Privacy Must Yield to the Needs of Security & Surveillance Is Not a Silver Bullet in the Fight Against ISIS Presented by: Dennis Mancino HD View 360

Surveillance Is Not a Silver Bullet in the Fight Against ISIS

Angeliki Dimitriadi is a visiting fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations in Berlin and a research fellow at the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy in Athens.

Updated November 19, 2015, 9:02 PM

The Paris attacks have prompted renewed calls for surveillance and additional powers to the police in France and across Europe. Yet a quick look around Europe reveals perhaps too much surveillance rather than too little.

What Europe needs right now is not more surveillance but rather better cooperation between the member states in safeguarding the union.

For all the criticism leveled to the United States by its European partners about violating basic rights to privacy, Europeans have been heading for some time on a similar path. Data retention laws, mass surveillance and bulk collection of data, weakened privacy protections and surveillance of those suspected of posing a threat are increasingly proposed and adopted in the United Kingdom, Germany and France, to name a few, with little oversight. As Europe grapples with questions around border security, it is worth reflecting on whether more surveillance, and more draconian laws, can indeed keep us safe and at what cost.

The problem with surveillance is that it relies on availability of data and ideally, relevant data. We cannot track what is not there or if it is lost amid too much information. In the case of Paris, the terrorists utilized communication sources that prevented authorities from accessing them. As technology progresses and attempts to safeguard the privacy of its users, it is also utilized by groups with an extremist agenda. The response by governments to limit privacy further, thereby prompting technology to offer alternative options to its users, raises a question of the measure’s efficiency. It is a catch-22 and one that reveals the limitations of surveillance but also our inherent responses in the face of fear, which is to raise walls, virtual and physical, to protect ourselves.

There is an opportunity here for Europe to learn from mistakes of the past, especially the U.S.’s program post 9/11. Surveillance is not a silver bullet, especially when it is indiscriminate and not independently monitored to ensure accountability. Rather, it has the potential to become a danger to the very society it is meant to protect as well as generate faulty data. What Europe needs right now is not more surveillance but rather better cooperation and exchange of information among the member states in order to safeguard the Union.


From another perspective and one we share:

Privacy Must Yield to the Needs of Security

Anthony Glees is a professor of politics and the director of the Center for Security and Intelligence Studies at the University of Buckingham in Britain.

Updated November 19, 2015, 9:02 PM

The Paris attack on Friday proved that the Islamic State can strike, at will, in the heart of Europe. But it was also, self evidently, a massive French intelligence failure, as many analysts now agree. States have a core duty to deliver security to their citizens. Arguably for the fourth time in 2015, France has shown itself to be incapable of doing so.

The best way to keep safe from jihadist terrorists is to intercept their communications and act against them before they act against us.

The best way to keep safe from terrorists is to intercept their communications and act against them before they act against us.

For more than a century, governments have been exploiting their ability to covertly learn the secrets of their enemies by tapping into their communications, whether they are sent wirelessly or by cable. No country knows this better than my own, the United Kingdom, where Bletchley Park has become the symbol of effective intelligence gathering that has benefited all civilized people everywhere. Without it the Nazi Third Reich would have been much harder to defeat.

President Hollande said that the Paris attacks were planned and steered by the Islamic State in Raqqa, Syria, and implemented by French-speaking jihadists from Belgium and France, possibly with a German link. The set up and execution doubtless involved countless communications, via the Internet and even, perhaps, the chat button on a Sony Playstation, over many weeks, within France and between France and other countries.

There may have been countless opportunities for intercepting these messages and preventing the terrorists from realizing their murderous plan. Just a few days before the attack, on Oct. 28, the French Senate finally agreed a new more intrusive interception regime should be lawful, still apparently unsigned by the president and then doubtless to be challenged in the French courts and the European Court of Justice.

And why has France resisted taking these steps? Because the French, unlike the British, have (until very recently) placed a higher value on their privacy than their security, a dreamy premodern view that was strongly reinforced by the revelations of Edward Snowden. Snowden managed to convince millions of people, not just the French, that they were under constant surveillance by "snooping" intelligence agencies. He also alerted our enemies to what we could do.

Of all the ways of defeating Islamic State attacks, getting hold of their communications and exploiting them offers the best chance of success. Hopefully France has now learned this lesson.



source: http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/11/19/does-europe-need-a-new-surveillance-system/privacy-must-yield-to-the-needs-of-security

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