Edward Snowden: A Jourisprudential Analysis

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As Justice Louis Brandeis wrote more than 100 years ago, we all are endowed with "the right to be let alone." This includes the right to control the disclosure of personal information. Philosopher and Harvard Law Professor Charles Fried put it this way in a treatise on the subject: "The ability to control what others know about us" is essential to the preservation of an autonomous self.

The right to privacy as an element of human right which restricts the intervention of both the state and another private individual in another person’s life is a long discussed one. But privacy rights require a detailed jurisprudential analysis with respect to the socio-political and economic milieu of the context in which the notions on privacy rights is …show more content…

They have been successful to misappropriate large quantity of metadata, internet history, chat details, even actual recordings of phone calls etc.The global surveillance leaks confirm that more than ten million online sources have been under surveillance since its inception. This includes even embassies and head of other states, virtually breaking provisions under various treaties and constitution, in existence. It has also resulted in the blatant intrusion of agencies into the sovereignty of another county. This has provoked widespread international debates on the evolving jurisprudence of Right to privacy. The argument in favor of privacy has therefore come under a larger opposition to intelligence operations carried out for political purposes, and has become a contentious issue since it undermines the perceived need of nations to spy on the general population in order to maintain their power structures.. However, privacy cannot be seen through the one-way definition of non-interference as it involves diverse discourse, filtering into the cross-sections of multi-aspects of social, economic and political life of people. Each aspect has to be understood differently in terms of the extend of interference it could undergo in order to maintain security, tranquility and normality of the society. The very difficulty in analyzing right to privacy as a homogeneous legal concept is due to the diverse aspects involved in the relation between the public domain and the personal life of an