Internet Surveillance Argument By Daniel J. Galliongton

“Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety”. A famous quote by none other than Benjamin Franklin, and although he did not live to see it, his words would be part of almost every argument considering internet surveillance. This ongoing debate is immense because many different people from all aspects of society use the internet, so everyone is affected by the outcome of the debate. There is no easy solution when it comes to the balance between security and freedom, but in the end the right thing to do is to allow people to not be monitored when surfing the internet as it is a violation of the constitution, very impractical, and morally wrong. The internet is a very new
Galliongton on the US News site, you find that his main argument is that most of our communication is already being monitored, and that we would not catch criminals without being monitored. He says we used wiretapping to catch and stop organized crime in the past and that the internet is no different. That criminals and other unwanted people should be monitored for national security and the safety of the greater population. He also adds that the NSA only uses the gathering information when needed, like when a warrant is presented (Galliongton). He and those like him, believe that security is more important than internet freedom. That is not inherently wrong, and he is far from the only
They claim that because there are horrible child porn creating terrorists on the internet, everyone should be watched in case they are one. The Power of Critical Thinking calls that method of thinking a “composition fallacy” (Vaughn 170). The idea is that one cannot create a logical argument by basing what is true of the parts must be true of the whole, and in this case the idea that a small minority of bad people can be watched legally, therefore all people can be watched legally because of the actions of a few. That is not the only fallacy used in that argument as a hasty generalization in which “The drawing of a conclusion about a target group based on an inadequate sample size” (Vaughn 191). It would be like hating all Muslims for the actions of ISIS, or seeing all blacks as thugs because a black guy stole your bike. In this case though, seeing all people as criminal terrorists because of the small minority of people that actually are criminal