Privacy: Inherent to Freedom.

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                Switzer

Brett Switzer

Mr. McGowan

AP Lit & Composition

October 9, 2003

Privacy: Inherent to Freedom

        In 1776, the forefathers of the United States of America essentially wrote a constitution, a social contract, guaranteeing the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  “In recent years, the right to privacy has been added to the short list of human rights (Grant).”  According to Thomas Paine, man did not enter into society to become worse off than he was before or to have fewer rights than he had before, but instead, to have those rights he started with better secured.  According to the stipulations of the social contract agreed upon, the government provides national safety, public safety, public health, and civil rights/liberties in exchange for the fees necessary to provide these services and the ability to coerce citizens with punitive measures for breaking the codes of the contract.  As long as a person poses no threat to the safety, health, and freedoms of any other citizen, then the government is obliged to honor all of the freedoms granted in the social contract.  To unlawfully invade one’s privacy is to effectively rid them of their human dignity and effectively eliminate true freedom and democracy.  Milan Kundera enters the discussion of privacy in Testaments Betrayed with a discussion of Jan Prochazka, a figure of great opposition to the government, whose conversations were secretly recorded and broadcasted over the radio.  It was an “audacious, unprecedented act, and…instantly Prochazka was discredited.”  Kundera asserts “that we act different in private than in public is…the very ground of the life of the individual…the value one must defend beyond all others.”  Referring to the publication of private conversation as “the rape of [Prochazka’s] life,” and making the distinction that this surveillance was unprecedented, Kundera argues that unless a person commits an act which provides solid evidence that he may be a threat to the social contract or the others governed under it, a person must be given complete freedom of privacy.

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        As Harry S. Truman said, even if one American who has don’t nothing wrong is forced by fear to shut his mind and close his mouth, then America as a whole is endangered.  In eighth grade, I was involved in a situation in which I was promised privacy, but this privacy was taken from me, and my disclosures were used against me even though taken out of context.  A substitute teacher allowed us to write letters to people we knew at another parochial school, promising that the letters would not be read by anybody, because she was going to be ...

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