Resolved: When in conflict, the right to Individual Privacy is more important than National Security

Thanks to Con for this debate. I will present my case at this time, and I will offer some definitions. Next round I will rebut Con's case. I also apologize in advance for any formatting errors due to C/Ping from Word. Contention One: Individuals are Self-ownersSub-point A: People are ends in themselves.Prof. Edward Feser writes, "Nozick takes his position to follow from a basic moral principle"enshrined in Kant"s second formulation of the famous Categorical Imperative: "Act so that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in that of another, always as an end and never as a means only." The idea here is that a human being, as a rational agent endowed with self-awareness, free will, and the possibility of formulating a plan of life, has an inherent dignity and cannot properly be treated as a mere thing, or used against his will as an instrument or resource in the way an inanimate object might be. In line with this, Nozick also describes individual human beings as self-owners. The thesis of self-ownership, a notion that goes back in political philosophy at least to John Locke, is just the claim that individuals own themselves--their bodies, talents and abilities, labor, and by extension the fruits or products of their exercise of their talents, abilities and labor." Prof. Dale Murray adds, "Nozick understood individuals as having absolute property rights over themselves."Sub-point B: Self-ownership requires the Minimalist State.Feser Two posits, "the only sort of state that can be morally justified is what Nozick calls a minimal state or "night-watchman" state, a government which protects individuals, via police and military forces, from force, fraud, and theft, and administers courts of law, but does nothing else. In particular, such a state cannot regulate what citizens eat, drink, or smoke (since this would interfere with their right to use their self-owned bodies as they see fit), cannot control what they publish or read (since this would interfere with their right to use the property they"ve acquired with their self-owned labor--e.g. printing presses and paper), cannot administer mandatory social insurance schemes...(since this would interfere with citizens" rights to use the fruits of their labor as they desire)...and cannot regulate economic life in general..." Prof. Dale Murray adds, Nozick is "vehemently opposed to...intrusion of the state into private lives. He was opposed to any sort of paternalistic legislation. For example, Nozick would have criticized laws prohibiting or restricting the riding of motorcycles without helmets"[because the] state should not have the right to interfere with an individual"s choice to [take risks]."Contention Two: Privacy is essential to self-ownership.Sub-point A: Surveillance threatens one"s control over one"s property. Take, for instance, Prof. Judith Jarvis Thomson"s argument, where she posits that, "the illicit viewing of another"s diary involves a breach of his right to dispose of his property as he sees fit." Suppose, for instance, that it was police, without a warrant, reading your diary in search of evidence of possible wrongdoing. Modernity is replete with opportunities for actors to infringe on your private property, particularly in the context of national security. Macnish notes: "Wireless networks transmit vast quantities of information on systems vulnerable to intercept. The Internet has seen the creation...of "data doubles" which are vulnerable to abuse and theft; online storing of medical, banking and other personal data which may be hacked or simply lost by the institution responsible; and the increased commodification of personal information by web sites which sell that data to advertising companies or governments"Technology means that almost limitless information can be collected, stored indefinitely and returned to or searched at will."Sub-point B: An emphasis on national security threatens one"s control over oneself.Macnish 2 states, "Privacy affords us the space to be ourselves and to define ourselves through giving us a degree of autonomy and protecting our dignity...Privacy is thus important in the social context of democracy...Thanks to a level of anonymity I [am able] to speak out publicly against corruption or injustice, or simply to be more creative in self-expression. Many of these benefits can be seen through the contrast with states employing high levels of surveillance, such as the former [East Germany]. Here the surveillance carried out by"STASI was instrumental in quashing open dissent and enforcing the behavioral uniformity foreseen by Orwell." In this way, a lack of privacy can be used to manipulate and coerce individuals into taking actions they may not wish to take. Contention Two: The PanopticonSub-point A: The Panopticon is freedom-limiting, using surveillance to enforce controlStanford Encyclopedia writes, "At the core of Foucault's picture of modern "disciplinary" society are three primary techniques of control: observation, normalizing judgment, and the examination. To a great extent, control over people---power--can be achieved merely by observing them...A perfect system of observation would allow one"to see everything, a situation approximated...in Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon...Foucault's point is that...the goals of power and the goals of knowledge cannot be separated: in knowing we control and in controlling we know. The examination situates individuals in a "field of documentation." The results of exams are recorded in documents that provide detailed information about the individuals examined and allow power systems to control them, e.g., absentee records for schools, patients' charts in hospitals, [and government databases]. On the basis of these records, those in control can formulate categories, averages, and norms that are in turn a basis for knowledge. The examination turns the individual into a "case"--in both senses of the term: a scientific example and an object of care. Caring is always also an opportunity for control. Bentham's Panopticon is, for Foucault, an ideal architectural model of modern disciplinary power. It is a design for a prison, built so that each inmate is separated from and invisible to all the others (in separate "cells")...Monitors will not always see each inmate; the point is that they could at any time. Since inmates never know whether they are being observed, they must act as if they are always objects of observation. As a result, control is achieved more by the internal monitoring of those controlled than by heavy physical constraints." Invasions of privacy, particularly pervasive and invasive surveillance and cyber-monitoring of individuals are creating a modern-day panopitcon where no individual is free from the threat of surveillance and observation. This is gradually morphing society into the prison which Foucault describes.Sub-point B: The Panopticon NowAccording to Kyle Chayka of Newsweek, "from 2008 to 2010...the NSA collaborated with the British GCHQ to intercept the webcam footage of over 1.8 million Yahoo users. The agencies were analyzing the images they downloaded from webcams and scanning them...with the help of a new technology called face recognition. The outcome was pure Kafka, with innocent people being caught in the surveillance dragnet...The U.S. government is in the process of building the world"s largest cache of face recognition data, with the goal of identifying every person in the country. The creation of such a database would mean that anyone could be tracked wherever his or her face appears." Prof. Daniel Byman and Benjamin Wittes of the Brookings Institute add, "In the 1960s and 1970s...U.S. intelligence agencies conducted abusive surveillance of journalists; members of Congress; Martin Luther King, Jr.; and prominent opponents of the War in Vietnam...[We can also cite] President George W. Bush"s warrantless wiretapping...circumventing FISA procedures...[Currently] the NSA estimates that is "touches" the equivalent of 580 million file cabinets of documents every single day...The NSA can access people"s Facebook messages, Skype feeds, financial documents, e-mails, and stored computer documents [as well.]" Moreover, administrations have even lied about the scope of this surveillance to oversight bodies: "the director of national intelligence told the Senate in March 2013 that the NSA does "not wittingly" collect data of U.S. citizens. But less than three months later, the massive metadata collection program was revealed, leaving [him] to lamely claim that his original statement had been the "least untruthful" one he could give." As Chayka summarized, with all of these invasive surveillance tools, "it will become impossible to be anonymous in society...That means every person in the U.S. would be passively tracked at all times. In the future, the government could know when you use your computer, which building you enter on a daily basis, where you shop and where you drive. It"s the ultimate fulfillment of Big Brother paranoia." And, since the U.S. has shared many of its surveillance technologies with allies, this threat to privacy is spreading.===================Feser - http://www.iep.utm.edu...Murray - http://www.iep.utm.edu...Thomson + Macnish - http://www.iep.utm.edu...Stanford - http://plato.stanford.edu...Chakya - http://www.newsweek.com...Byman + Wittes - https://www.foreignaffairs.com...