Governmental Power Abuses

Companies are allowed to track consumer web browsing and store information about consumers. One must wonder what such information will be used for. Currently, it is used for advertising, but given such legislation as the Patriot Act, it is difficult to judge where the encroachment may end. Soon, companies or the government may be able to use our information to any end. Some would argue that if a citizen isn’t doing anything wrong, they shouldn’t have anything to worry about. If you’re not doing anything wrong, why would it matter if the government is reading your email? Invasion of privacy may not be the worst thing that the government has done to citizens. After all, we’re not being locked in concentration camps or massacred. However, the government’s justification for invading our privacies is, in my opinion, terrifying. The government claims that they are wire-tapping, etc. for security purposes. In other words, they claim that they must perform any number of privacy invasions to prevent terrorism. While this may seem like a noble cause, it is actually placing the government in a position to choose one citizen over another. The government is now permitted to encroach on one citizen for the benefit of another. They now have an unprecedented level of power. They can decide that Person A’s rights are more important than that of Person B’s rights. Such power in a government is exceedingly dangerous. If the government continues to use such principles to flout the constitution, rights of citizens will soon amount to nothing. The government has the power to ignore the second amendment, “for the greater good”, so which rights will be next? Such blatant encroachment must stop, not because monitoring is a serious inconvenience to private citizens, but because the government should never have the right to select one citizen’s rights over another’s.