Security Engineering, 3rd Edition

CHAPTER 26Surveillance or Privacy?

Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government's purposes are beneficient… The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well meaning but without understanding.

– SUPREME COURT JUSTICE LOUIS BRANDEIS

Every thing secret degenerates, even the administration of justice; nothing is safe that does not show how it can bear discussion and publicity.

– LORD ACTON

The arguments of lawyers and engineers pass through one another like angry ghosts.

– Nick Bohm, Ian Brown and Brian Gladman

26.1 Introduction

Governments have ever more interests online, ranging from surveillance to censorship, from privacy to safety, and from market competition to fair elections. Their goals are often in tension with the reality of a globalised online world, and with each other too. They crystallise around a number of specific policy concerns, from terrorism and counterinsurgency, through national strategic and economic advantage, to the suppression of harmful or unpopular content and the maintenance of human rights. In this chapter we explore the nexus of surveillance, censorship, forensics and privacy.

The Internet has transformed the world in lots of complicated ways, like other big technologies before it – electricity, the steam engine, writing, agriculture and fire. The relationship between the citizen and the state has changed everywhere, with the state usually acquiring more power ...