Facial recognition technology (FRT) is fast becoming the tool of choice for law enforcement agencies looking to police public space. Over the last year, in England and Wales, FRT has been used at a number of crowded events to identify suspects and prevent crime. This technology is more intrusive than ordinary CCTV surveillance as it...
THE (PREDICTABLY) IRRATIONAL SACRIFICE OF FREEDOM FOR SECURITY – A BEHAVIORAL PERSPECTIVE
Liberal democracies are increasingly exposed to external and internal “threats“. The reaction tends to be to limit freedom in pursuit of security. Liberal democracies risk to sacrifice the very pillars that define them – democracy, individual liberties, social tolerance – to purportedly safeguard themselves. How come? The paper argues that common biases, wrong probability calculations,...
The paradoxical regulation of mass surveillance in Britain, 2013-2016
After the Snowden revelations, Britain’s Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT), an administrative panel dealing with illegal interception of communication, heard a series of complaints from NGOs. The Tribunal sat in public, treating the complaints as hypothetical scenarios: so-called ‘assumed facts’. The assumed facts enabled legal argument to proceed while protecting government secrecy. It determined in two...
The limits of (digital) constitutionalism: Exploring the privacy-security (im)balance in Australia
This presentation explores the challenges of digital constitutionalism in practice through a case study examining how concepts of privacy and security have been framed and contested in Australian cyber security and telecommunications policy-making over the last decade. We seek to understand if, and how, principles of digital constitutionalism have been incorporated at the national level....