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The sanctity of life does not outweigh an individual's right to privacy.
The title's been written, so I'm under something of an obligation to take this thing seriously now, so I better get the important concession out of the way first. When the chips are down, I agree with the philosophy of the sanctity of life. What I do not agree with however is the Machiavellian ideal "the ends justifying the means".
Benjamin Franklin is credited with the statement "they that can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither and will loose both."
In the following post I intend to show that, although forgoing the right to privacy might buy us a little bit of temporary security, it will not, in the long term, make society a better, or safer, place. The ends to not justify the means, and the innocent have everything to fear.
Chapter 1: Give me liberty or give me death.
Some American said that I believe; for a country where 'liberal' is one step away from being a term of abuse, they sure do love their liberty.
You and I are both British and as such can be considerably less melodramatic about the whole thing, but a truth I know we both value dearly is that we live in a free society.
To be alive is the be free. If we throw away our liberty to build a gilded cage of protection then we are no longer alive, we simply exist. That is what the sanctity of live means to me. It does not mean an all expenses paid excuse to criminalise innocent people.
As a western society we place a tremendous value on the rights of the individual. Rights such as that to be in innocent until proven guilty, to be free from torture and violent interrogation, and to have ones right to privacy respected. It is an unmistakable correlation in the western world between the value placed in these ideals and the levles of crime.
This is perhaps why the authoritarian nations such as the US and Russia end up locking ten times more people per capita than liberal nations like Sweden, yet still have higher crime rates. (1)
Tastycles theorises that we can make this world a safer place be demolishing the right to privacy. To that I say that you could equally well theorise that allowing torture would help protect us from criminal conspiracies. I think the numeric evidence shows that both theories are wrong. You say that we could gain a mile by sacrificing in inch... I say you've got it the wrong way round, and even if you haven't, it wouldn't be worth it.
Chapter 2: The innocent have everything to fear.
The UK government currently wants to to build a national DNA database to keep all of its citizens on record. Fortunately, the court of human rights has found this to be illegal and the general public have addressed fear and outrage towards this project. (2)
Tastycles claims that innocent people have nothing to fear from having their privacy violated, and I would agree if that information stayed 100% confidential.
Unfortunately it has repeatedly been proven that both the government and law enforcement agencies cannot be trusted with confidential data. MI5 agents leave laptops with national security information behind on the train.
Leeks come out of the police services like it's a fucking colander.
If hackers can dick around in the Pentagon then you can bet that they can access our government databases... and only a few months ago the home office managed to loose dicks containing millions of peoples social security information. (3)
If information is collected then some of it will make its way into the public domain; and if the privacy laws are torn down and the government is given free reign to spy on its citizenry then information on their personal lives is going to wind up in the wrong hands. That is why innocent people should be afraid of being monitored by the state.
You say you don't care if someone sees you visiting Tescos? How about if people get to see your phone records. Private convocations? Misdeeds and affairs? Income and expenditure? Medical and financial records? Would you start to care if all of that was made public?
Society has the right to protect its self and its citizens, but it doesn't have the right to enslave people for their own protection. Part of being allowed an identity is being allowed privacy, and no government has the right to strip that away on a fools errand of defending the sanctity of life.
Way to take the greats out of context. Franklin didn't say "will lose both", it was added later, and he was talking about giving in to certain British demands, not about privacy. Liberty in this instance referred to liberty from opression, not liberty to live a private life, which is what we are talking about.
Again with the Revolutionary War quotes. The liberty that they are discussing is the liberty to be represented within their own government, not the liberty to make a phone call without it being listened to.
Certainly, but there is no restriction of freedom with surveillance outside of the law. I can do whatever I want within the law, and all I lose with privacy is that somebody knows about it. The law isn't particularly restrictive here, and I am only put under surveillance if I am suspected of something. It's not a problem. People, and by this I mean you, approach this as if it is a case of Utopia or East Germany, when what it actually is, is a spectrum.
That may well be the sanctity of life, but if you lose some privacy, you don't lose that. Everyone who had ever joined a Union was under surveillance in the 1950s in America, but they were still free. It is only when married with oppression that invasions of privacy become an issue, and I don't think anyone could seriously suggest that we have that situation in the West today.
This is true, the authoritarian nature of those countries definitely has an effect on their crime rates, but the level of intrusion in the USA doesn't affect this, there are far too many other factors. The country with the secnd highest incarceration rate in the world is the St. Kitts and Nevis, and you know they don't get any more laid back then them Caribbeans. Zimbabwe has a lower level than most liberal countries. What we can read into this point is that the level of personal privacy and crime are unrelated.
The numeric data absolutely proves my point. Look at how many terrorist convictions there have been in the past 10 years, compared to the ten previous. Note I'm saying convictions too, not arrests. The vast improvements in this department owe everything to the surveillance imposed on people, some of which are innocent. It's a sacrifice that has categoricaly saved lives, so how you can't see the benefit is beyond me.
But why? What is the fear? The only fear is what is given to people by the papers. If they took everyone's DNA at birth, nobody would care. History has told us that when there are volunatry DNA drives, there is an almost 100% turnout. Look at the case of Colin Pitchfork, first DNA caught murderer as proof. People are only afraid because of scarmongering.
