A US scholar says that fewer Americans than before believe that itâ„¢s ok to give up their privacy for the sake of better national security, amid rising concerns about privacy rights in the US.
A new poll shows that a big majority of Americans say the National Security Agencyâ„¢s collection of telephone and Internet data intrudes on citizensâ„¢ rights without clear improvements in US security.
According to the Washington Post-ABC News poll, the percentage of Americans who put a higher priority on privacy protections than US anti-terrorism efforts has more than doubled in a decade.
However, only 40 percent say it is more important to protect privacy even if that limits the US governmentâ„¢s ability to investigate possible terrorist threats.
Å“Although most Americans continue to agree that it is ok for their privacy to be infringed to protect national security, the numbers who do are lower than they used to be,” said Patrick Basham, founding director of the Washington based Democracy Institute.
Å“In this new ABC poll, we see that those who approve of this trade-off is lower over time than it was,” Basham said.
American whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed details of the NSAâ„¢s surveillance programs earlier this summer.
He leaked to the news media details of two top-secret US government spying programs – one that collects massive amounts of information on phone calls made by Americans and the other, codenamed PRISM, sweeps up data on US citizens and other nationals via the Internet.
AHT/HJ
Republished from: Press TV