“Government should govern for the good of the people, not for
the good of those in power” – Aristotle
For my final Ethics project, I focused on the DCS devices
the government uses to eavesdrop on “criminal” online activity. The DCS systems
are used to gather intelligence for domestic security and assemble evidence for
criminal prosecution. With an authorizing court order, the FBI installs this on
an Internet Service Provider to trace the online communications of suspected
individuals. After 9-11, Congress passed the
Patriot Act which lowered thresholds for surveillance approval and greatly
expanded its range. These were powerful surveillance tools prior to 9-11, but
it became much more powerful in the new legal context of the Patriot Act.
Today's technological capabilities take surveillance to new
levels; the government can and does utilize methods to observe all the behavior
and actions of all people. The main uneasiness behind wiretapping is that the
government collects, and keeps forever, a large amount of information about
individuals in the U.S., including citizens. Is losing our privacy a necessity
to protect our country from terrorist attacks? When the NSA chose to intrude on
American citizens and listen in on private conversations they did so without
notification towards the nation and without a search warrant.
My chosen philosopher; Aristotle, had a different approach to
privacy. He distinguished a difference between the public sphere and private
sphere. He believed that the public sphere was the political community, whereas
private consisted of family and domestic life. When
applied to privacy, Aristotle would be on the side arguing that U.S wiretapping
on all people is wrong. The government is gathering information about citizens
without our knowledge. So, Aristotle would feel that what the government was
doing was wrong, because it wasn’t in the public political community that they
were getting this information. Many other philosophers have different views
around privacy. For instance, John Rawls believed in justice. He said that to
get justice in this world, you need to make decisions that maximize liberty. In
the subject of privacy, he would say that the NSA and practices like illegal
wire tapping are not ethical.
The government should have the power to protect the citizen’s of
this great country but they must balance that responsibility delicately and be mindful
of the rights of the citizens they are protecting. Some argue that having a
loss of privacy is necessary if we are to protect our country from terrorist
attacks. But I will argue that giving up basic privacy rights is a high price
to pay for being protected. The ethical dilemma lies in not just the legality
of wiretapping, but in the question of whether our private and public freedoms
are being run over all in the name of national security.
http://www.nlnrac.org/classical/aristotle
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