Great counter to the argument that we need mass surveillance. Now, UN also declared it illegal earlier today, so overall, not a good daddy for GCHQ / NSA etc
Electronic mass surveillance – including the mass trawling of both metadata and content by the US National Security Agency – fails drastically in striking the correct balance between security and privacy that American officials and other proponents of surveillance insist they are maintaining.
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Our research found that electronic mass surveillance performed poorly in terms of practical usability, ethical grounds, and the protection of privacy rights, whereas traditional (non-technological) surveillance or strictly targeted electronic surveillance might have a chance to strike a “balance.” The novelty in our work is demonstrating this through semi-quantification and numerical scores.
Electronic mass surveillance technologies were assessed in a terrorism prevention scenario in which six different surveillance methods were used to try to detect a terrorist act that was possibly in preparation.
Several of the six surveillance techniques assessed were closely modeled on the basis of what we know about #NSA surveillance from Edward snowden’s revelations and other sources.