We’ve been seeing a lot of whistleblowing not just in the past few weeks, but in the last 6 years or so when Snowden leaked highly classified information to the media.
People have mixed emotions about this. On one hand, the fact that the government knows every single word we say and every set we take is a little scary – especially if they wanted to pin us for a crime we never committed. On the other hand, I should feel safer that my government knows what everyone is doing at once.
Safety versus Privacy – a never-ending debate. Every person has a different opinion about both subjects. A lot of people want maximum privacy, but if everyone has maximum privacy would that harm the greater good of everyone? On the other hand, if the government has all this control and can see every little thing that we do, that takes away every little inch of privacy we have. Every picture, every text, and everything else is in their hands.
In my opinion, I am so thankful Snowden did what he did. I’m sure we would have had theories as to what the government knew, but now we are 100% solidly sure that they know everything. And they will punish the people that come in the way of it.
It is becoming harder and harder for journalists to protect their sources, and when sources stop coming, so does our intel. The public deserves to know what is going on in our government and how they are surveilling us. What are we going to do when whistleblowers stop seeking out journalists to alert the public on what’s going on?
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I like that you pose the debate of “what’s more harmful privacy without security? or maximum security with ultimate surveillance?” It’s sort of like a lesser of two evils situations which I hadn’t really thought about before, but it’s actually kinda sad haha. I guess I would have to say that I wish we could have both. I wish there was some way to truly put limitations on surveillance for government agencies so that way we’d at least be able to sleep at night knowing our phones weren’t able to be tapped at any moment while still feeling safe from national threats. Why should we have to choose? It seems like every regulation or limit on CIA or NSA practices gets broken regardless of its legality though (as shown by leakers like Snowden and Ellsberg) so yeah I agree that I think the best thing, or rather the only thing we can do at this point is continue to exploit the abuses that go on within national surveillance agencies until we’re forced to make real changes to how we go about national security.
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