本帖最后由 seiranzcc1 于 2009-5-3 23:19 编辑
The proposer's closing remarks
Feb 13th 2008 | Mr Neil C Livingstone
Privacy is dead, at least in the traditional sense. Get over it. I know this is not a popular assertion, nor is it what this audience wants to hear, but it is time to reframe the debate and become serious about what we can do to harness the new technologies reconfiguring the world and eroding our privacy and enlist them in an effort to erect a new privacy paradigm.
In his rebuttal, my opponent, Mr Barr, cites the words of Justice Louis Brandeis in his dissenting opinion to the 1928 Olmstead decision, to the effect that privacy is the most "comprehensive" and "valued" right of "civilised men". I have, by contrast, in my earlier remarks suggested that the right to life is even more valued and fundamental, and must be protected and guaranteed, to the extent possible, before rights like privacy can be fully appreciated and prized. Moreover, Mr Barr failed to note that Justice Brandeis, in the very same passage in his dissent to Olmstead, described privacy as "the right to be let alone".1
By that standard, I am fully in agreement with Mr Barr. I believe that all citizens should be left alone unless they are engaged in criminal or antisocial conduct. This does not mean, however, that we should not monitor certain activities, technologies and movements to ensure that people are not guilty of malicious behaviour, nor should we hesitate to develop databases to protect society from the transgressions of known or would-be terrorists and criminals. What is wrong, for example, in protecting families with young children by maintaining national databases, available to the public, of convicted paedophiles, including their addresses? Only those who have been convicted of crimes against children would be included in such an inventory and the great mass of citizens would not be harmed in any way; they would only benefit from such information.
Let us turn our attention to the internet. The internet cannot function without vast amounts of data and certain personal information stored online. However, if our information is properly stored and protected, and access to it is appropriately controlled, how much real privacy have we lost? Haven't we lost vastly more privacy if our identities are stolen or the computer systems we depend on are incapacitated by denial of service attacks? Credit cards make our lives immeasurably simpler and more convenient, yet they, too, depend on validation codes and full owner information. Do we want financial fraud and theft to flourish because we want to restrict the amount and kind of information needed in the verification process? In short, if we are identified, but not compromised, what have we lost?
There are vast criminal cyber-networks in existence today seeking to acquire and sell the intellectual property on which much of our national economy depends. Other malicious actors regularly hope to compromise our national security by breaking into highly sensitive and restricted computer sites. Should we not do everything in our power to police such activities and preserve both the utility and efficacy of the internet, even if it means that we may have to scrutinise all users in order to identify what my opponent has referred to as the bad guys? There may be no other alternative. If there is, I would like Mr Barr to put it forward, since his arguments are long on feel-good rhetoric and short on substance.
Returning to my introductory comments, if citizens are not misusing the internet or telephonic communications, or attempting to board an aircraft in the hopes of hijacking it, to cite only a few examples, then they have nothing to fear from government scrutiny. With this in mind, I am not suggesting that some actions and activities should not remain private and beyond the ordinary interest of the government. But these should be activities that are inherently private, like most intimate relations, medical records and the inviolability of the home (without a court order). But activities that occur in the public sphere must be subjected to more scrutiny in order to protect society and ensure their safe and uncompromised operation. As I have suggested in my earlier statements, if a citizen desires to live below the radar, then he or she should not use the internet, try to board an aircraft, make a purchase with a credit card, or place phone calls. I, for one, am happy to subject myself to reasonable government scrutiny, and to provide certain personal data, in order to do all of these things conveniently and without serious disruption.
The new technologies that many seem to fear, I believe, may in the end actually do more to liberate us than enslave us. The global access to information technologies will make it more and more difficult for repressive and dictatorial governments to oppress their citizens without fear of exposure and international sanction. The internet has played a major role in political reform and empowering ordinary citizens in China. Surveillance cameras are already liberating citizens, especially the elderly, from the constant fear of crime. Universal access to DNA information, opposed by many civil libertarians, would go a long way to ensuring many innocent people are not convicted of crimes they did not commit.
Surveillance of communications and the movements of certain individuals are great tools in fighting terrorism and ensuring the security and happiness of our citizens. Just think, if the US intelligence community had more aggressively collected information prior to 9/11, and had properly connected the so-called "dots", we might not be at war today in Iraq and Afghanistan. Moreover, this debate would probably not be taking place because the new security procedures which my opponent rails against would not have been implemented.
In closing, to be a defender of reasonable and commonsense security does not mean that one has to become the enemy of privacy. Quite the contrary; my opponent, if his views were to prevail, would so diminish and undermine security that privacy also would soon become a casualty of his folly.
