Mass surveillance
From Free net encyclopedia
Mass surveillance is the pervasive surveillance of an entire population, or a substantial fraction thereof. Mass surveillance may be done either with or without the consent of those under surveillance, and may or may not serve their interests. For example, the monitoring of the population for disease in epidemiology would generally be viewed as a benign form of mass surveillance, whereas a network of secret police informers would be regarded as surveillance abuse.
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Voluntary mass surveillance
One of the most common forms of voluntary mass surveillance is carried out by commercial organizations. Many people are willing to join loyalty card programs, trading their personal information and surveillance of their shopping habits in exchange for a discount on their groceries, although original prices are usually just increased to ensure participation in the program.Template:Fact
Involuntary mass surveillance
As a result of the digital revolution, many aspects of life are now captured and stored in digital form. Concern has been expressed that governments may use this information to conduct mass surveillance on their populations.
European Union
(This subsection documents a current event. Information may change rapidly as the event progresses.)
The legislative body of the European Union passed the Data Retention Directive on 2005-12-15. It requires telecommunication operators to implement mass surveillance of the general public through retention of metadata on telecommunications and to keep the collected data at the disposal of various governmental bodies for potentially quite long times. Access to this information is not required to be limited to investigation of serious crimes, nor is a warrant required for access.
Russia
The SORM (and SORM-2) laws enable complete monitoring of any communication, electronic or traditional, by eight state agencies, without warrant.
United Kingdom
Amongst the western democracies, the United Kingdom is perhaps the country subject to the most surveillance. Indeed, in 2004 the Government's own Information Commissioner, talking about the proposed British national identity database stated, "My anxiety is that we don't sleepwalk into a surveillance society." Other databases causing him concern are the National Child Database, the Office for National Statistics' Citizen Information Project, and the NHS National Programme for IT.
In 2004 it was estimated that the United Kingdom was monitored by some four million CCTV cameras, some with a facial recognition capacity, with practically all town centres under surveillance. Serious concerns have been raised that the facial biometric information which will be stored on a central database through the ID Card scheme could be linked to facial recognition systems and state-owned CCTV cameras to identify individuals anywhere in the UK, or even to compile a database of wanted citizens' movements without their knowledge or consent. Currently, in the London Borough of Westminster, microphones are being fitted next to CCTV cameras. Westminster council claims that they are simply part of an initiative against urban noise, and will not "be used to snoop", but comments from a council spokesman appear to imply that they have been deliberately designed to capture an audio stream alongside the video stream, rather than simply reporting noise levels. [1]
The British Police hold records of 5.5 million fingerprints and 2.5 million DNA samples on the National DNA Database. In London, the Oyster card payment system [2] tracks the movement of individual people through the public transport system, while the London congestion charge uses computer imaging to track car number plates.
Road vehicles are now tracked throughout much of the UK using a network of around 8,000 automatic number plate recognition cameras, while there are also proposals to track all road vehicles using vehicle telematics systems for road charging (see vehicle excise duty). Indeed the United Kingdom possesses enough surveillance equipment to quickly change into an oppressive police state.
Rest of Europe
Holland and Germany are reputed to have the highest levels of covert governmental mobile phone tapping. The article on telephone tapping states:
- "There were proposals for European mobile phones to use stronger encryption, but this was opposed by a number of European countries, including the Netherlands and Germany, which are among the world's most prolific telephone tappers (over 10000+ phone numbers in both countries in 2003)."
In 2002 German citizens were tipped off about the scale of tapping, when a software error led to a phone number allocated to the German Secret Service being listed on mobile telephone bills. [3]
United States
In the USA, there are concerns that the adoption of the Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange, which plans to collate criminal histories, driver's license data, vehicle registration records, and significant amounts of other data, will effectively revive the (notionally) unfunded Total Information Awareness initiative to give centralized access to the records of the US population. State and local governments have created similar databases independently, such as the now apparently dormant CriMNet in Minnesota. Concern has been expressed regarding the privacy of such databases and whether private organizations can be trusted to maintain such information.
