No there isn't a line in the sand. It's a gray issue. Ideologies and society values change throughout the history, and there is not right or wrong answer in many of those cases.

Like a poster above mentioned, what IF thousands of lives are saved by sacrificing the privacy of a few million people? Is that worth it? If you say no, then what if I ask you the lives could be that of your loved ones?

Just want to stress from a different perspective, my family grew up poor in a 3rd world country, and they laugh at American's obsession with human rights and they just say "that's what people do if they never needed to worry about putting food on their table".

It's all a matter of perspective actually, and you will NEVER have a productive conversation without being able to understand what the other side is coming from.

The other side is coming from fear.

"Just want to stress from a different perspective, my family grew up poor in a 3rd world country, and they laugh at American's obsession with human rights and they just say "that's what people do if they never needed to worry about putting food on their table"."

And you know why it's a 3rd world country? Because they lived how they had to and not how they ought to. Progress is not made by simply putting food on one's table.

EDIT:

Look, moral relativism has its place and all, but it lacks explanatory power. Waffling because there's no objective factual right way of doing things keeps you from doing anything meaningful--it's the cowards' way out.

Your arrogance is astonishing. First of all, that 3rd world country moved a billion people out of absolute poverty without a "human rights revolution", sure there are still plenty of problems around, but progresses are absolutely made simply by making sure people are well fed. I'm not saying human rights/privacy isn't important, but sometimes different things have different priorities. Moral relativism does not imply inaction, it just implies that different people think differently on what is "meaningful". Despite your hubris you can't tell me your priority is more "correct" than mine, and I simply choose to focus on other actions that's meaningful to me.

If you want to resort to name calling then so be it, I've met my share of condescending people who always put themselves on a moral pedestal.

Says the guy living in a $2k a month studio in San Francisco whilst working from his $3k MacBook Pro at Starbucks?

So your answer to everyone living in fear, in let's say Juarez, Mexico is that they need to be out in the streets protesting against the psychotic drug cartels, because that's how they "ought to" live, since you know third world country and all?

I live in an old busted rented house in an old busted neighborhood in an old busted giant city, thank you very much, and type on an old busted workstation salvaged from a university. But hey, don't let facts get in the way of your narrative.

And yeah, maybe that's what needs to happen. Tyrants have never been disposed of by hiding indoors and hoping they'll go away.

Certainly they should be taking the most effective action they can to take down the drug cartels!

Also, if they are Americans then they are benefitting from the history of the United States whose founding fathers shared our ideals. Certainly there's an argument to be made that without those ideas and conviction we would have ended up much more like Brazil. And being a Brazilian-American, let me be the first to say that the average American could not imagine a life as the average Brazilian and the type of systematic oppression that they have come to expect over generations.