Would you disclose the inner confines of your mind to the world — tell your every thought and emotion, desire and wish — to save just one child from the desolation of rape and murder? What about 10 children? A thousand?
This is a question that everyone needs to ask themselves, and whatever the answer is will inform us on how exactly we want our society to operate.
Our political culture today is marked by a heightened mindfulness of privacy and a fear of it being taken away. The outcry in response to the disclosure of the hidden and massive National Security Agency surveillance program was enormous. Here in Utah, politicians and citizens alike are protesting a three-year-old law in the Utah Code of Criminal Procedure that allows state prosecutors to search the internet, phone and bank records of suspected child predators without a warrant.
This outcry to governmental attempts to prevent and mitigate crime is centered on a fundamental value we all share — the value of privacy. And there does seem to be something intrinsically valuable about privacy. We do not want other people to be able to read our minds. We do not want a strange government official to know what we do in our private lives. And these preferences are more than just minor — they’re fundamental and are deeply tied to our feelings of autonomy and self-worth.
Ideally, we would live in a world where we did not have to compromise our privacy for things we value more, but we don’t. Instead, we live in a world that contains terrorists and child predators — a tiny minority of the population, no doubt -— but a significant force that has done, and will continue to do, some truly terrible things. How important is our privacy compared to the lives of innocent people all across the world?
If you answered yes to the question I posed at the beginning of this article, then you are willing to give up an absolute amount of privacy for the sake of a child. I think that action is heroic, but I’m sure many, including myself, might hesitate to embrace a world of no privacy whatsoever.
Fortunately, the controversial measures the government is trying to enforce today are not nearly so extreme. Instead, our society is asking us to give up only minor and partial aspects of our privacy. They want it, not to abuse us or exploit us, but to protect innocent children and adults from the harms of horrible people.
It’s something that, in the end, we should all be OK with.