In an environment of increasingly sophisticated threats to national security, experts talked about balancing the right to security of people as a whole and individual privacy rights at the RSA Conference 2009.

 Gary McGraw, CTO of Cigital, was moderator of "Surveillance: Privacy and Risk" – a session where security experts discuss the challenges of monitoring terrorist communications while making sure the privacy of innocents are not trampled on. They also discussed how effective domestic and foreign surveillance efforts being done by both commercial and federal agencies.

 Civil liberty protection advocate Alexander Joel believes the government does a very good job of balancing the both privacy and security. With the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), government agencies now have a clear guideline on when court orders are required when conducting surveillance activities. It also has protective guidelines which agencies must comply to while conducting the surveillance. The compliance of these agencies is also assessed twice a year for the Congress to review. In this manner, the three branches of government act together in surveillance activities. This should be the standard of intelligence activities, according to Joel.

 Matt Blaze, another of the panelists from the University of Pennsylvania, said that the traditionally secretive way the government handles surveillance actually works to their disadvantage. Also, public concerns over the abuse of these surveillance activities raises question regarding their legality. Blaze believes that the government must reassess what truly needs to be kept a secret to allay the public’s fears. Deidre Mulligan, an assistant professor in UC Berkeley, agrees that secrecy often leads to the disregard of checks and balance of surveillance powers.

 With experience in both government and private sectors of surveillance, panelist Rebecca Bace says commercial surveillance worries her more than the surveillance by the government. However, she did raise relevant questions regarding government surveillance. Who decides on government privacy decisions, and who is accountable when agencies commit privacy violations?

 She believes that the technology used must also be under scrutiny to determine if these provide the actual security they are meant to perform. The government must also analyze how much a difference new technology makes in the security issue to better justify government spending.