ALC105 Media Culture and Technological Transformations

Considering the current situation faced by humankind , it is important that a proper analysis of the entire situation is done with excellence and ethics. The involvement of the government is highly important because they have to take the role of the decision makers and depending upon their decisions the fate of the human kind is going to be decided. In some of the cases the ideology of mass surveillance has been thought but many socialist people are against it.

According to them, it is important that people consider the importance of freedom and that they expect it not to be violated due to the government surveillance. I am opposing this opinion and in the following section some of the major reasons behind not accepting this ideology is going to be detailed. The process is going to contribute in the privacy breaching process for an individual and that is violation of the human rights factor as well. One can argue about the national security and having a better idea associated with the process of safety of the people but the process is not good as it is violating the norms of the rights of an individual.

It is not the criminal intent for which the entire human race should oppose this but it is related to the basic human rights that will be violated if mass surveillance is conducted (Ram and Gray, 2020). If the government takes control of surveillance then it can be said that there will be nothing called personal life. It is highly important that a person consider his personal life to be an essential part of healthy living. Without having a personal life an individual might get psychologically ill and that might hamper the productivity and normal life of the person. There have been several situations reported where surveillance affected humankind in a very negative manner and people who were innocent have been affected as well (Savage, 2018). 

The victims will be the innocent people as well who have not committed any crime. If the intention is related to catching those people with criminal intent then there should be a filtering process which will not affect the innocent individual. On the other hand if the mass surveillance process is considered to be the only option then there should be a bigger team in the government to monitor the entire activity because the targeted population will be larger than before and it will enhance the possibility of error. It is directly related to the fact that an individual might be reported in this time of surveillance due to misunderstanding of a professional who is keeping an eye on multiple people. This misinterpretation may lead to victimization of an individual who has not intended to do something unethical in the eyes of the government. Apart from this mass surveillance can never detect the psychological behaviour of a person and cannot stop a criminal activity completely before it happens and affects people (Waters, 2018). It might be useful for monitoring purposes but the crime rate will remain the same.

It is important to understand that the thinking of a person and logical deduction of certain events in an individual's life is important behind the psychological development of the person. Criminality is nothing but the result of experiencing certain negative events in a person's life (Brown et al., 2018). In the process of democracy it is important that a person gets the right to do what he likes to and there is no intervention in the privacy. In this context, it mass surveillance is implemented then the authority of a person to maintain a pirate life is going to be violated. In a constituency such kind of malicious practice is strictly prohibited (Couldry, 2017). The idea of having a proper knowledge about democracy must not include any kind of surveillance process because that is going to harm the liberal codes of any country.

Considering the current situation it can be said that if mass surveillance is implemented then the liberal codes, that help a person take decisions on his own without being biased, are going to get maliciously affected. Being liberal is accepting the diverse opinions of people or a community and in that process any kind of intervention or surveillance is not expected. If people collectively think of something then the government is going to get aware of that and depending upon the magnitude of the collective thought process the government will be able to get decisions before that resistance is built against any malicious decision of the authority (DeBrabander, 2020). It can be stated that the idea of mass surveillance is going to affect in a negative manner. Democracy has a direct relation with liberal thoughts and mass surveillance may lead to a process where this entire thought process is going to face a resistance.

In some cases it has been observed that innocent people face unnecessary interrogation of the administration. If mass surveillance is considered as an important part of the society then there will be high chances of getting misled from the derived data and the individual's mental pressure is going to rise significantly. If the surveillance increases then the possibility of intolerance is going to rise among the individual as well because they will also be strictly noticed for their every action and if the administration does not consider one of their activities to be socially acceptable then they are going to unnecessarily interrogate them (Van der Vlist,  2017). This kind of activity will not be accepted and the tension among normal people will rise. In this process chaos is going to increase among the innocent individuals which is not expected from any administrative decision.

There is another reason which is related to security concerns of people. If more data is collected on a person and it is stored to a particular segment then breaching that section and getting hands on that data will be easier for any criminal. A few years back ransomware related security breaches was a major concern among the people and that is a proper example of threats related to data storage breaching (Sun and Mu, 2020).

In order to execute any kind of cybercrime it is essential that a person considers the importance of data storages. People with such malicious intent will easily get an idea of their target and all of the details that are recorded on that particular individual. For professional hackers breaching into that storage and taking the required material out will be easier. There will be no security space and people will remain under threat all the time. From the cash transactions to do any kind of financial detail everything is directly related to the data the government has derived from mass surveillance and hence this process is not a favourable option to track criminal activity (Boeke, 2017). This proves that not only people with crimes to hide are going to protest this but this is highly threatening for any individual in the society.

