In regards to Issue 16 Unit 5 in the textbook, I strongly agree that government Internet surveillance efforts threaten privacy and civil rights. It is a basic human right to allow someone to keep something secret to oneself. We owe no explanation or clarification to anyone for our private matters. With the governments increasing efforts in Internet surveillance this basic right is violated. It is as if we have become completely transparent to people we know nothing about ourselves. New technological tools are vulnerable to exploitation by governments aiming to crush dissent and deny human rights. All governments struggle to balance a need to deal with serious issues such as security, hate speech and child safety for their citizens but in repressive societies, these concerns often serve as convenient pretext to engage in censorship or surveillance of the internet that violates the rights and privacy of users and threatens the free flow of information. We all are aware that he internet and other communication technologies have created a vast amount of opportunities to share information, opening-up paths for pro democracy groups, activists, journalists and individuals around the world to share their opinion and judgment on various policies made by their respective government. I understand why monitoring people’s activity may seem as the right thing to do to ensure security but it is not of utmost importance; there are various other problems that need to be fixed at grass-root levels rather than monitoring people’s activity over the internet and in turn violating their freedom of speech. James A. Lewis provides his argument in our textbook on why Internet surveillance threatens human and privacy rights. He argues that legislations like the Cyber security Act of 2009 were not written with security in mind. They expected a self-governing commons to emerge, which did