ISSC451_ReplytoDiscussionweek5
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451
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Law
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Jan 9, 2024
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docx
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Uploaded by fighters18jfighters18j
Professor,
There are many concerns about mass surveillance, data collection, and the potential for abuse of power. Most Americans are concerned about how much data is being collected about them by both companies (79%) and the government (64%). Additionally, seven-in-ten Americans say they feel their personal information is less secure than it was five years ago (Froomkin, 2015).
Government surveillance of the Internet is a power with the potential for massive abuse. Like its precursor of telephone wiretapping, it must be subjected to meaningful judicial process before it is authorized. We should scrutinize any surveillance that threatens our intellectual privacy (Stahl, 2016).
With the expansion of surveillance, such abuses could become more numerous and more egregious as the amount of personal data collected increases. In addition, allowing surreptitious surveillance of one form, even limited in scope and for a particular contingency, encourages government to expand such surveillance programs in the future (Watt, 2017).
The information that the government collects through surveillance can provide more data on behaviors and choices that go beyond the need for safety. This effort could help politicians discover unique data points which might predict voter behavior patterns in an election (Froomkin, 2015).
Balancing privacy rights and enabling law enforcement agencies to effectively gather intelligence is a complex issue that requires a delicate balance. The role of privacy and civil liberties in national security has been recognized by the US Department of Defense in its Directive 5400.111 (Mohseni, 2023). The directive requires balancing the need to collect, maintain, use, or disseminate personal information about individuals with individual’s right to be protected against unwarranted invasion of privacy. It ensures checks for relevancy, timeliness, completeness, and accuracy and limits recording information relating to the exercise of First Amendment rights (Mohseni, 2023).
The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has also recommended fostering international co-operation among privacy law enforcement authorities to better safeguard personal data and minimize disruptions to transborder data flows (Oleary, et al, 1995).
In addition, legal frameworks can evolve to address these conflicts and uphold both individual rights and public safety. For instance, the USA PATRIOT Act and other national security laws were ill-equipped to handle developments in bulk data collection (Mohseni, 2023). Cloud computing and encryption have fundamentally unsettled the assumptions underlying the existing warrant regime. The privacy concerns that crystallized in the wake of the Snowden disclosures have had ripple effects beyond the national security context (Mohseni, 2023). Private companies, NGOs, and foreign governments reacted forcefully to the revelations, effecting new laws and policies to shield information from the National Security Agency. A defining feature of this new era is the increasingly contentious relationship between the U.S. government and major U.S. technology companies.
John Caldwell
Froomkin, A. M. (2015). Regulating mass surveillance as privacy pollution: Learning from environemntal impact statements. U. Ill. L. Rev., 1713.
Mohseni, F. (2023). An Overview of the USA Patriot Act. The Quarterly Journal of Judicial Law Views,
17(60), 179-212.
O'Leary, D. E., Bonorris, S., Klosgen, W., Khaw, Y. T., Lee, H. Y., & Ziarko, W. (1995). Some privacy issues in
knowledge discovery: the OECD personal privacy guidelines. IEEE Expert, 10(2), 48-59.
Stahl, T. (2016). Indiscriminate mass surveillance and the public sphere. Ethics and Information Technology, 18(1), 33-39.
Watt, E. (2017). The right to privacy and the future of mass surveillance. The International Journal of Human Rights, 21(7), 773-799.
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