Apart from that there is a major lag in the decision making system with the surveillance process. The process is highly expensive because the entire population is going to be under supervision of the government. The cost is going to be borne by the individuals who are paying taxes and in the end they will get the negative effects of this kind of unnecessary implementation. That amount can be used for improving the health care and education process of the targeted population for which the government will get proper support from the individuals. On the other hand there are many constituencies where challenging the decision of the government is not permitted by legislation (Chatterjee, 2017).

 The biggest negative impact that mass surveillance can have on people is related to tolterian government policies. In these kinds of policies the government takes the decision to maintain the authoritative position which is not expected from any progressive country. If the government has an idea of what the people are doing and thinking then there is a high possibility that they are going to suppress that Idea and implement what they think to be important for the nation (Laas-Mikko and Sutrop, 2012.). Taking opinion from the common people about the well being of the country is going to get faded and a one sided dominance of the government will be observed. Mass surveillance will provide the required data of the citizens and depending upon that the government will develop some tolterian characteristics that will make the life of the commoners unbearable. The authority of imposing decisions on normal people must not be given to a government which thinks for its own benefit.

It will result in a power-building situation which is not expected by any contest. If the government takes a wrong decision then the general public cannot oppose that and claim for their rights as this mass surveillance process is implemented after informing the population. In this way the possibility of individuals getting convicted for deeds they have not done is going to increase drastically. The negativity is going to rise in the society and that will result into a social unrest among the individuals. Considering the above mentioned opinions and facts it is evident that taking decisions of mass surveillance may not be as fruitful as it is perceived. It is important that the decision-making process considers the opinion of the individuals after informing them the good and bad sides of mass surveillance (Linder, 2019). However there are some benefits of mass surveillance but the negative impacts are too drastic to overlook. Thanks it will not be a problem for those people who want to hide their crimes but it will affect an ordinary individual who has no connection with criminality.

From the above discussion it can be concluded that the major issue mass surveillance is going to put into is related to privacy concerns of the people. Apart from that there are other constitutional problems and possibilities related to hampering the daily life of common people. It can be further stated that the possibility of maintaining a normal life will not be possible due to the constant monitoring of the government (Stahl, 2016). Such kind of activities are related to building an authoritarian ambience where people might not feel safe to stay. Mass surveillance is not only going to analyse the behaviour of the criminals but it will involve the normal people as well and that is the main concern why this activity should be avoided.

References

Boeke, S., 2017. Reframing ‘mass surveillance’. Terrorists’ Use of the Internet: Assessment and Response, 136, p.307.

Brown, H.E., Jones, J.A. and Becker, A., 2018. The racialization of Latino immigrants in new destinations: Criminality, ascription, and countermobilization. RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, 4(5), pp.118-140.

Chatterjee, P., 2017. Verax: The True History of Whistleblowers, Drone Warfare, and Mass Surveillance: A Graphic Novel. Metropolitan Books.

Couldry, N., 2017. Surveillance-democracy. Journal of Information Technology & Politics, 14(2), pp.182-188.

DeBrabander, F., 2020. Life After Privacy: Reclaiming Democracy in a Surveillance Society. Cambridge University Press.

Ghiasi, N., Azhar, Y. and Singh, J., 2020. Psychiatric illness and criminality. StatPearls [Internet].

Laas-Mikko, K. and Sutrop, M., 2012. How do violations of privacy and moral autonomy threaten the basis of our democracy?. TRAMES: A Journal of the Humanities & Social Sciences, 16(4).

Linder, T., 2019. Surveillance capitalism and platform policing: The surveillant assemblage-as-a-service. Surveillance & Society, 17(1/2), pp.76-82.

Ram, N. and Gray, D., 2020. Mass surveillance in the age of COVID-19. Journal of Law and the Biosciences, 7(1), p.lsaa023.

Savage, S., 2018, October. Lawful device access without mass surveillance risk: A technical design discussion. In Proceedings of the 2018 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (pp. 1761-1774).

Sellers, C.S. and Akers, R.L., 2018. Social learning theory: Correcting misconceptions. In The essential criminology reader (pp. 89-99). Routledge.

Stahl, T., 2016. Indiscriminate mass surveillance and the public sphere. Ethics and Information Technology, 18(1), pp.33-39.

Sun, D.Z. and Mu, Y., 2020. On the Security of Symmetric Encryption Against Mass Surveillance. IEEE Access, 8, pp.175625-175636.

Van der Vlist, F.N., 2017. Counter-mapping surveillance: A critical cartography of mass surveillance technology after Snowden. Surveillance & Society, 15(1), pp.137-157.

Waters, S., 2018. The effects of mass surveillance on journalists’ relations with confidential sources: a constant comparative study. Digital Journalism, 6(10), pp.1294-1313.

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