I have enjoyed the opportunity of taking what is the more unpopular and seemingly less sympathetic position in this debate. I understand that many of you are cynical and skeptical about the demands of security versus privacy in the contemporary world. I would only ask that you carefully consider my arguments and try to expand the way you view this complex debate before making a final judgment.
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The opposition's closing remarks
Feb 13th 2008 | Mr Bob Barr
My learned opponent, Neil Livingstone, has raised a number of interesting points in the course of his effort to defend the position that the only way security can be achieved in this era is to take away our privacy. Before I turn to rebut a few of these arguments in my continuing effort to show that this proposition is wrong, let me begin where Mr Livingstone ends the rebuttal he has previously submitted.
Mr Livingstone premises the entire structure of his arguments on the principle that the first and most important duty of the government is to protect its citizens. If one accepts this premise, then it becomes quite easy to be lulled into accepting the notion that privacy must give way to measures the government deems necessary in its effort to provide security for the people. If security trumps all else, then, of course individual privacy must fall; and fall gladly in Mr Livingstone's world.
The fact of the matter is, however, the primary, or first duty of the government is not to provide security for the citizenry; it is to serve as guardian of the rights guaranteed the citizens under the founding documents and principles of the nation. Certainly, the government has a responsibility to provide security measures for the citizenry, but that is a subsidiary duty of the prime duty to guarantee the rights of the people. Were it otherwise—were it as Mr Livingstone posits—then it becomes easy and quite acceptable for the government to decide that security necessitates listening in to private conversations at will, reading people's mail at will, preventing individual law-abiding citizens from travelling, and all those other intrusions to which we have been subjected since 9/11, simply because the government believes people generally are safer if certain people do not travel or communicate privately. And, most importantly, it matters not if such measures violate other rights, such as the right to privacy, because they are inferior rights. I reject this proposition just as, I am confident, America's founding fathers would.
The 21st-century world is a dangerous place; I grant Mr Livingstone that premise. But so was the 18th-century world; the time in which the principles on which the US was founded were crafted and enacted in a Constitution and Bill of Rights. To my opponent, these what he labels concepts (easier to denigrate than calling them what they are, rights), including the right to privacy, must give way to new threats because the "framework of old laws and attitudes" are, well, outmoded. Such situational interpretation of fundamental rights has been a convenient tool of despotic governments in all ages. The dangers evident in this model were understood and rejected by the Framers. If it were otherwise, then they would have incorporated into the Bill of Rights, for example, language making clear that rights such as the right to be free from government intrusion absent probable cause that a crime was being or had been committed, could be unilaterally suspended or denied by the government whenever it decided the security required it. This is simply not the case, and using fear of terrorist actions to do what the Constitution prohibits is dangerous and it is wrong; it is also unnecessary.
The rights guaranteed in the Bill of Rights are not ephemeral, abstract rights, the category to which Mr Livingstone relegates them. He even denigrates freedom to such status, and thereby lays the groundwork for his later effort to justify diminishing it in order to provide security. Security, which in my opponent's words is seen in the "orderly and smoothly functioning" of society, has long been the tool whereby governments force the citizenry into doing their will. Doing whatever is necessary to make the trains run on time will always appeal to a large segment of the population; but this does not mean that allowing the government to do so by taking away fundamental rights is acceptable or just.
Part and parcel of Mr Livingstone's approach is the notion that the government is entitled to pre-emptively protect citizens or the security interests thereof, a "preventative" paradigm, as he calls it. Just as governments such as the current administration in Washington, DC believe pre-emptive invasions are a legitimate tool of foreign policy, pre-emptive intrusions into the liberty of citizens domestically can be justified simply on the grounds that doing so accomplishes certain desired security objectives. The government is simply pre-emptively fulfilling what Mr Livingstone views as its fundamental and overarching responsibility to provide security. As appealing as this notion might be, it cannot be squared with limitations on government power in Bill of Rights, especially the Fourth Amendment; unless, of course, one has bought into the idea that offering a sense of safety to the citizenry is the single most important function of the government and everything else must fall in its path.
Mr Livingstone himself ultimately falls into the trap set by his faulty premise. As noted previously, in his rebuttal he concludes that the right to privacy must give way to security measures designed to make society run smoothly and to eradicate any sense of fear. My opponent then further reminds us that in accepting this principle the reader should keep in mind that "the tyrant always comes in the guise of the protector". This statement makes the case against the very premise of the debate topic before us, perhaps more vividly than arguments using words of my own choosing. The government that presents itself as the protector is always the one that becomes (or already is) the tyrant. I thank my opponent for providing in summary the very reason we should fear—and never accept—the principle that the government be allowed to take away our fundamental right to privacy simply to make us feel safer.
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发表于 2009-5-3 22:10:29
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