![]() Given the scale of the pandemic and the extraordinary measures adopted by governments to curtail it, the COVID-19 crisis provides a unique and tragic opportunity to understand how citizens view the trade-offs between civil liberties and improved public health conditions. As part of the response to the pandemic, civil liberties that had been almost universally guaranteed in democratic societies, such as free movement and free association, are being restricted for the sake of public health. ![]() The COVID-19 pandemic is a case in point. Those trade-offs are particularly stark in times of crises, such as terrorist attacks and natural disasters, when safeguarding public welfare may require extraordinary measures that impose severe restrictions on civil liberties (Ackerman 2007, Argente et al. Governments often must strike a balance between competing demands and navigate complex trade-offs. For instance, it is possible that, in the pursuit of national security guarantees, rights to individual privacy may be infringed upon (Sunstein 2016, Acquisti et al. These core government functions – protection of civil liberties and provision of public goods – may come into conflict. Public goods – such as clean air and law enforcement – are goods that improve collective welfare and, absent government intervention, would likely be underprovided in a free market (Mas-Colell et al. In fact, according to political philosophers such as Hobbes (1651), Locke (1689) and Rousseau (1762), individuals agree to surrender some of their freedom and be part of the state precisely to ensure better protection of their remaining rights and liberties. Civil liberties – such as due process, freedom of expression, and the right to privacy – are foundational values that the state commits to respecting to the largest possible extent. It proposes a different way to think about this relationship-one based on an old text of evolutionary biology: the idea of a “hostile symbiosis.” And it proposed categories of surveillance that might even enhance, rather than erode, liberty.Īnd not only does it, like the blog post, detail the history of that famous Franklin quotation, it also gives the surprising history of Justice Robert Jackson’s famous warning about turning the Bill of Rights into a “suicide pact.Two of the central roles of the state are the protection of civil liberties and the provision of public goods. ![]() It is a broad examination of the relationship between security and liberty-and an attack on the idea that the two exist in some sort of “balance” in which a gain in one will tend to come at the expense of the other. ![]() The larger paper, however, is worth reintroducing too in the context of the current conversation about the NSA’s data-mining programs. The history of the quotation is, indeed, interesting it actually does not mean what people (including Snowden) use it to mean. In what were to be the last words of the interview, he quoted Benjamin Franklin: “Those who surrender freedom for security will not have, nor do they deserve, either one.” ![]()
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