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One Nation Under Surveillance: A New Social Contract to Defend Freedom Without Sacrificing Liberty
What limits, if any, should be placed on a government's efforts to spy on its citizens in the name of national security? Spying on foreigners has long been regarded as an unseemly but necessary enterprise. Spying on one's own citizens in a democracy, by contrast, has historically been subject to various forms of legal and political restraint. For most of the twentieth century these regimes were kept distinct. That position is no longer tenable. Modern threats do not respect national borders. Changes in technology make it impractical to distinguish between 'foreign' and 'local' communications. And our culture is progressively reducing the sphere of activity that citizens can reasonably expect to be kept from government eyes.
The main casualty of this transformed environment will be privacy. Recent battles over privacy have been dominated by fights over warrantless electronic surveillance or CCTV; the coming years will see debates over DNA databases, data mining, and biometric identification. There will be protests and lawsuits, editorials and elections resisting these attacks on privacy. Those battles are worthy. But the war will be lost. Modern threats increasingly require that governments collect such information, governments are increasingly able to collect it, and citizens increasingly accept that they will collect it.
One Nation Under Surveillance proposes a move away from questions of whether governments should collect information and onto more problematic and relevant questions concerning its use. By reframing the relationship between privacy and security in the language of a social contract, mediated by a citizenry who are active participants rather than passive targets, this book offers a framework to defend freedom without sacrificing liberty.
The main casualty of this transformed environment will be privacy. Recent battles over privacy have been dominated by fights over warrantless electronic surveillance or CCTV; the coming years will see debates over DNA databases, data mining, and biometric identification. There will be protests and lawsuits, editorials and elections resisting these attacks on privacy. Those battles are worthy. But the war will be lost. Modern threats increasingly require that governments collect such information, governments are increasingly able to collect it, and citizens increasingly accept that they will collect it.
One Nation Under Surveillance proposes a move away from questions of whether governments should collect information and onto more problematic and relevant questions concerning its use. By reframing the relationship between privacy and security in the language of a social contract, mediated by a citizenry who are active participants rather than passive targets, this book offers a framework to defend freedom without sacrificing liberty.
312 pages, Hardcover
First published February 24, 2011
About the author
Simon Chesterman
26 books41 followersSimon Chesterman is David Marshall Professor and Vice Provost (Educational Innovation) at the National University of Singapore, where he is also the founding Dean of NUS College. Educated in Melbourne, Beijing, and Oxford, he has lived and worked in Singapore since 2006. Simon is the author or editor of more than twenty books, including the young adult Raising Arcadia trilogy and the standalone I, Huckleberry. The novel Artifice is his first work of general fiction.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
April 3, 2016
This is a very interesting book for those who have an interest in the balancing act of privacy and security. The book successfully outlines the vast majority of the debates involved and comments critically on most of them. It opens one's eyes to alternative ways of thinking about some of the issues involved. It is also a great book to identify further leads and books that might interest the reader.
This debate is ever-changing, and given that the book was published in 2011, there is a chance that the nature of the debate has changed yet again in the last five years. This doesn't make it redundant from the overall debate but one should keep in mind that, yet again, the national security threat that we face has changed, along with recent technological advances.
One of the unique features is that it compares and contrasts the approach to security and intelligence of the USA and UK. Most would consider that the two are quite similar but the response of both to national security threats are different and distinct, this is something that the book covers well.
There was one disappointing aspect. The whole purpose of the material before the final chapter is to preface the author's theory of a 'new social contract to defend freedom without sacrificing liberty'. As a result, the reader advances through the book looking forward to what is built up to be a fairly revolutionary way of thinking about this debate. The reality when the reader reaches the final chapter is disappointing. The theory that the author poses doesn't depart much from a standard Hobbesian social contract theory and in explaining the finer details, nothing appears to jump from the page as being revolutionary or out of the ordinary. The final chapter explaining the theory is only 14 pages long.
As long as one approaches the book as more of a history of intelligence, national security and privacy with critical comment along the way, the reader won't be too disappointed when they reach the end. As long as you don't expect anything revolutionary when you get to the final chapter, this is a worthwhile read and contribution to this debate.
This debate is ever-changing, and given that the book was published in 2011, there is a chance that the nature of the debate has changed yet again in the last five years. This doesn't make it redundant from the overall debate but one should keep in mind that, yet again, the national security threat that we face has changed, along with recent technological advances.
One of the unique features is that it compares and contrasts the approach to security and intelligence of the USA and UK. Most would consider that the two are quite similar but the response of both to national security threats are different and distinct, this is something that the book covers well.
There was one disappointing aspect. The whole purpose of the material before the final chapter is to preface the author's theory of a 'new social contract to defend freedom without sacrificing liberty'. As a result, the reader advances through the book looking forward to what is built up to be a fairly revolutionary way of thinking about this debate. The reality when the reader reaches the final chapter is disappointing. The theory that the author poses doesn't depart much from a standard Hobbesian social contract theory and in explaining the finer details, nothing appears to jump from the page as being revolutionary or out of the ordinary. The final chapter explaining the theory is only 14 pages long.
As long as one approaches the book as more of a history of intelligence, national security and privacy with critical comment along the way, the reader won't be too disappointed when they reach the end. As long as you don't expect anything revolutionary when you get to the final chapter, this is a worthwhile read and contribution to this debate.
Displaying 1 of 1 review