Stahl2016IndiscriminateSurveillance

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⇒ See also Stahl2016IndiscriminateMass

Stahl2016SurveillancePublic - Spedener

Titus Stahl (2016), "Indiscriminate mass surveillance and the public sphere"

Bibliographic info

⇒ Stahl, Titus. "Indiscriminate mass surveillance and the public sphere." Ethics and Information Technology 18.1 (2016): 33-39.

Commentary

⇒ In general, what about this text makes it particularly interesting or thought-provoking? What do you see as weaknesses?

The paper provides a critique of surveillance focusing on political power in the public sphere as a complement to standard liberal approaches to privacy. The paper addresses the issue of scale and distinguishes between two senses of surveillance: information capture and storage and access to information. Indiscriminate surveillance technologies allow the acquisition of large amounts of information first and filtering out irrelevant information later, which puts into question the justifiability of the information capture even if the government is legally constrained from using the information for illegitimate purposes. Relying on the concept of political power, the paper is able to provide an argument against surveillance in the form of information capture and storage (in itself), whereas liberal approaches can only provide arguments against putting the captured information to use such that it will negatively impact the individual. The paper only briefly mentions the case of the TEMPORA program and would have benefitted from other examples of indiscriminate mass surveillance.

Excerpts & Key Quotes

Privacy at Scale

As part of its TEMPORA program, the British GCHQ accesses fiber-optic cables that carry a massive amount of Internet traffic. GCHQ stores all data that passes through these cables for several days (GCHQ Authors 2014; MacAskill et al. 2013). Following analysis, subsets are selected for longer (potentially indefinite) storage. Such a program is only possible thanks to technological advances, among them price decreases for storage media and faster processors in communications equipment. The usefulness of such a program is also tied to advances in ‘‘big data’’ analytics, that is, search algorithms that make it possible to perform relatively quick analyses of large amounts of data (Lyon 2014). These indiscriminate mass surveillance technologies raise several issues that are absent from classic discussions of privacy. First, they have unprecedented scale: programs like TEMPORA affect almost every member of the electorate in the concerned countries, rather than only specific individuals. While traditional discussions of privacy focus on individuals, it does not seem unreasonable to think that differences in scale also make a moral difference. It might be morally unproblematic to collect some information about a few people, but problematic to gather it for everyone all the time.

Comment:

This excerpt highlights the unprecedented scale of new surveillance technologies, such as TEMPORA, which affect all citizens instead of a few particular ones.
It presents the need to consider broader privacy rights beyond traditional individual privacy.

Two Surveillance Types

A second problem concerns the separation between two senses of surveillance, surveillance in the sense of information capture and storage and in the sense of access to information (Solove 2006, p. 490). Indiscriminate surveillance technologies allow intelligence services to acquire large amounts of information first and filter out irrelevant information later. This raises the issue of whether there is something already wrong with mere information capture even when the government is legally constrained from using the information in illegitimate ways.

Comment:

Stahl makes the distinction between capture/storage of information and its subsequent use. He proceeds to argue that the capture/storage of information in itself is harmful and constitutes and invasion of privacy even if it is not put to use.

Neo-Republican Perspective on Privacy

A second argument is presented by neo-republican authors. According to these authors, what privacy protects us from is not interference but domination. Someone is dominated whenever there is someone else who has the option of arbitrarily interfering with their choices, whether this option is taken or not (Lovett 2010; Pettit 1997). Therefore, it does not matter that the information that is gathered by indiscriminate mass surveillance is, in fact, not abused (Skinner 2015). The mere fact that surveillance puts the government in a position to use it to interfere with its citizens’ choices constitutes domination (Roberts 2014). Such an account seems to be better suited for a critique of indiscriminate mass surveillance because it entails that the fact that surveillance creates or increases the power of the state to interfere constitutes domination.

Comment:

This excerpt introduces the neo-republican perspective on privacy, which is one of the liberty based privacy theories.
This view argues that the mere facto of surveillance puts the government in a position to interfere with citizen's choices and thereby already
constitutes domination. While this view is closer to challenging information capture as a harm in itself, Stahl will argue that the neo-republican view does not suffice to defend the claim.

Soft Power

However, if we understand power as the ability to influence the behavior of others by means of influencing their reasons, we can see that political power can also have other modalities. Many of the reasons that govern people’s actions are not independent of social institutions. For example, if one performs an action out of professional obligation, patriotic duty or romantic commitment, the reasons involved in these acts presuppose certain social institutions and shared understandings. The reasons that govern social interactions, in particular, are very often dependent on the participants standing in specific social relationships with each other and having certain social roles (Hayward 2000; Isaac 1987; Wartenberg 1991). One can therefore exercise power over people not only by directly giving them reasons to act (such as by providing an incentive) but also indirectly by influencing the social ‘‘space of reasons’’ that is available to them (Forst 2015, p. 14), for example, by making certain kinds of relationships difficult to obtain, de facto unavoidable or obligatory. The political power of governments typically includes this capacity. Through legislation and executive actions, governments can change the social context of citizens’ interactions, creating or changing non-government institutions in ways that change the space of reasoning that is available for their members. New technologies of indiscriminate mass surveillance have made new forms of such ‘‘indirect’’, reasons-based power available to governments. These technologies allow them to shape the communicative environment of citizen-to-citizen communications, such that certain kinds of relationships become impossible and others become unavailable.

Comment:

This excerpt explains more sublte versions of power, namely power as the influence over the possible reasons people can have guiding their course of action.
For instance, this form of power changes the communicative envionrment and social interactions in the sense that certain interactions are impossible.

Collective Self-determination

This argument leads to a new account of the harm created by surveillance: indiscriminate surveillance of political, public activities removes the option for participants of the public sphere to collectively determine what social relations are appropriate for this sphere and it thereby limits their ability to exercise collective communicative freedom (Habermas 1996, p. 369; Warner 2002). The interest that is violated by surveillance is, consequently, not only an individual interest in liberty but also a collective interest in self-determination that can only be effectively safeguarded by exempting political public spheres from surveillance (Parsons 2015).

Comment:

Stahl provides a new account for the harm created by surveillance, namely that it limits collective communicative freedom necessary for democratic self-determination.
By monitoring citizens they loose the ability to freely and safely discuss.