The Importance Of Privacy And National Security

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In the past few years, there has been a debate on what is more important, national security or privacy. Both sides have strong arguments for and against them. National security may sound important, but privacy is more important. If we do not have the liberty to do what we want without our privacy being invaded, how can we be secure as a nation?
We are getting our privacy invaded in many ways. One example is that our cell phones act as mini radios. Their signal can be picked up if someone has the right equipment, allowing the person on the other end to hear everything being sent and received. Foreign intelligence and police forces are some of the groups that have access to this. Many “Americans understand that we need to give due weight to provide both privacy and national security. But right now, …show more content…

Many terrorists realize that they are being watched, so they must take extra precautions to not be caught. This shows that “online surveillance has been effective and is an important tool the fight against terrorism” (Francis, “5 Reasons Why The NSA's Massive Surveillance Program Is No Big Deal”). This is a major point to back up the importance of national security. They also say that we do it anyway when we post photos and videos to social media; so what’s the difference if the NSA is seeing what we do? We are able to “determine… the following things about the most active people in [our] Facebook feed: Where they live; where they work; roughly how much more they make; how many children they have; where their children go to school…” (Francis, “5 Reasons Why The NSA's Massive Surveillance Program Is No Big Deal”) among many other things. This shows that our “privacy” isn’t as private as we make it out to be regardless of the NSA and other spying organizations. It also shows that we need to be careful what we post to social media as it could become

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