Govenrment Monitoring of Social Media
Wednesday, November 3, 2010
Facebook, Twitter, and Skype have ushered in a new era of global connection and social media. They have emerged rapidly over the past few years and this apparently poses a problem for the government.The Obama administration is currently seeking legislation that would allow government to more quickly and easily monitor conversations on social networking sights.
This legislation would require companies that offer online communication providers to create backdoors to their sites encryption, making them much easier to access and monitor.
The main concern for government is their ability to track terrorist and criminal behavior through social websites. In doing so it would bring these sites under the same scrutiny that was put on telecoms by the 1994 Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act.
Online monitoring of possible terrorist sects and criminal activity is an understandable cause, but should the government be allowed to blatantly invade a person’s privacy in order to do so?
It would appear that the only reason that this legislation is a thought right now is because the government is failing to keep up with the ever evolving world of the online social network.
Has the government dropped the ball here? Apparently so and now they want the average person to give up their right to privacy so they can play “catch-up.
Sure, monitoring terrorists and criminals is a good cause but, doing so through a clear violation of privacy is not the way to go about it.
2 comments:
Wow. I agree. This is creepy in many ways. I know that everything online is able for everyone to see, but the government getting more involved than they already are. I'm all about keeping the country safe but I feel this may be a violation of our rights.
I would say that this is completely out of line for the government. If the government decided to do this it would definitely say they our violating our privacy. It would almost be like the government coming into our houses and reading letters that we have received in the mail.
I agree Tyler, keeping the country is great and all, but this is a little much.
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