Watching Them Watching Us

Steve Wright argues that the process of watching official and unofficial surveillance activities, is guided by an “uneasy ethics.” It can never be a neutral behaviour since someone is benefitting or being dis-benefitted, from both being watched, or being the watcher. The role of the military, security, police, university, media entertainment, industrial complex is now core. Surveillance capacities are being rapidly expanded, whilst existing checks and balances prove both inadequate or in a state of erosion. What can be done in the face of such change and who will create the requisite reinforcement, the checks and balances to prevent surveillance remorselessly moving even further beyond the limits of the law? Wright argues that this is a core issue of applied ethics: it cannot and should not be a sterile exercise in social and political astronomy; not if constitutional democratic systems as we know them are to survive. He calls for a much wider debate on the notion of meaningful human control…and the crucial roles of both whistleblowing and research activism

http://journals.communicationethics.net/abstract.p...