ABSTRACT

This chapter looks at ethics of monitoring the citizens one is attempting to protect, and associated issues of mass surveillance. It turns to the issue of encryption, and whether governments should be able to insist on ability to break all encryption systems used domestically, and ethical implications of people employing encryption to avoid government surveillance. Ethical issues that arise in domestic security seen in this way therefore have in common with both foreign espionage and domestic policing. As with foreign espionage, there is degree of intelligence gathering that goes beyond standard policing, and stakes are often seen as higher than in domestic crime. Mass surveillance involves carrying out surveillance on large percentage of non-liable population in order to both discover and deter acts that would threaten national security. Given that there is obvious openness to abuse for political ends when a politician has control of national security surveillance warrants, in US a court of independent judges meets to determine warrants.