The failure of surveillance
My regular Friday column in Expansión, Spain’s leading financial daily, is entitled The failure of surveillance (pdf in Spanish), in which I return to a subject I have discussed on many occasions, but that takes on renewed importance in light of the recent murders in Paris. I have seen several misleading references in the media to Benjamin Franklin’s aphorism on freedom and safety, attempting to suggest that some kind of balance between the two is not only possible, but also, somehow, “desirable”. This is not the case. Allow me to explain why.
Any supposed balance between the two simply undermines fundamental rights such as the privacy of our letters, emails, telephone conversations, etc, as well as the right to encrypt our digital communications. As soon as we frame any debate about our right to privacy in terms of wrongdoers, we all lose. We lose because our fundamental rights are not arbitrary whims or the result of accident, but above all, we lose because we gain nothing by suppressing those rights. There is no benefit to be gained. Using the murders in Paris to justify greater surveillance is a fallacy of the first order: the killings themselves show that surveillance has not worked, and neither will it work simply by expanding it yet further.
Let’s be clear about this: our governments’ efforts to set up mass surveillance systems, and to increase their control over us has nothing to do with security or our safety. Our governments are manifestly unable to protect us, as shown all to tragically in the case of the attack in Boston, or more recently in Paris. Instead, our governments simply want to reduce any possibility of insurgence, protest, or change. More “security” is simply an attack on our freedoms. As citizens, we must fight to defend the right to secure communications, the use of encryptment, and to not feel constantly under surveillance. It doesn’t matter whether it is the Spanish prime minister, the US president, or the British premier who is putting these pernicious ideas forward, we must reject them on principle. Quite simply, it is a lie that more surveillance will make us safer. New terrorist attacks should serve to convince us that more surveillance is pointless and absurd, not the other way around.
Below, the translated version of the Expansión article in full:
The failure of surveillance
The brutal attacks in Paris seem to have prompted a rethink about our basic rights as citizens: we are increasingly seeing news items preparing us for an EU equivalent of the US Patriot Act, a raft of laws that would significantly increase the extent to which ordinary people’s communications and movements are subjected to surveillance.
The idea beggars belief: we’re supposed to introduce stricter border controls throughout Europe because some French citizens carry out an attack in France? The dichotomy here is completely false, arguing that it is only possible to be secure if our basic rights to privacy are reduced. The logic here is that if you want privacy, then you must be up to no good.
If the attacks in Paris prove one thing, it is that mass surveillance has not made us any safer. Last year, France passed tough new surveillance laws, the most restrictive in Europe. But as with the Patriot Act in the United States, it has proved utterly useless. The French authorities knew about the men who carried out the attacks, just as the US police knew about Tsarnaev in Boston… but in neither case did this help prevent them from carrying out their crimes.
Mass surveillance simply provides the authorities with huge and unmanageable amounts of information, while putting millions of innocent people under unjustified scrutiny.
All governments have an inherent tendency to keep tabs on the population, and are ever hungry for more data and checks. But security and safety are not the result of surveillance. Opening our letters, reading our emails, and eavesdropping on our conversations, as well as preventing us from encrypting our communications, does not prevent attacks. It doesn’t work. Do not believe it. It is a fallacy. Mass surveillance systems have failed.
(En español, aquí)
