Mass Surveillance PDF

What is mass surveillance?
Mass surveillance is the subjection of a population or significant component of a group

to indiscriminate monitoring. It involves a systematic interference with people's right to
privacy. Any system that generates and collects data on individuals without attempting
to limit the dataset to well-defined targeted individuals is a form of mass surveillance.
Under the methods that mass surveillance is now capable of being conducted,
governments can capture virtually all aspects of our lives. Today it increasingly involves
the generation, collection, and processing of information about large numbers of people,
often without any regard to whether they are legally suspected of wrongdoing. At this
scale, modern surveillance shifts the burden of proof, leads to an unaccountable
increase in power, and has a chilling effect on individual action.
Is mass surveillance only a recent phenomenon?
While the mass surveillance of populations is currently on the rise, mainly due to rapid
technological changes around the world, it has been used all throughout history.
One of the oldest forms of mass surveillance are national databases. These old
administrative surveillance techniques include censuses registering the subjects of a
kingdom, ID documenting individuals and tattoos marking them, and numbering and
categorising humans.
The searchable nature of databases makes any datastore a potential investigative tool
and increases the potential of trawling. This is why national databases are supposed to
be regulated carefully under law in democratic societies. Census databases collect
detailed information on individuals in a country but should not be used to identify
specific individuals or populations. Identity schemes should be limited to very specific
uses and not allow for discrimination or for abusive use of stop-and-identify powers. The
increasing use of biometrics and the ability to query identity databases for matches and
near-matches allows for fishing expeditions that increase the risk of abuse and re-use of
the system for other purposes than for which it was designed.
Mass surveillance in public spaces became more commonplace with the deployment of
closed-circuit television cameras (CCTV). Older systems collected vague images with
limited capabilities of linking captured images to personal information. But now it is
possible for people's movements to be tracked and stored for later analysis. Automated
and real-time identification of large numbers of people is now undertaken, and the risk
of further abuses is growing.
What are the latest forms of mass surveillance?
While databases and CCTV still exist and are in use, the most recent discussions around
mass surveillance focus around the monitoring of communications, including what we
do on our phones and our computers.
When it comes to spying on our phones, government authorities can now get access to
data on everyone within a specific geographic area around a cell tower through bulk
access to data held by mobile phone companies (often referred to as a 'cell tower dump').
We are also seeing an increase in the use of mobile surveillance tools that allow
authorities to monitor all communications and identify all devices within a localised
area, for instance at a public protest by setting up fake mobile base stations.
Having started as mechanisms to administer and control large populations, then moving
to capture 'public' actions, mass surveillance techniques are no longer restricted to
public-facing activities. For instance, governments have passed laws mandating that all
communications transactions are logged and retained by service providers to ensure that
they are accessible to government authorities upon request. However, numerous courts
have called this type of surveillance policy an interference with the right to privacy.
The technologies of mass surveillance are becoming more prevalent, and as resource
limitations disappear, the capabilities for governments become endless. Now it is
possible to monitor and retain an entire country's communications content, and directly
access communications and metadata from undersea cable companies,telephone
companies and internet service providers.
There are practically no limits on what governments can do with this broad access and
the power that comes with unaccountable surveillance. For instance, in conducting fibre
optic cable interception States can collect and read any the content of any unencrypted
communication flowing through that cable including phone calls, voice-over-IP calls,
messages, emails, photos, and social networking activity. They can then apply a range of
analysis techniques and filters to that information from voice, text and facial
recognition, to the mapping of networks and relationships, to behavioural analysis, to
emotion detection.
Mass surveillance will be applied beyond communications surveillance. As we move
towards 'smart' devices and cities, more and more of our activities will be collected and
analysed. Smart meters report on our electricity usage, while smart cities track
individuals and vehicles using cameras and sensors. Laws must keep up to date with
these innovations that seek to monitor and profile us all. As the UN Office of the High
Commissioner for Human Rights noted in 2014, "the technological platforms upon which
global political, economic and social life are increasingly reliant are not only vulnerable
to mass surveillance, they may actually facilitate it."
What are the legal frameworks around mass surveillance?
Mass surveillance is an indiscriminate measure. Human rights laws require that any
interference with privacy is legitimate, necessary in a democratic society, and
proportionate. Even where it can be shown to meet a legitimate aim, mass surveillance is
unlikely to meet the tests of proportionality and necessity.
Key to this is that governments are often reluctant to introduce necessary safeguards to
minimise the information that is collected -- ID programmes are increasingly collecting
more information and being required for more transactions; DNA database laws resist
the deletion of unnecessary information including the samples and profiles of innocent
people; and communications surveillance programmes are increasingly trying to 'collect
it all'.
In judging whether mass surveillance is lawful, courts have weighed on the scope of the
surveillance, the safeguards in place, the type of surveillance, and the severity of the
pressing social need. They have concluded that the collection and retention of
information on people is an act of surveillance that must be controlled. The mere
capability to enable surveillance that examines, uses, and stores information consitutes
an interference with the right to privacy. The systematic collection, processing and
retention of a searchable database of personal information, even of a relatively routine
kind, involves a significant interference with the right to respect for private life, and to
an emerging extent, requires protection against unreasonable searches.
What's the problem with "collecting everything"?

Governments have been quick to attempt to colour the discourse around mass
surveillance by rebranding their actions as bulk collection of communications,
asserting that such collection in itself is a benign measure that does not offend privacy
rights.
But what governments often do not point out is that collection of this information is
where the interference to our privacy occurs. Mass surveillance programmes are
premised on one fundamental objective collect everything. Mine it, exploit it,
extrapolate from it; look for correlations and patterns, suspicious thoughts or words,
tenuous relationships or connections.
By starting from a position where everyone is a suspect, mass surveillance encourages
the establishment of erroneous correlations and unfair suppositions. It enables
individuals to be linked together on the basis of information that may be no more than a
coincidence a tube ride shared together, a website visited at the same time, a phone
connecting to the same cell tower and conclusions to be drawn about the nature of
those links.
Authorities can now have access to information concerning the entirety of an individuals
life: everything they do, say, think, send, buy, imbibe, record, and obtain, everywhere
they go and with whom, from when they wake up in the morning until when they go to
sleep. Even the strongest of legal frameworks to govern mass surveillance with the
strictest of independent oversight would leave room for abuse of power and misuse of
information; for discriminatory attitudes and structural biases; and for human fallibility
and malice.
The threat of being subject to such abuse, discrimination or error strikes results in
changes in human behaviour, and consequently changes the way we act, speak, and
communicate. This is the chilling effect of surveillance: the spectre of surveillance may
limit, inhibit or dissuade someone's legitimate exercise of his or her rights.
These impacts include not only the violation of privacy rights, but extend to broader
societal impacts on the ability to freely form and express ideas and opinions, to associate
and organize, and to disagree with dominant political ideologies and demand change to
the status quo.
As the UN Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Expression concluded in his 2013 report,
States cannot ensure that individuals are able to freely seek and receive information or
express themselves without respecting, protecting and promoting their right to privacy.
We believe that ultimately mass surveillance will enforce conformity, limit innovation,
hamper creation, and diminish imagination.
Privacy International. London.

Mass Surveillance PDF

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Mass Surveillance PDF

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Mass Surveillance PDF

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

What is mass surveillance?

Mass surveillance is the subjection of a population or significant component of a group

What's the problem with "collecting everything"?

Privacy International. London.

You might also like