Security not synonymous with invasion of privacy

Prism. Verizon. AP.

Just last week, those three words were seemingly unrelated but now, after a wave of whistle-blowing, they offer a stark lesson on the growing lack of privacy due to government surveillance in the world today. Prism is a US National Security Agency (NSA) programme that allowed the US government to tap into social networks such as Google, Facebook and Yahoo. The NSA was also monitoring the phone records of Verizon, a major US telecom firm, and the US Justice Department was secretly collecting the phone records of Associated Press reporters for two months in 2012.

In today’s highly polarised world, surveillance may be necessary to some degree, as evident in several successfully-thwarted terrorist plots. However, the degree to which governments around the world — the US is by no means the only country engaged is this type of activity — are now snooping on their citizens in the name of national security raises the question: Where does it stop?

Without enforceable limits on what is allowable — or necessary — the world is slowly marching down a dystopian road to an Orwellian future. That may seem far-fetched, but a generation ago, so was the idea of uploading our lives on to networked super-computers. It is time for governments to come clean and ensure that while they protect their citizens, they also respect them. Not every one is a potential terrorist whose every move needs to be watched and every spoken word recorded and analysed.