Some governments today seek to monitor the general public’s electronic communications (in the form of phone calls, texts and emails) saying that this reduces crime. Many people oppose this, however, saying that it erodes individual freedoms. Discuss the aspects of this debate, and give your own conclusion to the discussion.

It is admirable that governments seek to reduce criminality, and are prepared to use modern

methods

to achieve

this

.

However

, the arguments on both sides of

this

particular discussion (about monitoring private electronic correspondence) are by no means straightforward, as we shall see now.

First,

those who favour the interception of private digital messages and calls say that only by doing so can criminal messages be tracked and the culprits detained. Indeed, there are many examples of violent and sexual criminals (especially in the USA) who have been caught by these

methods

. A

further

argument is that people with nothing to hide should have nothing to fear from being monitored, and that monitoring is an exercise in public safety, rather like CCTV or having police officers watch a large crowd for potential trouble-makers.

Such

arguments are persuasive and are often used by media supporters of interception and monitoring.

By contrast

, though, other people point to the fundamental breach of civil liberties that

this

policing activity involves. After all, they say, we would not allow the police to search our homes entirely at random, or open our paper correspondence without reason, purely on the chance of finding something incriminating. Another counter-argument is the extremely small number of convictions that actually stem from these

methods

, compared to the

overall

population. It appears to be true that the security services are most effective when responding to specific information or observations, rather than ‘trawling’ the entire population’s messages in the hope of detecting tiny numbers of criminals.

Overall

, I feel that the monitoring of the general population in

this

way is unjustified, in terms of personal freedoms and the evident lack of effectiveness of

such

methods

. We should urge our police to focus on gaining information through informants and leads from concerned citizens, which would have a higher benefit in terms of conviction rates and consequent public safety.