Advances in Technology Raises Ethical Issues

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In the past decade informative technology such as video surveillance has been relentlessly overtaking us with great speed. While such technology certainly has the potential to improve the quality and efficiency of our lives, it also raises important ethical issues. For many years the government has been monitoring us through the use of surveillance technologies such as audio recordings, video recordings, databases, and even tapping into our phone calls. While informative technology is neither bad nor good, it can and is used for both and that is humanity’s biggest problem. Due to this, there are many ethical dilemmas that can result from the misuse of informative technology. One such ethical dilemma is whether a government should have the right to use technology to monitor its citizens without their knowledge or consent and if so how do you limit the power of government to spy on. Moreover who should be allowed to blow the whistle when intelligence gathering goes too far, or when information is misused?
Although this trend of advanced monitoring in the United States had been increasing for years, it is in the aftermath of terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 that the United States has dramatically increased its use of surveillance technologies all while modifying the laws giving its law enforcement agencies and other governmental agencies nearly unlimited powers in terms of surveillance and monitoring. Legislations such as the Patriot Act gives the government extensive and freely defined powers to do things such a monitor computers and cell phone calls without a warrant. Governmental agencies are also now given unrestricted access to medical records, financial records and an assortment of other information. All th...

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... related moral and ethical issues are left up to individual interpretation. While there is a need for the sacrifice of privacy for security, it seems that the growing need for humans to spy on one another seems to have overtaken all priorities of safety when it comes to surveillance. The advancement in informative technology just allows more individuals’ information to be readily accessible to those who have the means to acquire it. Thus it seems that with the improvement of technology, there will always more innovative ways to breach an individual's privacy. If kept within the boundaries of the constitutional laws, surveillance can indeed be a good asset for the protection and defense of our county however if used to seek out individuals who minorities, women, immigrants, etc, surveillance can be a dangerous weapon, which unfortunately at this current time, it is.

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