Sacremongering again. The information that has been leaked isn't very important, its addresses. I could get the same information by looking at the electoral role. Serious confidential data has never, and will never be given to a low level employee to carry on the 12.03 to Basingstoke. It just wouldn't happen.
You've got a shit colander if its letting leeks out. It should be keeping the veg in, and letting the water out.
The social security information being the fact they had children, and their address. Something that I could find out by going to the registry office and ooking in the phone book. The government has no precident of letting anything remotely important out of the bag when it shouldn't.
Not really no. That information is all in the hands of someone else anyway. Orange have my phone records, a convorsation is between at least two people anyway, I don't do any misdeeds really, the NHS have my medical records, NatWest have my banking records. None of it is public, and even if it was, it wouldn't make a difference. NatWest and the NHS are now branches of the government anyway, and why should I trust Orange any more than the government. You can't live a completely private life and use technology, the two are mutually dependent.
To compare privacy with slavery is invalid. Society needs to protect itself and its citizens, but sometimes it needs to protect itself from its citizens. In this instance, it is better to remove some otherwise fundamental rights in order to remove these rotten apples then to let them damage the society from within.
You posted again? What kind of sportsmanship do you call that?
You'll notice I said that he was credited with the statement; not that he made it. Yes, I've read that Wikipedia page as well.
Whatever he or whoever made the quote was talking about at the time, it still remains totally relevant to the question in hand, which is why I made it.
Yes it's a spectrum; and when you take one step towards a fascist dictatorship then instantly go half way towards justifying the next one. If we say that the individuals right to privacy can be done away with in the name of protecting society then in five years someone can recommend that we can the can the torture restrictions, and when we counterarguments based on morality and human rights, well... we set the precedent five years ago.
As for people only being put under surveillance with due merit, we both know that that isn't true. Even over the past few years the government has been caught using anti-terrorist legislation and surveillance equipment to root out such dangerous criminals as dog walkers and litter droppers. (1) I'd rather not hand them another string to their bow.
Given what our beloved Maggie Thatcher decided to do to unions a couple of decades ago, I think it shows remarkable folly to claim that surveillance in the western world holds no risk of becoming marred with oppression. If we turn our eyes to history we'll see that we've only just got rid of a police chief who illegally taped phone convocations 'because he felt like it', and if we look at US events like Watergate it doesn't get any prettier. (2)
If you don't think that the government would misuse the right to spy on its citizenry then you're quite to optimist... especially for someone who doesn't think privacy is a human right.
You present two pieces of transparently anomalous data and claim it over-rides the statistical pattern. St.Kits has a population of 50,000 and cannot possible present a reliable pre-capita statistic.
Similarly, we cannot use Zimbabwe, a country that has no police force across half the nation, as a model for the authoritarian social system.
The correlation between rights of the citizenry and decreased criminality exists, and you'll have to do considerably better if you want to convince me otherwise.
Really Tasty? You're saying that we've caught more terrorists in the ten years after 9/11 than we did before? Gosh... will the revelations never cease to amaze me.
I'll point out that this surveillance has cost lives as well. I surely don't have to remind you about the fate of Jean Charles de Menezes (3), an utterly harmless Brazilian national who was shot eleven times in the head at close range because an incompetent surveillance team mistook his identity.
Might I also point out to you the transparent attempts the police force made to cover up their mistake, attempts which extended to providing false witness about the man's movements to make their mistake look justified.
Don't try to sit up there on the moral high ground and tell me that the innocent have nothing to fear.
People are afraid because an organisation with a history of abusing and misusing its powers wants to legally force them to give over information that they don't want to give.
People are afraid because a historically corrupt police force is being given more and more powers to spy on their day to day lives, and they are being given zero choice in the madder.
People are afraid because they see this as another step on the road to an authoritarian state. You can sit there and deny it all you like, and I imagine that you'll continue doing it through torture and midnight curfews, right up till the point that they install the video screen in your living room.
Your security demands are moving society in utterly the wrong direction.
Those two discs with everybody's social security data on them were to "on no accounts to be taken out of the building". They still were, and they still wound up in the public domain.
Did you not read that link I provided to all the data leaks in the US?
The difference is that these companies are held accountable for their actions are bound by the data protection act, have legitimate purpose for holding the information, been given it voluntarily and are not in positions of power.
The same can not be said for the government and the police force, organisations with a history of mishandling and abusing the information at their disposal, and which have unrivalled protections against investigation when they do.
So we're back to the ends justifying the means. Screw ideology. Never mind that it's one step closer to a police state. Who cares about the waves of innocent people who will be criminalised, hurt and shot eleven times in the head because of these changes? The historical presidents of these kinds of changes are immaterial to the decision and we should throw backwards ideals like human rights and innocent until proven guilty out of the window to better facilitate some authoritarian witch hunt aimed at rooting out the "bad apples" in society.
You know what? You're not invited to the next communist meeting Tasty.
Really Tasty? You're saying that we've caught more terrorists in the ten years after 9/11 than we did before? Gosh... will the revelations never cease to amaze me.
I'll point out that this surveillance has cost lives as well. I surely don't have to remind you about the fate of Jean Charles de Menezes (3), an utterly harmless Brazilian national who was shot eleven times in the head at close range because an incompetent surveillance team mistook his identity.