One specific aspect of surveillance morality is the myth of consent. The idea behind the myth of consent involves one of the most critical but ignored things in America: the terms and conditions. In the terms and conditions of most cell phone contracts, it will be stated that you consent to having your phone metadata, aspects such as call length and phone numbers, shared with the government (Spener 404-405). The problem with this is that not many people actually read those terms and conditions, they just blindly agree. This means that millions upon millions of Americans “consent” to have their information monitored, when virtually none of them are aware that they agreed to that. The debate about the morality of government surveillance is …show more content…
Hayden argued in the debate that many people who argue against surveillance don’t know the true nature of it or the reasoning, and that they need to know the past of surveillance before they can judge the current day surveillance in our country, and he points out that nobody complained when the NSA was intercepting Soviet communications long ago to support that idea (Hayden Does State Spying Make Us Safer 6-8). Next up to speak was Alexis Ohanian, who opens his argument by comparing Canada, the location where the debate was being held, to the United States, and says how they both try to balance security and privacy, but how that has led to a powerful surveillance state in the United States. Ohanian argues that surveillance is dangerous because the United States is losing money due to lack of interest from foreign tech companies due to surveillance, the fact that the internet is now in danger because some countries are threatening to make the networks of their countries private because of surveillance, and finally because of the fact that surveillance is a threat to security because it takes advantage of a security flaw of the entire nation and uses it to collect information that supposedly keeps them safe, while that same security flaw can be exploited by someone else if they so desired (Hayden Does State Spying Make Us Safer 9-12). The next debater was Alan Dershowitz, the civil liberties journalist. He argues that in order to solve the issue of government surveillance, a balance must be struck, and one direct quote from him supports this idea, “No state has ever survived without surveillance, and no state deserves to survive if it has too much surveillance, particularly against its own citizens” (Hayden Does State Spying Make Us Safer 12-13). Glenn Greenwald was the last to speak, starting off by