Indiscriminate mass surveillance and the public sphere

By Titus Stahl. 2016

57 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Recent disclosures suggest that many governments apply indiscriminate mass surveillance technologies that allow them to capture and store a massive amount of communications data belonging to citizens and non-citizens alike. This article argues that traditional liberal critiques of government surveillance that center on an individual right to privacy cannot completely capture the harm that is caused by such surveillance because they ignore its distinctive political dimension. As a complement to standard liberal approaches to privacy, the article develops a critique of surveillance that focuses on the question of political power in the public sphere.

Subfields: Political Science and International Relations, Safety Research, Sociology and Political Science, Privacy & Security

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In Political Science and International Relations

In Safety Research

In Sociology and Political Science

In Privacy & Security

Citations in the corpus

Ethical and social risks of harm from Language Models (2021, background): “The collection of large amounts of information about people for the purpose of mass surveillance has raised ethical and social concerns, including risk of censorship and of undermining public discourse (Cyphers and Gebhart, 2019; Stahl, 2016; Véliz, 2019).”
Taxonomy of Risks posed by Language Models (2022, background): “The collection and analysis of large amounts of information about people creates concerns about privacy rights and democratic values [41, 173, 187].”