Government Monitoring Internet

"As time has gone on, internet capabilities have exceeded the world’s expectations. The internet has brought the world immense efficiency and pleasure. However, as the internet has become increasingly popular, areas of the internet have become corrupt causing the government to feel like they must monitor the internet. This subject has become controversial between groups and seems to be an ongoing debate. The government- federal,state, and local- do not have the duty to monitor internet content because privacy is an important value to American society that should be upheld and if government were to monitor the internet certain freedoms may be denied. Internet privacy should be upheld by the government because it denies freedom to an extent.

citizens. For example, the opposition feels that government monitoring could prevent bullying on social media. Meaning that schools should have access to their students private accounts or some other way of monitoring. This may sound like a good idea to some, but there is a reason why most teens create private accounts and that is so only designated followers can view them. This is not necessarily because they are hiding something, but because they may not want the school to know every detail in their personal lives. In relevance to cyberbullying, monitoring may discourage the perpetrator, but will it disband all bullying in general? Probably not, as alternate accounts could be made and means to the way the perpetrators bullys could be changed. Also, the idea of government or school leaders monitoring all teen accounts seems utterly time consuming and unnecessary especially because accounts can be disbanded by the certain social media companies themselves. The concern and main reason for social media and internet use monitoring could also mostly be attributed to the government's ongoing fear of terrorism. However, can one actually draw extensive information from one simple social media post or an internet search? Will this actually lead us to the possible suspects of criminal activity? Maybe, but the likely evidence will not be great enough to prove anything. Monitoring suspicious activity would take a ton of time considering the amount of people on the internet and would be a waste of time, resources, and people. Most importantly though, tracking citizens’ internet use is an invasion of privacy and gives the government more power than necessary over the population. Therefore, government should not have the capability to monitor the internet in social