Surveillance Is Security? Think Again
Over the past few decades technology has advanced at an astonishing rate; from floppy disks to early progress in artificial intelligence, things have changed the world around us. Many have seen this advance in technology as a good opportunity to address a problem that has stuck with us since the beginning of time: crime. With advanced facial recognition technology, surveillance cameras on street corners, and an enormous database to store every individual’s information, law enforcement can easily identify and track down those breaking the law with a simple search. Countries the world over are sympathetic to using this technology. In China, various provincial governments and private companies are experimenting with a social credit system. Meanwhile in the US, after the tragic San Bernardino shooting in 2015, slightly more than 50% of Americans wanted Apple to open a back door to the shooter’s iPhone so that the FBI could track down other terrorists in his network. Contemporaneously, numerous tech companies have gigantic databases of the data of millions or billions of users, which they are often willing to hand over to governments. Despite all of the temptations of using surveillance to solve crimes, the citizens of the Free World must resist the Siren’s song of expanded government surveillance and lobby our governments accordingly.
One way that American governmental authorities surveil their citizens is through geofence warrants. With these warrants, the police can request that tech companies such as Google provide geolocation data from all devices within a certain area at a certain time, allowing them to collect data on people without probable cause of crime. This method came to the forefront of discussion last summer, as police have used this method to identify and arrest thousands of Black Lives Matter protestors who might or might not have broken the law. Because data is collected on anyone in a specific area, it can often be misleading. For example, a man in Arizona lost his job and his car after being arrested because geofence data put him near a murder scene, before he was exonerated of the crime about a week later. Meanwhile, the reliability of the data is also a concern. Google estimates that Google Maps’ location-logging data is only 68% accurate.
Some have defended this controversial method of law enforcement. For example, Richard Salgado, the director of law enforcement at Google, stated that they “vigorously protect the privacy of our users while supporting the important work of law enforcement.” However, as Electronic Frontier Foundation lawyer Mark Rumold has noted, even with the most rigorous privacy protections, turning over data to law enforcement can reveal too much information on people practicing their First Amendment rights.
Even if we assume the law enforcement and intelligence agencies do show restraint as they claim, surveillance is still harmful, as just knowing that you’re being watched can change your behavior. For example, after Edward Snowden blew the whistle on NSA’s surveillance system, Wikipedia viewership for terrorism-related articles decreased by 20%. Knowing that an authority watches over you can make people avoid saying or doing certain things, pressuring people to self-censor opinions that are not favorable to those in power. Thus, while surveillance might not directly trample on our First Amendment rights, it can certainly pressure some people to self-censor and thus prevent them from exercising their rights fully.
Further research can show that the government authorities, even while assuring their good intentions, can indeed use the tools of surveillance for authoritarian control. One such prominent example is the Social Credit System that is being experimented in China. In essence, the Chinese government claims that it is intended to encourage people to act like good citizens, for example by discouraging theft, encouraging good driving, and discouraging spending more money than one can afford. Through the various public and private corporations, as well as surveillance cameras, the Chinese authorities can collect data on the citizens to compile it into a social credit score. People with a low score can be denied higher education or prevented from boarding a plane, among other things. Whether the Chinese government does this out of good intentions or bad, it is certainly a dangerous idea that the people of the Free World should not consider. At the foundation of the Social Credit System is a goal to divide the society into two groups: “good” citizens, and the “bad” ones. This is very dangerous, because once the government can stratify a society into good citizens who deserve special privileges versus bad citizens who do not, it has plenty of space to abuse that power and shape the society as it sees fit. In fact, one of the factors that affects a Chinese citizen’s social credit score is whether they post “fake news” online. Many authoritarian governments have used “fake news” to justify their crackdown on free speech, and China is no exception. If we, the citizens of the Free World, allow our own governments to amass this horrendous amount of power, we would completely lose the last bit of leverage we have over the people we elect to serve us: our right to speak up against those in power. With this abhorrent amount of power to watch over all of us, there can be no guaranteed security for those who get on the bad side of those in power.
Meanwhile, one may assume that allowing the government to surveil us would make us safer and more secure, but this is not necessarily true. The entire idea that surveillance combats crime rests on the assumption that government and crime are in opposition to each other. However, this is not always the case. For example, the President of Honduras has been accused of participating in an elaborate drug trafficking operation. When corrupt government officials entangled with criminal networks obtain the power to surveil and silence critics, it can only serve to protect the criminals that the surveillance is supposed to bring to justice. While this is an extreme example, the American government itself does have numerous special interest influences, sometimes from legally questionable sources. Overall, this does not serve any good for any society that truly believes in law, order, and justice, and can be used to silence one of the only avenues to expose these government connections to crime and hold those officials to account.
Image credit:"Caméra vidéo de surveillance" by zigazou76 is licensed under CC BY 2.0