ENEMY OF THE STATE PART FOUR: ON LIBERTY…AND RIGHTFUL HACKING

John Stuart Mill’s publication On Liberty not only contains what may be described as Greenwald’s sentence, but also former head of the NSA General Michael Hayden’s sentence. Mill follows Greenwald’s sentence directly with Hayden’s, as he says, “Acts injurious to others require a totally different treatment.” Mill elaborates upon that statement by defining the injurious acts in saying, “Encroachment on their rights; infliction on them of any loss or damage not justified by his own rights; falsehood or duplicity in dealing with them; unfair or ungenerous use of advantages over them; even selfish abstinence from defending them against injury — these are fit objects of moral reprobation, and, in grave cases, of moral retribution and punishment. And not only these acts, but the dispositions which lead to them, are properly immoral, and fit subjects of disapprobation which may rise to abhorrence.” What Mill means this time is that though, as Greenwald believes, only the persons of interest require special attention and that no one in relation to them should be similarly monitored, when the actions of the person of interest include harming other people, that opens the door to more desperate measures. He also provides a definition of what exactly these “acts injurious to others” entails. Thus, it seems as though Mill’s On Liberty serves neither to favor people like General Hayden who support the NSA or people like Glenn Greenwald who rather oppose the NSA. This is the case because when Mill states support for Greenwald in condemning the methods of connecting the dots that the NSA carry out when investigating persons of interest, he immediately follows it with what the exception to this is, and the exception is when people are engaging in acts that are detrimental to society. Thus, Mill does not support either extreme – no method of surveillance for the sake of national security nor the indiscriminant metadata method of surveillance – but rather a happy medium. Mill calls for neither an indiscriminant nor nonexistent NSA, but instead for an ideal NSA that does not collect all but only makes exceptions and connects dots between people when a real threat to the American public is present. In conclusion, John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty only goes to show that neither extreme is justifiable, and that a compromise must be reached in order to uphold both the rights of citizens and national security.