Breaking News: Kansas Governor using Surveillance Technologies to combat COVID-19
Using Surveillance technologies to track the people’s movement is an unconstitutional mandate. Kansas Governor Laura Kelly is doing Kansans a great disservice by instituting a surveillance system by which the citizens’ rights are getting infringed upon.
This Executive order is an example of how governmental power can infringe on our liberties. Once a government starts growing its power, The government is not easy to shrink. In the words of Padme Amidala, “What if the democracy we thought we were serving no longer exists, and the Republic has become the very evil we have been fighting to destroy?” This quote is indicating that executive orders can slowly interfere with our daily livelihoods. The Hawk News Report favors the Right to Individual Privacy above National Security because Right to Individual Privacy increases the Kansans quality of life. Quality of life is defined as “the Standard of Living where your basic necessities are met and exceeded. It can be measured by the public health, material well being, and social wellbeing.The Quality of life encompasses the protection of life.
Kansas Governor may look like she is helping the Kansans amid this COVID-19 outbreak, but in the future, Kansas can abuse this power also. This is why The Hawk News Report favors the idea of government accountability. An Accountable government is one that protects individual rights of its citizens. best achieved by upholding the Quality of life and keeping the government in Check to its citizens. When the government isn’t accountable to its citizens, it can lead to the abuse of the government’s power and violations of the quality of life.
Is Kansas doing this surveillance system for the betterment of society? To answer this question, Kansas is doing this surveillance system for the betterment of society because it protects the citizens intrinsic value of Sanctity of life. Sanctity of life is the protection of their life. However, a flag exists with this policy. This flag is growing government. By using executive powers, we are slowly increasing the government powers over us.
Since every nation, or state, is always plausibly under some security threat, writing the government a blank check to trample privacy rights for the sake of security or a pandemic paves the road to tyrannical government. Perpetual state surveillance turns society into something resembling Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon – that is, a circular prison structure with one man standing at the center who surveils the prisoners. A tinted glass surrounds his outpost, so he can see them, but they cannot see him; they are sentenced to live under the constant specter of an all-seeing eye whose gaze may fall upon them at any moment. Bentham designed this prison structure to command obedience through fear.
The fear that the kansas government is inducing is the fear of getting the COVID-19 virus. The virus should be rightful feared, but it should not enable the Kansas government to enact an unduly power of instituting a surveillance system, Unacast, to infringe on the rights of citizens. The job of the government is to protect their citizens mentally, physically, and emotionally. This act is protecting them physically, but not mentally.
In Conclusion, Allowing the guise of national security to trump privacy rights gives the government the keys to the panopticon, giving it unchecked power to make us all prisoners of its surveillance. In the words of German Historian Hubertus Knabe, (quote) “The Stasi didn’t try to Arrest every dissident, it preferred to paralyze them, and it could do so because it had accesses to so much personal information.”(end quote) Because valuing privacy rights places an immovable roadblock on this road to tyranny, it best upholds Quality of life.
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