The
achievement will never be realized if citizen privacy overrules the execution of services.
The social, economic and political stability of any country is assured when
peaceful state exists. Regardless of technological adoption, insecurity is at alarm when all citizen
desire to satisfy their privacy. Humanitarian agencies have however risen controversial to
infringing of human rights. Even with the arguments the security agents believe that insecurity
begins from same citizen that claim to secure their privacy.
Unites state has led in forefront to fight terrorism with the aim to assuring its citizen
security. It also a country with the highest organizations leading to challenge the protection of
human rights. With the two sides, contributions to invest on national security face a block.
However, compromising on a group’s interest would help realize the pursuit to assuring national
security. More so, it is not prudent to avoid the implementation of some security measures under
the guise of violating privacy rights.
In United States where two political stands have contrary reasons to this issue, arguments
on what would work best takes long time to agree. The democrats and the conservatives have
different perspective.
Democrats argue in support of freedom and rights to privacy of every citizen. They are
against compromises at any time that would be made to any number of citizen freedoms. Their
arguments support Benjamin Franklin argument. To the conservatives, compromising some
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constitutional rights of some citizens to assure national security has more weight. They support
that infringing freedom and liberties when there is need to provide national security (stahl, 6)
In his article the false choices between security and liberty, Aimes Thompson articulates
true state of attacks. Terrorists’ attacks which includes Twin Towers attack and Pentagon attack
that had devastated impacts to economy. These attacks demolished valuable properties and
caused death of large number of people. The impact of these attacks was felt for a long time. The
victims had social and economic itches. What mattered to them was national security (medine
7).The followed legislations were aimed to mitigate future occurrence of such event. For
example, Medine suggests that there have been numerous demands to expand the national
security telephone metadata. However, security agencies should not use the terrorist attacks
Pentagon and Twin towers as a way to gather information from citizens without seeking the
opinion of the public on these contentious issues between balancing privacy concerns of the
citizens with national security.
In actual sense, the action of developing security is to ensure that people practice liberties
and freedoms in their lives — freedom matters where there is security. Insecurity poses threats to
people's freedom. That means where safety is compromised; freedom does not exist. As such,
security is vital for democracy. In dispute comparing citizenship privacy to national security,
security is far way crucial.
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Aimee Thomson. The False Choice between Security and Liberty
08/21/2013 02:12 pm ET Updated Oct 21, 2013.
medine, David. Choice between security and liberty a false one. 23 November 2015.
<https://edition.cnn.com/2015/11/23/opinions/medine-surveillance-after-parisattacks/index.html>.
Stahl, Noah. Freedom Versus Security: The False Alternative. November 2006. 2019.
<Freedom Versus Security: The False Alternativehttps://theundercurrent.org/freedomversus-security-the-false-alternative/>