Privacy is a fundamental right

My opponent critizes the distinction I make between primary and secondary rights as being irrelevant to the discussion. I will now demonstrate its relevance to the topic at hand. I believe the implication was there that the only fundamental rights would be primary rights and secondary rights would be contingent rights by virtue of their non-universality.What I mean by this is the following, given that there is another secondary right in opposition to each secondary right, the protection of each cannot be universal, and any discussion over which right should be upheld will have to appeal to other primary rights. We cannot decide on secondary rights alone. In one motion, my opponent asserts the primacy of freedom of speech, and then caveats this by protections agains slander, libel and hate speech. He cannot have his cake and eat it too. Either the right is universal, or it is not. Universal (primary) rights are fundamental, and can be used as the sole reason for a legal decision in a dispute between two parties (not including the state). Secondary rights are persuasive only, and such rights cannot be upheld in all cases (as they are often in direct opposition).AccountabilityThis appears to be the major sticking point in our discussion. I will put forward the following proposal. In any case of a violation of privacy, the gathering of information alone does nothing to damage the individual. It is only in cases where this information is actually used that harm is done to the individual. In this case, legal restrictions on how the information can be used (providing legal recourse when the government does use the information) should be available. My opponent asserts that the government in our particular example will do everything necessary to ensure that the clandestine nature of the surveillance is ensured. We must however assume, that the government can still only do things within its legitimate power. It is unfair of us to assume that because the government will not respect privacy that it will not respect our other rights in its pursuit of this violation of privacy, this goes against our stated assumption of the legitimacy of government. We must assume that there has been legislation passed which permits violations of privacy of this nature, without exposing what programmes are in play. In which case we must investigate the means of ensuring the secrecy of the programme available to the government. In particular, even suppressing information from the trial still leaves a trace, there will still be information left behind. Every time the information is used, there will be traces left and this will eventually lead to the 'critical mass' my opponent mentions. In which case, the only reasonable course of action to 'ensure secrecy' would be to never use the information at all. In which case, I say that there is absolutely no harm to it. If my opponent wishes to investigate instead a weaker notion of 'clandestine' which does not require that the government be capable of maintaining the secrecy indefinitely to an arbitrary degree then perhaps there will be something on which to debate. Clandestine government operations are usually assumed to become public eventually (and if they aren't then whoever started it was kidding themselves). I make the final point that it is only by insisting that the secrecy of the programme be absolute that my opponent is able to dismiss my arguments and that if he were to take a slightly less dogmatic interpretation of the word 'clandestine' (as for instance in the description of 'unadvertised' surveillance) we might have something more substantial to discuss. In order to achieve such absolute secrecy the government either has to:a. Be granted additional powers that were not given to it by the context of this debate orb. Never use information that was gathered using the programme.Neither of which are useful in resolving this debate.