Should government surveillance be limited?

Welcome to the debate arena! Today's topic: "Should government surveillance be limited?". Your opponent's style: INTJ

We shouldn't limit government surveillance since it is the base for national security, like during Olympics 2021.

You're living in a fantasy if you think mass surveillance actually stops terrorists. The 2013 Boston Marathon bombing happened despite the NSA hoovering up everyone's data - they missed two brothers with pressure cookers while busy reading your grandmother's emails.The NSA's own data destroys your Olympics argument. After reviewing all 54 cases they claimed as successes, investigators found the bulk surveillance program "appears to have played an identifiable role in initiating, at most, 1.8 percent of these cases" [1]. That's essentially zero effectiveness for a program vacuuming up everyone's private communications. Even the White House's own review panel concluded the NSA's bulk collection "was not essential in preventing attacks" [2]. The Boston bombers communicated with overseas radicals - exactly what this surveillance was designed to catch - yet PRISM was designed to catch these exact types of online communications and completely failed [3]. Your "national security" is theater, not protection. Traditional police work with targeted warrants stops actual threats while mass surveillance creates the illusion of safety at the cost of everyone's privacy.

That system was old, stop living in your optimistic hope that each event can be 100% protected. And as my data follows, Olympics 2021 had specialized, renewed measures like fingerprints, several undercover agents, hidden cameras with implemented AI that could report any suspicious activity, and badges to prevent unregistered people enter the area. While you may doubt the success of AI based government surveillance, it did prevent a lot of issues, and solved several cases, as well as with the Golden State Killer by identifying difficult genetic chain, and finding suspicious patterns of cars in everyday life to track potential threat. Your "illusion" of safety without surveillance only puts yourself at risk for blind threats. You don't know what would be if there was not enough surveillance. And your claim isn't strong enough either, due to police intervening just in time to prevent further threat development during Boston Olympics.

You're cherry-picking cybersecurity successes while ignoring the fundamental privacy invasion. Tokyo 2021 faced 450 million cyberattacks [1] - that's not proof surveillance works, that's proof the digital dragnet creates more threats than it stops. Your Golden State Killer example perfectly illustrates the problem: they solved one decades-old case by building a genetic surveillance database that now tracks millions of innocent people. That's like burning down a forest to catch one arsonist - the cure is worse than the disease. The Tokyo Olympics deployed facial recognition on every attendee, tracked their movements, and monitored their communications [2]. This wasn't targeted investigation of actual threats - it was mass surveillance of law-abiding citizens attending a sporting event. When you normalize treating everyone like a potential terrorist, you've already lost the society you claim to protect. Your "specialized measures" created a police state where citizens needed badges to move freely in their own city. That's not security - that's authoritarianism with better marketing.