Pros And Cons Of Surveillance

With recent developments in technology, government and private surveillance has increased. Not only has the surveillance increased but also those who wish to surveil. This surveillance, like any other social issues has its pros and cons. The good it has brought to society is not something to be overlooked. On April 18th 2013, 3 days after the Boston marathon bombing took place, the Federal Bureau of Investigation released some photographs and a video of two suspects. Later that day the two brothers Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Tamerlan Tsarnaev were identified. Cameras worn by police officers, popularly known as “cop cams” or “body cams”, have also help bring some unjust officers of the law to justice as well as public attention. Also videos captured by citizens (on their mobile devices), security systems of various companies and establishments have helped in various police investigations. Also it gives society a sense of security because surveillance deters eccentric or deviant behavior. The examples, amongst others have shown these systems have helped to

solve some major crimes, causing many to call for even more cameras. However, according to the Surveillance Studies Centre at Queen's University in Ontario, these urban surveillance systems have not proven to an acceptable extent to actually deter criminals. It's still not clear whether they are effective at preventing crimes either.
Surveillance can also be harmful in various ways. With cameras in different cities, all connecting to the same database, the movement of people across state lines or worse could be tracked thoroughly.
"We like to think we have some privacy in our lives, that we can go places that we don't necessarily want the government to know about. What concerns me is if all of those cameras get linked together at some point, and if we apply facial recognition on the back end, we'll be able to track people wherever they go." said Jennifer Lynch, an attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an Internet civil-liberties group.[1] . Consequentialists argue that this is for the greater good of society. This means that though a number of people don’t necessarily agree with this, it should be done regardless. The rights of these individuals are then overridden by the interests if the many.
Following terrorist attacks in September 2001, the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), as part of the war on terror, was authorized by executive order to monitor, without search warrants, the phone calls, internet activity (this includes emails, web pages visited, online messaging and others), text messaging, and other communication involving any party believed by the NSA to be outside the U.S., even if the other end of the communication lies within the U.S. Early June, 2013, Edward Snowden a former contractor of the Central Intelligence Agency(CIA) revealed some shocking information about said government surveillance. The Guardian newspaper reported that the US National Security Agency (NSA) was collecting the telephone records of tens of millions of Americans. The paper published the secret court order directing telecommunications company Verizon to hand over all its telephone data to the NSA on an "ongoing daily basis". Following this report, the Washington Post and Guardian revealed that the NSA was involved in a surveillance program known as Prism. Under this program the NSA tapped directly into the servers of nine internet firms including Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo to track online communication. Facebook has one of the biggest facial-recognition databases in the world, making tracking by the NSA even much easy if they did indeed tap into their servers. The documents, provided Edward Snowden, include a level of detail and analysis that is not routinely shared with Congress or the special court that oversees surveillance. An internal NSA audit, dated May 2012, identified 2,776 violations (or incidents) of the rules or court orders for surveillance of Americans or foreign targets in the United States, from April 2011 through March 2012. "Most were unintended. Many involved failures of due diligence or violations of standard operating procedure. The most serious incidents included a violation of a court order and unauthorized use of data about more than 3,000 Americans and green-card holders," it said. [4] The Wall Street Journal reported that the NSA spies on Americans’ credit card transactions as well.
Taking all this surveillance into account, individuals in the United States, barely have any privacy from government and are prone to the harms of all this massive surveillance. One instance where this is harmful is when it threatens out intellectual property. For example, a group of college students meet to have a discussion about a teacher’s methods of teaching. This discussion, under no surveillance, would more than likely be very honest and thorough as compared to having this discussion about surveillance. The fear of being watched causes people to act and think differently from the way they might otherwise. Surveillance thus menaces our society’s foundational commitments to intellectual diversity and eccentric individuality.
Surveillance is a power with the potential for massive abuse.

Professor Anthony Giddens, a British sociologist, popularly known for his theory of structuration and his holistic view of modern societies argues that argues that surveillance continually seeks the supervision of social actors and carries with it a permanent risk that supervision could lead to domination. [4] Surveillance has its effects on the power dynamic between the watcher and those being watched. This disparity increases the risk of harms such as discrimination, coercion, and the threat of selective enforcement, where critics of the government can be prosecuted or blackmailed for wrongdoing unrelated to the purpose of the surveillance. Surveillance can sometimes be necessary, even helpful. Unconstrained surveillance however, especially of our intellectual activities, threatens a cognitive revolution that cuts at the core of the freedom of the

mind.