What is the proper balance between privacy and security?

The answer is in the constitution. The original intent of the constitution is to severely restrict the powers of government while guaranteeing our God-given, unalienable individual rights.

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Warrants shall be issued ONLY upon probable cause and MUST describe the place to be searched and things to be seized. General warrants are verboten!

Against whom? Which country? Where is the declaration of war per the U.S. Constitution?

The Islamic maniacs are at war with us, but they always have been, always will be. They cannot live in peace with the rest of the world. They must kill all who don't follow Allah. Perhaps we should declare war against Islam and get it over with but we won't.

Meanwhile, we cannot and should not suspend our constitution or allow government to stomp on our unalienable rights. Obama wants to set himself up as a dictator and that's exactly what will happen if we allow him to suspend the constitution. It's already happening right before our eyes and unless we get a handle on this thing immediately, America as a free country is over.

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

Along with the guaranteed right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, the founders also gave us these additional guarantees (among others):

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

The government is in direct violation of the constitution when it suppresses the free press or deprives the people of their constitutionally guaranteed right to free speech. The government violates the constitution by spying on the press or the people. They cannot snoop on our phone calls or email messages or demand that companies turn over "billing records," "metadata," content, IP addresses, email addresses, ID's, or any other communications by or among individuals whether private or business. And obviously they're in direct violation of the constitution when they attempt to infringe upon our rights to keep and bear arms.

The second amendment is intended for our personal defense and security. Our country cannot declare war against Islam and they refuse to stop allowing people who are at war with us to take up residency within the U.S. so our only real security is to remain armed and vigilant. If the Islamists wish to conduct war against our people on OUR soil, then they had best bring their lunch and a lantern, because it's going to be a long day for them. Americans are armed to the teeth and we aim to defend ourselves, our families, our property and our nation. The government sure as hell isn't.

So, the proper balance between privacy and security is for the government to keep its snooping eyes and ears the hell out out of our mail, out of our phone calls, out of our email and online activities and to keep their fascist hands off our property and off our guns per the constitution!

Context

What Ben Franklin Really Said

By Benjamin Wittes
Friday, July 15, 2011 at 6:53 AM

Here’s an interesting historical fact I have dug up in some research for an essay I am writing about the relationship between liberty and security: That famous quote by Benjamin Franklin that “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety” does not mean what it seems to say. Not at all.

I started looking into this quotation because I am writing a frontal attack on the idea that liberty and security exist in some kind of “balance” with one another–and the quotation is kind of iconic to the balance thesis. Indeed, Franklin’s are perhaps the most famous words ever written about the relationship. A version of them is engraved on the Statue of Liberty. They are quoted endlessly by those who assert that these two values coexist with one another in a precarious, ever-shifting state of balance that security concerns threaten ever to upset. Every student of American history knows them. And every lover of liberty has heard them and known that they speak to that great truth about the constitution of civilized government–that we empower governments to protect us in a devil’s bargain from which we will lose in the long run.

Very few people who quote these words, however, have any idea where they come from or what Franklin was really saying when he wrote them. That’s not altogether surprising, since they are far more often quoted than explained, and the context in which they arose was a political battle of limited resonance to modern readers. Many of Franklin’s biographers don’t quote them at all, and no text I have found attempts seriously to explain them in context. The result is to get to the bottom of what they meant to Franklin, one has to dig into sources from the 1750s, with the secondary biographical literature giving only a framework guide to the dispute. I’m still nailing down the details, but I can say with certainty at this stage that Franklin was not saying anything like what we quote his words to suggest.

The words appear originally in a 1755 letter that Franklin is presumed to have written on behalf of the Pennsylvania Assembly to the colonial governor during the French and Indian War. The letter was a salvo in a power struggle between the governor and the Assembly over funding for security on the frontier, one in which the Assembly wished to tax the lands of the Penn family, which ruled Pennsylvania from afar, to raise money for defense against French and Indian attacks. The governor kept vetoing the Assembly’s efforts at the behest of the family, which had appointed him. So to start matters, Franklin was writing not as a subject being asked to cede his liberty to government, but in his capacity as a legislator being asked to renounce his power to tax lands notionally under his jurisdiction. In other words, the “essential liberty” to which Franklin referred was thus not what we would think of today as civil liberties but, rather, the right of self-governance of a legislature in the interests of collective security.

What’s more the “purchase [of] a little temporary safety” of which Franklin complains was not the ceding of power to a government Leviathan in exchange for some promise of protection from external threat; for in Franklin’s letter, the word “purchase” does not appear to have been a metaphor. The governor was accusing the Assembly of stalling on appropriating money for frontier defense by insisting on including the Penn lands in its taxes–and thus triggering his intervention. And the Penn family later offered cash to fund defense of the frontier–as long as the Assembly would acknowledge that it lacked the power to tax the family’s lands. Franklin was thus complaining of the choice facing the legislature between being able to make funds available for frontier defense and maintaining its right of self-governance–and he was criticizing the governor for suggesting it should be willing to give up the latter to ensure the former.

In short, Franklin was not describing some tension between government power and individual liberty. He was describing, rather, effective self-government in the service of security as the very liberty it would be contemptible to trade. Notwithstanding the way the quotation has come down to us, Franklin saw the liberty and security interests of Pennsylvanians as aligned.

Against a Crude Balance:
Platform Security and the Hostile Symbiosis Between Liberty and Security

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Good ol' Ben knew what he was talking about....