2015_The New Culture of Security and Surveillance

Journal of Political Sciences & Public Affairs, 2015

Human Security versus "Homeland" Security Human security At the end of the 20 th century, the Human Security paradigm was developed as a response to the dissatisfaction with a perspective of 'security' addressing mainly the State whose security should be protected, with the means of military organizations. The 1994 Human Development Report articulated a basic understanding of the function of society, namely to provide basic security for everybody. Deeply related to human development thinking, the new security conception was set from the start to include a fuller picture of human beings than from the limited perspective of violence alone, as present in the traditional security perspective [2]. The report deliberately chose seven areas to broaden the understanding of security: economic security, food security, health security, environmental security, personal security, political security and community security. These were to be conceptualized together, with the individual person being the main addressee. Vulnerabilities and insecurities identify the counter-terms of security, while human flourishing and capabilities serve as the anthropo-ethical telos of development. I would follow Martin, Owen in his proposal to use a threshold approach to human security, building upon the Human Security Commission of 2003: Human security is the protection of the vital core of all human lives from critical and pervasive environmental,

In the past few years, terrorism has been defined within a narrow media and political discourse as the new threat that democracies of western societies must face after the Cold War. Even if the dimension and extent of the terrorist events in the United States and Western Europe are minuscule, it still appears to be a preoccupation compared to other causes of violence. According to William W. Keller, the real threat of terrorism is, paradoxically, in the response the State has proposed to face it: generalized and systematic surveillance of society. Democracy Betrayed shows that the challenge to western democracy's values does not come from violent extremism, as is commonly believed, but from the surveillance measures that undermine the liberties and freedoms of several sectors of the population.

Maureen Webb’s new text Illusions of Security: Global Surveillance and Democracy in the Post-9/11 World details the post-9/11 social moment as it pertains to human rights law, through an analysis of surveillance technologies and policing within Western democracies.

This co-edited volume examines the relationship between privacy, surveillance and security, and the alleged privacy– security trade-off, focusing on the citizen's perspective. Recent revelations of mass surveillance programmes clearly demonstrate the ever-increasing capabilities of surveillance technologies. The lack of serious reactions to these activities shows that the political will to implement them appears to be an unbroken trend. The resulting move into a surveillance society is, however, contested for many reasons. Are the resulting infringements of privacy and other human rights compatible with democratic societies? Is security necessarily depending on surveillance? Are there alternative ways to frame security? Is it possible to gain in security by giving up civil liberties, or is it even necessary to do so, and do citizens adopt this trade-off? This volume contributes to a better and deeper understanding of the relation between privacy, surveillance and security, comprising in-depth investigations and studies of the common narrative that more security can only come at the expense of sacrifice of privacy. The book combines theoretical research with a wide range of empirical studies focusing on the citizen's perspective. It presents empirical research exploring factors and criteria relevant for the assessment of surveillance technologies. The book also deals with the governance of surveillance technologies. New approaches and instruments for the regulation of security technologies and measures are presented, and recommendations for security policies in line with ethics and fundamental rights are discussed. This book will be of much interest to students of surveillance studies, critical security studies, intelligence studies, EU politics and IR in general.

