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Running head: SURVEILLANCE STATE 1

SURVEILLANCE STATE 1

Aspects of Surveillance State

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A surveillance state can be defined as a state whose goal is to have preventive, daily, and extensive surveillance. Surveillance state does not experience serious backlash from some population. This is because some people have no problem being surveilled since they like the idea that someone is paying attention (Heynen & van der Meulen, 2019). Many of these people believe that they have no information that can be incriminating; for instance, Reid states on people reading his E-mail that, “they’ll be pretty bored.” Watson, popular for works on DNA structure, states that the compulsory DNA fingerprint does not hinder anything except, “take away our liberty to commit a crime.” we can see another surveillance application in China to allow the authorities to rank its citizen by their trustworthiness. Consequently, the individuals that are evaluated as unreliable are sent to reeducation camps. Nonetheless, the discussion in this paper focuses on the dangerous aspect of a surveillance state.

Surveillance is dangerous in a democratic country (Why the Surveillance State Is Dangerous, 2018). A country considered to be democratic must seek consent from a large number of the population. The United States has various examples of circumstances that demonstrate the surveillance state; for instance, checkpoints have been rechristened as inspections and smartphones and other devices are searched without a warrant. This is done at a rate of thirty thousand times annually. This means that the National Security Agency (NSA) has been spying on millions of Americans. In 2010, Wall Street's research revealed the FBI had many records of DNA of its American citizens. However, the numbers show to have increased in China such that the state operates mass surveillance to control almost all of the Xinjian province's population. Therefore, we can see the danger to democracy in the surveillance and control going hand in hand.

America has less state of surveillance than in China. Therefore, life is still much better in America than in China. This is because there is so much problem in the surveillance state in China. However, the focus is not so much on how it knows about but on what it can do with what it knows. The danger is not in the surveillance state violating the basic standards of privacy. On the contrary, the main problem is that surveillance state fuels control. The beauty of surveillance is that it provides a high level of everyday surveillance such that it lowers the cost of information (Qiang, 2019). The low cost of information is a result of the fixed cost of putting the surveillance in place. Consequently, the state can be tempted by such benefits surveillance brings. The reason is that the cost of control is less since the information readily available.

Control, which is caused by the rise of surveillance, takes the form of laws and regulations. Therefore, the low cost of control means that the political costs and resources of imposing new regulations and laws are greatly lowered. Ideally, a decrease in the cost of something results in the user wanting more of it (Reidenberg, 2014). Therefore, the more the state gets to know through surveillance, the more control it enforces. The state has the power to do anything with the information it has gathered or the information it has seized from the databases of private parties databases. This means that private parties' information is only secure up to the state or an order by the court.

Therefore, the state powers exist within the matters of security. The matters of security also require some surveillance. The government is forced to push the button on surveillance due to various emerging issues today — For example, the return of religion wars, the international travel low costs, and individual empowerment in the sense of social networks, car availability, and encryption. These cases require more surveillance than what is deemed necessary. The popular statement by Franklin states, “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety”. He says that the individuals in need of temporary safety have to give up their essential liberty. Franklin continues to say that such individuals do not deserve liberty or safety. Therefore, this statement made by Franklin suggests that the level of surveillance that is being exercised is more than necessary. However, the main lesson from Benjamin’s statement that security and surveillance is a matter of trade-offs. Hence, as mentioned in the beginning, democracy is affected. This is because the state makes this trade-off for everyone else. We can view this to be an extension of more than the role that the state is expected to do.

Hence, the outcome of surveillance is that the people must act as law-abiding and fear the state. The people cannot go against surveillance since it would mean that they are non-law abiding despite not changing their behavior (McCoy, 2009). They will face charges of violating laws that they did not know existed. Therefore, the state can push for surveillance by coining law-abiding in the new laws and regulations. Since the cost of control is low, then the state will easily enforce these prohibitive laws. Consequently, the level of surveillance will rise as the number of new laws and regulations are imposed.

References

Heynen, R., & van der Meulen, E. (2019). Making Surveillance States: Transnational Histories. University of Toronto Press.

McCoy, A. W. (2009). Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State. Univ of Wisconsin Press.

Qiang, X. (2019). The Road to Digital Unfreedom: President Xi’s Surveillance State. Journal of Democracy, 30(1), 53–67.

Reidenberg, J. R. (2014). The data surveillance state in the United States and Europe. Wake Forest Law Review. https://heinonline.org/hol-cgi-bin/get_pdf.cgi?handle=hein.journals/wflr49&section=21

Why the Surveillance State is Dangerous. (2018, June 10). https://www.econlib.org/archives/2018/06/why_the_surveil.html