The Ethics of State Mass Surveillance

Facilitated by technological progress, recent years have seen a rapid expansion of state mass surveillance operations. These include the global surveillance program uncovered by Edward Snowden, video surveillance in public places (increasingly with facial recognition), and surveillance operations to contain the spread of the coronavirus. While state mass surveillance is not a new phenomenon, modern state mass surveillance differs in many morally relevant ways from ‘old fashioned’ surveillance. Some of the differences include its unprecedented scale, its reliance on computers and artificial intelligence, as well as the fact that it is increasingly established democracies that engage in large scale surveillance. The use of mass surveillance in democracies raises particularly challenging philosophical questions.

The collaborative, DFG-funded research project “The Ethics of State Mass Surveillance” explores ethical questions surrounding state mass surveillance in liberal societies ─ with regard to (a) the individual being monitored, (b) the democratic society in which surveillance is carried out, and (c) the technology companies that are involved in surveillance operations. The overall project is composed of three subprojects, each dedicated to one of these three aspects:

• Subproject 1 (“State mass surveillance and self-governance”, PI: Christian Seidel/KIT) examines the impact of state mass surveillance on individuals, especially with regard to personal autonomy. While the discussion has so far mostly centered on privacy and characterizations of privacy’s connection to autonomy have remained somewhat generic, the project will offer a more nuanced examination of the extent to which specifically state mass surveillance has a direct effect on the (conditions of) autonomy of the persons being monitored, possibly even without violating their privacy.

• Subproject 2 (“State mass surveillance and liberal democracy”, PI: Peter Königs/TU Dortmund) examines the impact of state mass surveillance on democratic societies. The starting point is the observation that state mass surveillance can take on different forms, and that the societal impacts of surveillance therefore vary significantly as a function of the specific parameters of surveillance. Two crucial such parameters and their significance for democratic societies – whether data analysis is algorithm-driven and what purpose the surveillance measure serves – are then examined in more detail.

• Subproject 3 (“State mass surveillance, technology companies, and the ethics of dissent”, PI: Christian Neuhäuser/TU Dortmund) explores the role of technology companies on whose data and infrastructure governments rely for their surveillance operations. It is well-known that technology companies function as ‘surveillance intermediaries’, but the resultant question concerning their moral responsibilities has not yet been addressed. The central question is thus to what extent technology companies have a right or even a duty to refuse to participate in ethically questionable state mass surveillance practices.

The overarching aim of the research project is to achieve a better understanding of the ethical significance of state mass surveillance. By exploring a topic of major political and social interest, the research project will not only be relevant to academics working in the field, but to the public in general and in particular to the main actors involved in state mass surveillance (i.e policy makers, citizens and technology companies). In order to provide an integrated and coherent picture of the ethics of state mass surveillance, the research group will embrace a cooperative work style and introduce various formats of joint collaboration between Dortmund and Karlsruhe.