"Those who would give up essential liberty, to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."
It's a famous quote from Ben Franklin, describing the tension between our own liberty and privacy and what the government can do to find out what's going on and to protect us.
It's a tension that's existed since the time of Franklin - but today, a lot of things have changed. Technology has changed how we think about the tension between freedom and security.
This issue came to the forefront of course when Edward Snowden released thousands and thousands of documents that he had obtained that showed that the NSA was capturing a lot of our communications.
It was kind of shocking to all of us that the government had this capacity to essentially change the ground rules. That sense of being taken by your government is one that permeates these debates about the balance that Ben Franklin spoke about so long ago.
In all the coverage about surveillance, I, like many of you, am left wondering exactly what it all means. I think I know what data mining means, I kind of am guessing what encryption means, and wire taps I sort of understand. I thought it was time to unpack some of the buzzwords we encounter, so this week, I spoke to S usan Landau, a professor of cyber security policy at Worcester Polytechnic Institute and former senior staff policy analyst at Google.
Security Mom is a podcast hosted by Juliette Kayyem that aims to unpack how the strange and secretive world of national security works. Subscribe to the Security Mom podcast in iTunes.
