privacy vs terrorism

new boy

new boy

new boy

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Simple question. Promted from a disscusion at work, and feel like I want to see how the general public feel.

What price are we willing to pay to prevent terrorism? The government are looking deeper into our personal communications (not crazy tin foil hat wearing man here, its true) in order to prevent terrorism. If we all presume for the duration of this thread that there are no ulterior motives on the part of the government, then is it more important to preserve our right to privicy, or is it more important to potentially save some lives?

I'm not the best at making my posts seem grand and intellectual, but I'd like to hear your thoughts.
 
Interesting. Me and my colleague both felt that letting the govenment look at our (albiet mundane) private conversations was kinda like letting them win. We felt that terrorists are best ignored. I suppose at somepoint someone is going to ask weather I would feel that way if someone deer to me was a victim. Obviously I cant say for sure, but I would like to feel like my values would not be swayed either way.

EDIT - them is the terrorist not the gov lol.
 
scorza said:
Except that the security services don't have unlimited resources available to them so it's about making things easier for them, rather than the terrorists. We've just seen these awful attacks in Paris where the perpetrators should have been being watched but weren't. If it turns out that the reason they weren't being watched closely was because of a lack of resources then surely anything that utilises resources more effectively can only be a good thing.
Click to expand...

But there must be a limit. If the have to watch another 100,000 innocent civiliens in order to watch the right people, then is that a good thing?

What about if they watch the whole population?
 
Might be worth trying to put things into perspective. How many british people (as an example) have lost there lives due to terrorist attacks per year for the last 20 years?

lets say for arguments sake, 5? (I have completly pulled this figure out of my ass)

if we spend £10,000,000 a year upping survalence in order to reduce that by 1, then is that worth it? What if the donated that £10,000,000 to water aid or whatever, how many lives would that save? And on top of that we have maybe thousands of inosent civilians monitored?
 
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