The National Security Agency has been alleged as a major figure in this type of activity because of ECHELON, although this was never solidly proven to be surveillance directed against American citizens. However, the NSA warrantless surveillance controversy has brought the topic to discussion even on the major television news outlets (eg: Fox News, CNN, etc).
A further development is the January 2006 filing of a class action lawsuit, Hepting vs. AT&T, by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, alleging that the telecommunications company AT&T assisted the NSA to tap the internet usage of its customers, including historical records, telephone calls placed over the internet and the like.
In December 2005 President George W. Bush admitted that he had circumvented the FISA Court in when he ordered the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on American citizens without a warrant. This mass surveillance could be viewed as a violation of the fourth amendment to the US Constitution and has come under intense scrutiny by politicians, both Republican and Democrat.
The President George W. Bush states that he does have the legal power granted to him by Congress when war was declared. The Justice Department has stated when Congress passed the resolution for war in 2001 to use military force against Al Qaeda and to deter future terrorist attacks, it gave the President George W. Bush the legal backing for such surveillance. The Attorney General Alberto Gonzales sent a 40-page white paper to Congress detailing the legal justifications for such surveillance.[4]
The Justice Department's lengthy legal analysis also asserts that if a 1978 law that requires court warrants for domestic eavesdropping is interpreted as blocking the president's powers to protect the country in a time of war, its constitutionality is doubtful and the president's authority supersedes it.[5]
East Germany
Before the Digital Revolution, one of the world's biggest mass surveillance operations was carried out by the Stasi, the secret police of the former East Germany. By the time the state collapsed in 1989, the Stasi had built up an estimated civilian network of 300,000 informants (approximately one in fifty of the population), who monitored even minute hints of political dissent among other citizens. Many West Germans visiting friends and family in East Germany were also subject to Stasi spying, as well as many high-ranking West German politicians and persons in the public eye.
Most East German citizens were well aware that their government was spying on them, which led to a culture of mistrust: touchy political issues were only discussed in the comfort of their own four walls and only with the closest of friends and family members, while widely maintaining a facade of unquestioning followership in public.
Literature and movies critical of mass surveillance
- The Transparent Society by David Brin, discusses various scenarios for the future considering the spread of cheap web-cameras, increases in government security initiatives, and the possible death of encryption if quantum computing becomes reality
- Nineteen Eighty-Four, a novel by George Orwell depicting life under an omnipresent totalitarian state
- Minority Report, a story by Philip K. Dick about a society that arrests people for crimes they have yet to commit (made into a movie in 2002)
- Blue Thunder, 1983 movie starring Roy Scheider
- Brazil, a film by Terry Gilliam depicting an oppressive total information awareness society
- Pizza, a short film by ACLU depicting ordering pizza by phone in a Total Surveillance Society.
- Discipline and Punish by the critical theorist Michel Foucault is generally taken as being one of the paradigmatic works on theories of surveillance and discipline
- Enemy of the State, 1998 film about the use of surveillance and the powers it provides a corrupt politician who could track a person who has evidence of a politically motivated crime that would expose a murder.
Literature and movies praising mass surveillance
- The Light of Other Days is a science-fiction book that praises mass surveillance, under the condition that it is available to everyone. It shows a world in which a total lack of privacy results in a decrease in corruption and crime.
See also
- Big Brother (1984)
- Computer ethics
- Criticisms of the War on Terrorism
- Data privacy
- Data retention
- ECHELON
- HUMINT
- National security
- Network analysis
- Nineteen Eighty-Four novel by George Orwell
- Panopticon
- Pen register
- RFID tagging
- Right to privacy
- SIGINT
- Telephone tapping
- Traffic analysis
- Vehicle telematics
- USA PATRIOT Act
External links
- The UK House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee's report into ID cards
- Bigger databases...could also mean more unwelcome intervention
- Telegraph Online report: Council plans to listen in on street life
- Minnesota CriMNet Department of Public Safety Bureau of Criminal Apprehension databases