In modern societies, surveillance is progressively emerging as a key governing tech- nique of state authorities, corporations and individuals:‘the focused, systematic and routine attention to personal details for purposes of influence, management, protection or direction’ (Lyon, 2007, p. 14). The ‘Snowden revelations’ of mass-surveillance programmes brought into the light of day the ever-increasing and far-reaching capabilities of digital surveillance technologies (Greenwald, 2014). The lack of serious reactions to these activities shows that the political will to implement digital surveillance technologies appears to be an unbroken trend. This drive towards a security governance based on digital mass-surveillance raises, however, several issues: Are the resulting infringements of privacy and other human rights compatible with the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union or the EU data protection framework and the values of demo- cratic societies? Does security necessarily depend upon mass-surveillance? Are there alternative ways to frame security? Do surveillance technologies address the most pressing security needs, and if so, are they the most efficient means to do so? In other words, the promotion and adoption by state authorities of mass-surveil- lance technologies invites us to ask again if the argument of increasing security at the cost of civil liberties is acceptable, and thus to call into question the very idea that this would be necessary to preserve democratic societies. Focusing on the citizens’ perspective on surveillance, privacy and security, this volume contributes new insights from empirical research and theoretical analysis to a debate, characterized by evident tendencies to provide simplified answers to apparently multidimensional and correspondingly complex societal issues like security. This book tries to further nurture a debate that challenges the assumption that more security requires less privacy, and that more surveillance necessarily implies more security (Bigo et al., 2008). A key motivation is the wish to incorporate into new analyses the perspectives, attitudes and preferences of citizens, understood as being the main beneficiaries of security measures, while at the same time potential and actual targets of mass-surveillance programmes conducted in the name of responding to imminent security threats.

2017

This chapter explores important ethics issues regarding government surveillance on citizens. Two views are discussed regarding debates about ethics and possible model development for reconciling tensions between freedom and security. Key issues for debate are presented and these include the need to define and deliberate the meanings of privacy, abuse, proportionality, secrecy, etc. Certain propositions for debate are also offered. These are: a. It is unethical to monitor citizens who are not under any demonstrable reason of suspicion without their knowledge or permission; b. It is unethical for citizens to block necessary national security surveillance when such surveillance is proven to be needed to stop acts of crime or terrorism; c. Governments should not conceal the facts about how much they monitor citizens for national security and in what typical conditions they do so; and d. Citizens should not accuse governments who use surveillance to track criminals and terrorists as being fascists or trying to establish dictatorships. Those who surrender true liberty to a false security defend nothing worth preserving, while those who abandon real security to an illusory liberty protect nothing worth safeguarding.-Ronald Collins We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.-President Barack Obama

On 21 March 2011 President José Manuel Barroso requested the EGE to draft an Opinion on the ethical implications of information and communication technologies and to produce, subsequently and separately, an Opinion on the ethical implications of security technologies, with due attention given to the development of security technologies and to surveillance technologies. The EGE has provided the Commission with its Opinion on Ethics of Information and Communication Technologies on 22 February 2012. It also drafted an Opinion on Research, Production and Use of Energy that was published on the 16th January 2013, in response to an intervening request from the President of the Commission. The present Opinion addresses the issues of security and surveillance technologies from an ethical perspective. As the group prepared the re- port, the revelations of Edward Snowden emphasised how important a reorganisation and reinterpretation of our approach to security and surveillance is. Indeed the predicament of data flows and surveillance activities thrown into sharp relief by these revelations form part of the evolving backdrop against which this Opinion is set. National security is the responsibility of the Member States, but the Lisbon Treaty, and particularly the Charter of Fundamental Rights embedded in it provides for action by the Union where necessary to protect the rights of individual citizens. In addition, the EU shares competence with member states as regards the internal security of the Union and has established an Internal Security Strategy to identify and coordinate action against common threats. In this opinion we address the manner in which surveillance has been enhanced due to the availability of new technologies and the means to record and analyse and retain vast amounts of data provided by advances in information and communication technologies. While national security or state security paradigms pertain to a state’s ability to defend itself against external threats, the notion of human security holds that the referent for security is the individual rather than the state. This is to be considered against the backdrop of the forms of security expected from the Westphalian nation-state (46) (with the social contract on which it is premised calling upon the state to ensure the security of its citizens) and against the backdrop of an increasing technologically mediated attention to border control as well as to the ‘enemy within’. Security procedures lie within the compass of the State that in addition may procure services from national or international companies to provide the facilities for collection and management of information that the security services require. Information gathered about individuals or organisations may then be held either by the State, where democratic accountability ought to exist, or by private entities where the conditions for handling sensitive material may not be in the public domain and may possibly be retained or may not only be used for the purposes of a particular State. The Opinion addresses the principles by which these forms of surveillance should be governed. In addition, surveillance of the public by companies or by other individuals should be subject to conditions, and again, the opinion addresses the principles that govern these forms of ‘commercial’ or individual surveillance, and the manner in which the data so gathered may be used as part of a data mining or profiling system by private entities or the state. The digital revolution and subsequent advances in mobile, wireless and networked devices have significantly contributed to the development of security and surveillance technologies. New technologies offer the possibility of recording the everyday activities of billions of individuals across the globe. Our mobile phones can identify and pinpoint our location at any given moment, loyalty cards allow commercial entities to analyse our spending and track our personal preferences, keystroke software monitors our performance and productivity in the workplace and our electronic communications can be screened for key words or phrases by intelligence services. Moreover, personal data concerning our health, employment, travel and electronic communications are stored in databases, and data mining techniques allow for large amounts of personal data from these disparate sources to be organised and analysed, thereby facilitating the discovery of previously unknown relationships within these data. Security technologies are no longer discrete; the trend is toward convergence, creating more powerful networked systems. Thus, our everyday lives are scrutinised by many actors as never before, all made possible by developments in technology together with political choices or lack thereof.

