Trading Liberty for Illusions Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Trading Liberty for Illusions - Assignment Example To start with, Wendy Kaminer in her article â€Å"Trading Liberty for Illusions† argues that liberty of people has often been compromised for the sake of promising safety for the general population. The most affected, according to the author, appear to be ethnic minorities, who become an embodiment of the hated regimes. Whenever Americans felt frightened they have responded: â€Å"by persecuting immigrants, members of suspect ethnic groups, or other guilty of sympathy for unpopular beliefs†. (Kaminer) Moreover, Kaminer suggests that if to look back into the history, one would find many examples when targeting particular individuals was justified under the promise of ensuring the common good.In â€Å"Kyllo vs the United States: technology Versus Individual Privacy† Thomas Colbridge supports the argument made by Kaminer. To illustrate that infringements on privacy become an issue, he resorts to the Kyllo v. the United States: Technology v. Individual Privacy case i n which after the years of debates, the Supreme Court finally recognized that the police conducted unconstitutional search. The subject matter of a case was the usage of a thermal imager of a home to scan marijuana plants, which was conducted without a warrant and therefore, infringed on privacy of home owners. Subsequently, the author explains that the liberty and privacy of an individual is often regarded as secondary in importance when it comes to the police fulfilling its duties. Furthermore, Kaminer exposes that the usage of the new surveillance technologies is not reasonable as far as their effectiveness can be questioned. For instance, it is argued that Facial recognitions systems are not working as they should as far as they never â€Å"identified even a single individual contained in the department’s database of photographs†.