For many years, nation’s governments have been monitoring their citizens through the use of surveillance technologies. Initially, privacy concerns involving computer technology arose because citizens feared that a strong centralized government could easily collect and store data about them. For the last decade in the United States, the federal government drastically increased its ability to monitor its citizens due to both changes in its laws and due to advancements in surveillance technologies. Together, the unfolding revelations opened a window into the growth of government surveillance that began under the Bush administration after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and has clearly been embraced and even expanded under the Obama administration. In 2007, the United States National Security Agency (NSA) even launched the PRISM program. The NSA can use these PRISM requests to target communications that were encrypted when they traveled across the internet backbone, to focus on stored data that telecommunication filtering systems discarded earlier, and to get data that is easier to handle, among other things. However, just because we are able to do something it is not always the best decision to do so. For instance, is it wise or even ethical for the government to use this level of surveillance on its citizens in its broad unrestricted searches for terrorists. Let examine the ethics governmental monitoring from the perspective of a variety of ethical models such as the Social Contract model, Kantian model and the Act Utilitarian model.
First, the ethics of governmental monitoring from a social contract perspective. The social contract theory states that rational people will agree to accept those moral rules that will mutually benefit all in the society on the condition that others will agree to follow those rules as well. In order to examine, if governmental monitoring is ethical according to the social contract theory, we must define what we as a society...