Surveillance, Privacy and Security, 2017

This volume examines the relationship between privacy, surveillance and security, and the alleged privacy-security trade-off, focusing on the citizen's perspective. Recent revelations of mass surveillance programmes clearly demonstrate the everincreasing capabilities of surveillance technologies. The lack of serious reactions to these activities shows that the political will to implement them appears to be an unbroken trend. The resulting move into a surveillance society is, however, contested for many reasons. Are the resulting infringements of privacy and other human rights compatible with democratic societies? Is security necessarily depending on surveillance? Are there alternative ways to frame security? Is it possible to gain in security by giving up civil liberties, or is it even necessary to do so, and do citizens adopt this trade-off? This volume contributes to a better and deeper understanding of the relation between privacy, surveillance and security, comprising in-depth investigations and studies of the common narrative that more security can only come at the expense of sacrifice of privacy. The book combines theoretical research with a wide range of empirical studies focusing on the citizen's perspective. It presents empirical research exploring factors and criteria relevant for the assessment of surveillance technologies. The book also deals with the governance of surveillance technologies. New approaches and instruments for the regulation of security technologies and measures are presented, and recommendations for security policies in line with ethics and fundamental rights are discussed. This book will be of much interest to students of surveillance studies, critical security studies, intelligence studies, EU politics and IR in general.

Canadian Review of Sociology/Revue canadienne de sociologie, 2012

Sécurité et surveillance sont aujourd'hui une partie de l'expérience quotidienne banale d'une manière qu'ils n'ont pasété jusqu'à la fin du XXe siècle.À juste titre, ils sont devenus plus importants sujets dans la sociologie, même si chacune aégalement suscité un intérêt multidisciplinaire depuis les années 1990, parfois sans référenceà l'autre. Le contexte de ces initiatives et de leurséléments qui se chevauchent et interagissent sont esquissées et tracées, préparant le terrain pour les articles sélectionnés pour ce numéro spécial. Il ya un besoin urgent de travaux théoriques et empiriques adéquate dans ces domaines en croissance, notamment parce que les questions abordées dans ces articles sont de plus qu'un intérêt académique. Security and surveillance are today part of commonplace, everyday experience in ways that they were not until the end of the twentieth century. Appropriately, they have become increasing important topics within sociology, even though each has also generated multidisciplinary interest since the 1990s, sometimes without reference to the other. The background to these initiatives and their overlapping and interacting elements are sketched and traced, setting the stage for the articles selected for the special issue. There is an urgent need for adequate theoretical and empirical work in these growing fields, not least because the issues covered in these articles are of more than academic interest.