Queen’s expert talks about new book Surveillance After Snowden
Two years ago, U.S. intelligence whistleblower Edward Snowden began revealing the extent of electronic surveillance of citizens by the United States and its allies, including Canada. In his new book, Surveillance After Snowden, David Lyon, director of Que
Q How does the book advance what’s already been written about the dangers of the surveillance society?
A What we’re trying to understand is the particular ways in which surveillance has been changing that we could not have understood fully without those disclosures from Snowden. (They) help us to understand the ways in which corporations and government departments work together, the ways in which the Internet has become crucial to all kinds of surveillance, and to indicate that the kinds of surveillance happening are on a much larger scale but done in far greater secrecy than we ever imagined.
Orwell had no idea about how corporations could be involved in surveillance. Now they are so closely involved, that link is something that we just have to acknowledge, and work to understand its consequences. It’s a mutual dependence learning from each other. It’s quite amazing to see the extent to which they are engaged.
Q Why has there been no sustained outcry about this mass surveillance, at least not in Canada?
A There’s a great need for far more outrage. For most of us, most of the time the Internet provides all kinds of useful tools and we tend to think of it in that generally positive way. The benefits in that kind of consumer approach partly blind us to the realities of what’s going on behind the scenes.
These are things that are not just politically sensitive but raise huge ethical questions and fundamental questions that Snowden himself asked: What kind of society do we want, and what kind of society have we already made that can in someway be unmade?
Q You believe attempting to “balance” national security and civil liberties is a fallacious approach. Why?
A If we believe that we should keep our borders secure on the one hand, and if we believe that the political, social and economic rights that ordinary people have should also be maintained, then these are parallel goals. The idea that there is somehow a balance and that somehow we can let the scale go down on one side because the so-called national security threat is so great ... they are both goals, both government responsibilities, both things that we should all join in upholding and maintaining.
Q You write that government surveillance is about wanting to control the effects of things such as crime and terrorism, at the expense of understanding their causes. The new security law, Bill C-51, for example contains new powers and controls, but no provisions for counterradicalization.
A The idea that we should search back for the causes simply gets obscured in the process of this management approach that says we have to control the outcome, that we have to be concerned with what’s happening and understand from moment to moment what is going on.
So big data surveillance is something that is always trying to protect, always trying to secondguess.
It prevents us from really being able to have a sense of where things are going because all our focuses are on what can be inferred about the future rather than trying to understand the (past) causes.