Mass Surveillance: Do you think it should be amended?

A clear understanding of what Mass Surveillance is, and whether it violates the rights of an individual.

Digital Rights can be considered as an extension to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the era of internet platforms. Disconnecting people from the internet can be considered as a severe violation of these rights and is against International Law. It always goes hand in hand with digital responsibilities. The Digital Rights of a human are the following:

1. Right to Privacy
2. Right to freedom of Expression
3. Right to Digital Access
4. Right to our Identity
5. Right to credit for personal work

What is Mass Surveillance?
From tapping of telephone wires to email to interceptions and from monitoring using CCTV to hacking computers, Mass Surveillance can involve any other methods for spying on a part of the population. Indiscriminate Mass Surveillance interferes with the Human Right to Privacy and proves the failure of rule of the Law. Right to Privacy implies that humans are free from any sort of unnecessary disturbance or attention into their private lives. Mass Surveillance is an infringement of our Digital Rights, however, we fail to understand that it has a proactive element to it which is aimed at identifying potential threats and breach of security in a State. While Mass Surveillance is essential for a plethora of security reasons, it is pertinent for us to understand how it infringes our Digital Rights.

Implications of Mass Surveillance
The government authorities or any private entities can easily reach out to an individual’s ISP (Internet Service Provider) and gather all the intimate information of all your activities whilst you are connected to the internet and the individuals might not even know about who’s viewing their private life. These days, smartphones provide one of the simplest ways of Mass Surveillance. Mobile phones have microphones, front and back cameras and also GPS connection which can be used to obtain information about where an individual goes on a regular basis.

Surveillance States

A surveillance state is a country where the Government engages in pervasive surveillance of enormous numbers of its citizens and visitors. Such widespread surveillance is typically justified as being necessary for national security, such as to stop crime or acts of terrorism, but might also be accustomed stifle criticism of and opposition to the government. Germans also protested against the NSA surveillance program PRISM in Berlin at the Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin. The NSA surveillance program PRISM is one of the most paradigmatic cases of a government spying on its citizens. This program was launched in 2007, following President Bush’s Protect America Act, to collect and store data from internet communications from at least 9 major internet companies in the United States, including Google, Microsoft, Apple, Skype, Youtube, Yahoo!, Paltalk, AOL and Facebook. Some instances of surveillance in the past include states like the previous Soviet Union and therefore the former East Germany, which had an enormous network of informers and a very complex technology base in computing and spy-camera technology.

The Pros and Cons of Mass Surveillance are:

Pros:

• Having the capacity to trace and check the communication of suspected criminals and terrorist may help avoid crimes and save lives. Police and intelligence agencies can investigate suspects and find out about their whereabouts.
• Deterrence Factor: terrorists, offenders and wrongdoers find it more difficult to plan and organize their attacks and crimes. Simply the very real possibility of them being caught may make many of them change their minds.
• Government develops know-how that could be very important in terms of future security. As described in many science-fiction books, the Internet and the control of information will become a new battlefield in future wars. A country with tested and powerful data-gathering tools may be better placed to protect its citizen's interests in such battles in the future.
• Research: The information collected for the purpose of security could also be used in the long run to better understand other aspects of society. Part of the databases could be made accessible in the future to social scientists who could make great contributions in their fields.

Cons:

• The increasing capacity of the government to spy on our private lives can contribute to a society in which there is no room for privacy and governments control even the minds of citizens.
• The loss of personal privacy can have an important psychological impact on people and a sense of being controlled by the government or others. Additionally, these programs clash with individual rights and liberties and can be considered as not democratic.
• The information collected by mass internet surveillance programs could be used for other purposes by the government and even by private organizations. Hackers could potentially gain access to the databases of the government surveillance programs and sell it to rival governments, companies or organized crime groups.
• These programs are very expensive and mean that many government resources have deviated from other potentially more beneficial policies. It is difficult to assess the efficacy of secret mass surveillance systems and therefore it is difficult to justify that this is a good way to spend government limited resources.