Mass Electronic Surveillance is an Invasion of Privacy

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Introduction

Privacy is central to our understanding of freedom of expression and thus on a larger scale democracy. Mass surveillance is an invasion of common man’s privacy. Recent development in the way in which technology can invade privacy has heightened the need for greater protection freedom of expression. However, a major problem in this area is that the public are not provided with adequate information to act against such invasion of their rights. To date, there has been little agreement to what extent mass surveillance should be allowed in the name of providing security to the citizen of the country and to what extent privacy of the citizens of other countries should be respected.
This essay seeks to remedy these problems by analyzing the literature and development in this field. The main issues addressed in this paper are the ways in which state uses its power to do surveillance and how they justify to common people their behaviour. It further analyses the reaction of the general public and the effects of such mass surveillance on common people. The essay has been organized in the following way. This paper first gives a brief overview of the history of surveillance. Followed by reaction of state and common people to mass surveillance, later it discuss about the use of laws and media as a tool to further state interest over the public. Work of non profit organization is studied in last section along with a conclusion which gives suggestion on what should be done.
Mass surveillance has a long history of religious extremism followed by the Nazi government spying on everyone to Soviet bloc using it during the cold war. Surveillance itself is not a new concept as it has a long history. It begins with record keeping and no...

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...SION OF THE UNITED NATIONS GENERAL ASSEMBLY http://www.un.int/brazil/speech/13d-PR-DR-68-AG-Abertura-Ing.html
15. London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), 2013 Media Policy Project http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/mediapolicyproject/?s=surveillance

16. Jonathan Watts, (9 September 2013) NSA accused of spying on Brazilian oil company Petrobras. The Guardian From http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/09/nsa-spying-brazil-oil-petrobras
17. TED talk, Rebecca MacKinnon: Let's take back the Internet! POSTED JUL 2011 • TED Global 2011 from http://www.ted.com/talks/rebecca_mackinnon_let_s_take_back_the_internet.html
18. Rodriguez. G (June 9, 2013), Edward Snowden Interview Transcript, The Policy Mic from http://www.policymic.com/articles/47355/edward-snowden-interview-transcript-full-text-read-the-guardian-s-entire-interview-with-the-man-who-leaked-prism

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