Suspension Of Rights

The difference between rights and privileges is that rights can’t be taken away. So, rights can not be allowed to be suspended by a government for any scenario. Taking away the rights of citizens is unethical, difficult to implement, and often ineffective in stopping whatever disaster they intend to either mend or stop, not that all disasters or attacks are serious enough to warrant such an over the top response. Rights of a citizen should not be up to the government to decide to suspend them when it suits them. A government suspension on the rights of citizens is not an ethical thing to do. Rights, under any circumstance, should not be able to be taken away from a citizen, if they are, then those were not rights but privileges. They must

A suspension of rights allows government officials to get away with whatever they please. They can do what they please, in the name of finding and punishing the guilty, however, the judicial systems of the world should not be installed to punish the guilty, but protect the innocent and their best interests and a suspension of their rights is nothing but detrimental to those who have done no wrong. Large scale spying operations on citizens, as is allowed by the PATRIOT Act, is not only ethically wrong, it is logistically impractical and has been shown to fail to catch terrorist plots time after time. The perpetrators of the Boston Marathon Bombing were alleged to, by Edward Snowden, have been mentioned by name by Russian intelligence agencies to the intelligence community in the United States before the attacks ever occurred. The NSA had recorded phone calls of the assailants of the September Eleventh Attacks to their commanders, yet they did not catch it at the time, this was still at a scale before the PATRIOT Act, it was many magnitudes smaller, yet they could not find the terrorist plot with less data to sort through. They had an unwieldy amount of data before, yet they add more. So,

To give a sense of the scale, and the unworkableness that the PATRIOT Act has conjured, let’s create a thought experiment. A lot of what the NSA uses are emails, search history, phone usage, and open source intelligence (abbreviated OSINT, it’s things like facebook status’ and twitter feeds), let’s say that the average person is associated with forty others, which is an understatement in this age of connectivity. One person is flagged by the program, so you must investigate their associates, and their associates associates, and so on, given three degrees of separation you need to investigate 64,000 people. You need to investigate their emails, google searches, phone records, and so on, no person can do this so computers are relied on,