The Ethics and Efficacy of Mass Surveillance

Evaluating the degree to which post-9/11 programs of mass electronic surveillance as leveraged by law enforcement have achieved purported counterterrorism objectives

The post 9/11 era has witnessed an explosion in the use of state surveillance for the purposes of law enforcement. In the past few decades, the means and methods of state surveillance have become increasingly pervasive, effective, and cheap, thanks (i) to advancements in technology, (ii) the broadened post-9/11 statutory authority for the US intelligence community (“IC”) to leverage surveillance methods against both domestic and foreign targets, and (iii) increasingly routinized law enforcement data access requests from major technology and telecommunications companies.

The expansive post-9/11 surveillance regime was explicitly built out of the pragmatic purpose of identifying unknown terrorist operatives and preventing terrorist attacks. These programs have raised constitutional objections related to the Fourth Amendment as well as having raised ethical concerns related to Panopticism and digital authoritarianism. A key defense of warrantless surveillance provided within this argument is that 1) mass surveillance programs effectively mitigate the threat of international terrorism within the domestic United States, and 2) the government does not possess comparably effective alternatives to mass surveillance in mitigating the threat of international terrorism within the domestic United States. This thesis aims to provide quantitative evidence to investigate the following claims at the center of this debate: 1) Does evidence exist to support the claim that the government's expanded surveillance authorities post-9/11 have been integral in mitigating the threat of Islamic terrorism within the domestic United States? 2) Does the government arguably possess reasonable alternatives to mass surveillance that mitigate the threat of terrorism within the domestic United States with comparable efficacy? 3) What controversial uses of the law enforcement's expanded post-9/11 powers have emerged in the 20 years since 9/11?

Speaker: Viona Atefi, Stanford University

See weblink for entry instructions

Community Social with Dessert after the talk

Room 126