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Essay / Essay on the Unethical Era of Government Oversight
However, the extreme invasion of our rights makes us distrustful and skeptical of our own body of government. Another major drawback of government surveillance programs is extreme distrust of our own government system. People will only trust an authority figure to the extent that that authority figure trusts them in return. According to the guardian of government oversight and trust in government, “as soon as it becomes clear that they are in fact trading their own freedom, the social contract is broken. Violating this trust changes the definition of "us" and "them" into one in a way that can be dangerous for a democratic authority: as a result, most of the population opposes its own government. (source) When people discover the extent of the freedoms they cede to the government, they realize that it is no longer the government and the governed who stand together. Rather, they are two distinct groups of people who distrust each other. According to Scott Rasmussen, “Only 30 percent of voters nationally have a lot of confidence in government officials when it comes to their surveillance efforts. It was also shown that only 24 percent of voters are confident that the federal government does the right thing in most cases. time." (realclearpolitics) It is extremely disarming that the government that is supposed to protect us is actually instilling more fear.