ABSTRACT
Vast amounts of personal information are currently produced and collected through people’s online behavior and use of automated technologies. This technological capacity creates an expectation that states should use these technologies to provide security to their citizens. However, in liberal democratic societies there are constraints around intelligence and surveillance technologies, particularly when considering domestic use. In this chapter, I draw from US, UK, and Australian cases to show how value judgments are woven into these automated systems. To make this information more useful for preventing acts of violence, it needs to be structured and analyzed to construct what we can call a “virtual identity.” This chapter demonstrates different ways of constructing these virtual identities: the comparison of surveillance data with existing biometric databases; characterization of individuals through metadata analysis; and flagging of suspicious behavior through artificial intelligence pattern recognition. The chapter closes out by suggesting that, in the context of national security and law enforcement, each of these methods produces a range of ethical concerns when information technologies are used in the context of mass violence and state actions.
