The free world is in a flurry at the moment.
Since the September 11 tragedy in New York (and Bali and Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia and Baghdad and Pakistan and so on) countries that enjoy the freedom of speech, the right to vote and the right to privacy have started to tighten their security.
Security in this case means finding the bad people through monitoring and then taking action to prevent further threats. With communication becoming a global, digital network, security agencies will rely more on technology to intercept, collate and analyse this information.
And in doing so, they're going to impinge on the privacy of every single person.
At least, this is how privacy advocates are seeing it. Their issue is that not only do we have a right to say what we want but we also have a right not to say it. Thus, we should have the right to remain anonymous if we want to buy something just as much as we can choose what we want to buy.
The counter-argument, of course, is that if you aren't doing anything wrong then you've got nothing to worry about. And don't you want our country to be safe?
Currently, we're somewhere in the middle. But in light of this 'new' idea of terrorism, we need to renegotiate what's important to our society and draw a new line in the sand between personal freedoms and national security.
The tools to monitor people are already in place. The Internet is essentially one massive log file which records where emails go; what sites are visited; and which computer each and every packet of information goes to. By the time other forms of communication go completely digital, like phones, we'll already have the perfect infrastructure in place to record the behaviour of individuals.
At the moment, the only thing that's preventing the wholesale, blanket monitoring of the population is legislation which more or less says we have a right to privacy, unless there's strong evidence to suggest we've abused that right. I like that idea. Privacy is a right, and if someone abuses it then it should get taken away. Taken away for that particular person, not every single person.
My belief is that if we take away the foundations of our free society in order to protect it, then what are we protecting? We'll go into an unhealthy spiral where tightened security that's designed to protect our free way of life actually takes it away.
I'll say it again because I think it's important: what are protecting if not our freedom?
What do you think? Do you think everyone should be monitored more? What's more important, national security or individual privacy?
Email me at dkidd@pcauthority.com.au