What is mass surveillance?
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Mass surveillance is the subjection of a population or significant component of a group to indiscriminate monitoring. It involves a systematic interference with people’s right to privacy. Any system that generates and collects data on individuals without attempting to limit the dataset to well-defined targeted individuals is a form of mass surveillance.
Under the methods that mass surveillance is now capable of being conducted, governments can capture virtually all aspects of our lives. Today it increasingly involves the generation, collection and processing of information about large numbers of people, often without any regard to whether they are legally suspected of wrongdoing. At this scale, modern surveillance shifts the burden of proof, leads to an unaccountable increase in power, and has a chilling effect on individual action.
Is mass surveillance only a recent phenomenon?
While the mass surveillance of populations is currently on the rise, mainly due to rapid technological ch...
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