What limits, if any, should be placed on a government's efforts to spy
on its citizens in the interests 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 data-mining and biometric identification. There will be protests
and lawsuits, editorials and elections resisting these attacks on
privacy. Those battles are worthy. But they will all 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. The point of
this book is to shift focus 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,
the book offers a framework to defend freedom without sacrificing
liberty.
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A New Social Contract to Defend Freedom Without Sacrificing Liberty
Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9780191625008
Publisert
2020
Utgiver
Oxford University Press Academic UK
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter