One Nation Under Surveillance: A New Social Contract to Defend Freedom Without Sacrificing Liberty

ISBN-13: 9780199580378 / Angielski / Twarda / 2011 / 320 str.

Simon Chesterman

Opis

What limits, if any, should be placed on a government's efforts to spy on its citizens in the name of national security? Spying on foreigners has long been regarded as an unseemly but necessary enterprise. Spying on one's own citizens in a democracy, by contrast, has historically been subject to various forms of legal and political restraint. For most of the twentieth century these regimes were kept distinct. That position is no longer tenable. Modern threats do not respect national borders. Changes in technology make it impractical to distinguish between 'foreign' and 'local' communications. And our culture is progressively reducing the sphere of activity that citizens can reasonably expect to be kept from government eyes. The main casualty of this transformed environment will be privacy. Recent battles over privacy have been dominated by fights over warrantless electronic surveillance or CCTV; the coming years will see debates over DNA databases, data mining, and biometric identification. There will be protests and lawsuits, editorials and elections resisting these attacks on privacy. Those battles are worthy. But the war will be lost. Modern threats increasingly require that governments collect such information, governments are increasingly able to collect it, and citizens increasingly accept that they will collect it. One Nation Under Surveillance proposes a move away from questions of whether governments should collect information and onto more problematic and relevant questions concerning its use. By reframing the relationship between privacy and security in the language of a social contract, mediated by a citizenry who are active participants rather than passive targets, this book offers a framework to defend freedom without sacrificing liberty.

Recenzje

Simon Chesterman moves the debate on privacy beyond the question of whether the government and its intelligence services should have access to personal information to the realistic recognition that electronic transparency is here to stay. In a series of carefully articulated arguments, Chesterman outlines mechanisms that can hold governments accountable for the uses of that information. In so doing, he points the way to a twenty-first century rethinking of notions of privacy, security, and the laws that regulate them.

O autorze

Simon Chesterman's books include Shared Secrets: Intelligence and Collective Security (Lowy Institute for International Policy, 2006), You, The People: The United Nations, Transitional Administration, and State-Building (Oxford University Press, 2004), and Just War or Just Peace? Humanitarian Intervention and International Law (Oxford University Press, 2001).