Surveillance Technologies and Economies

Thus far this work has been concerned extensively with the way liberal democracies attempt to balance individual privacy with the need for collective security. Government collection of data on individuals, along with its ethical and legal underpinnings, has been our main concern. In Chapters V and VI, for example, we described surveillance technologies and systems increasingly used by governments for security purposes – passenger name records, data mining to create terrorist profiles and National Identity Cards to name a few. In those sections we touched briefly upon current, widely accepted modern communication and information systems, such as social networks that