Principales cambios en el desarrollo

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to be governed is to be watched, inspected ,spied upon, directed, law –driven ,numbered, regulated ,enrolled ,indoctrinated ,preached at, controlled ,checked ,estimated , valued, censured, commanded ,by creatures who have neither the right nor he wisdom nor the virtue to do so (Proudhon, 1923)

Most people now accept that someone has the capability to monitor every digital transaction we make and in most large cities and public buildings the ability to observe everything we do. A frequently asked question is who is the “they”, who is it that has both the power and authority to do this.

An Organisational level analysis focuses on people. People make decisions within nation states, and, therefore, people make policy.

The moral point of view requires us to regard the world from the perspective of one person among many rather than from that of a particular self with particular interests, and to choose courses of action, policies, rules, and institutions on grounds that would be acceptable to any agent who was impartial (Beitz, 1999, p. 113)

Mill noted that where ever there is an ascendant class, a large portion of the morality of the country emanates from its class interests, and its feelings of class superiority. Men who judge in their own case will always give themselves the benefit of the doubt and will always assume that they are in the right (Nozick, 1974, p. 11). For the

majority emotions work to keep us in step with the moral status quo. It feels wrong to be different, so we go with the flow. Reason, more often than not, is just an impotent latecomer. If this is correct things have panned out much as David Hume reasoned. For Hume, Reason was the “slave of the passions ‘and ‘all morality depends upon our sentiments; and when any action, or quality of the mind, pleases us after a certain manner, we say this is virtuous” (Hume, 1888, p. 517).

Driven by the dominant elites and their will to control, mass surveillance erodes and undoes the democratic promise of transparency. Time has supported Zuboff’s rather gloomy predictions of the appropriation of the promise of information technology by

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powerful groups and its concomitant use in ways that, by and large, accommodate the interests of these groups.

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those they oppress (Douglas, 2016)

Ultimately the determining factor is the mental attitude of the ruling class itself (Orwell, 2008, p. 215). It is, therefore, essential that citizens elect the right people to be in charge. Interestingly while the surveillance debate focuses on the potential intrusion into everyone’s life, society seems to have overlooked the fact that it has already provided these same individuals who govern surveillance with society’s authority to initiate nuclear Armageddon and end the world as we currently know it. The future will be shaped by how states, citizens, companies and institutions handle their new responsibilities in the digital age. After all as Hobbes notes” covenants, without the sword, are but words, and of no strength to secure a man at all” (Hobbes, 2008, p. 111). The advent of nuclear capability has already provided the sword; mass surveillance simply defines the target more clearly.

Society created “the great Leviathan called a Commonwealth, or State which is but an artificial man, though of greater stature and strength than the natural, for whose protections and defence it was intended” (Hobbes, 2008, p. 7). “The great Leviathan –for by this authority, given him by every particular man in the Commonwealth, he hath the use of so much power and strength conferred on him, that by terror thereof, he is enabled to conform the wills of them all, to peace at home and mutual aid against the enemies abroad” (Hobbes, 2008, p. 114). Clearly the members of the Five Eyes are well known Western governments. The governments act through law enforcement agencies and other government departments to carry out the work. The agencies employ officials who design, create and implement the requests of their

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leaders. Society is, therefore, the creator of the “they”. This is reinforced in The Nicomachean Ethics, which is an exercise in political science (Aristotle, 1996, p. xxi). It notes that individuals need to understand happiness so that we can construct a good state, which is a state in which people are enabled and encouraged to lead good lives. No one is specially absolved of responsibility for actions when these are performed jointly with others either from political motives or under the direction or orders of political leaders (Nozick, 1974, p. 100).

Motives might well be in play which dominate any particular occasion. But in basic terms “The buck stops here “is an important piece of ethical wisdom. For the Act of Surveillance Nozick suggests:

Perhaps the principle is something like this: an act is not wrong and so cannot be prohibited if it is harmless without a further major decision to commit wrong (that is it would not be wrong if the agent was fixed unalterably against the further wrong decision); it can only be prohibited when it is a planned prelude to further wrong action (Nozick, 1974, p. 127)

All actions we are concerned with could be done for perfectly legitimate and sensible reasons (for example self-defence), and they require further decisions to commit a wrong by the agent himself if wrong is to occur. A valid principle would hold that one may prohibit only the last wrong decision necessary to produce the wrong. An even more, robust principle would be holding that one may only prohibit the passing of the last clear point at which the last wrong decision necessary to be wrong can be reversed (Nozick, 1974, p. 128). We cannot know what reason requires without first deciding from which perspective that question should be decided. Nagel suggests a procedural test (Nagel T. , 1998, p. 12). He seeks principles for balancing the impersonal and personal perspectives that everyone should find reasonable if he were motivated by the desire to settle on one standard. Much of the modern virtue theory has been concerned to develop Bernard Williams criticism of utilitarianism and Kantianism that, through their impersonality and impartiality, the two violate the integrity of moral agents. Anscombe believed that it was a mistake to seek a foundation for a morality grounded in legalistic notions such

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as obligation or duty (Anscombe, 1958, pp. 1-19). According to both the principle of utility and the Kantian categorical imperative, and moral reasons, being universal are independent of the desires of goals. Philippa Foot impressed by the rationality of fulfilling one’s own desires, has argued that moral reasons do depend on the desires of the agent in the context of general disbelief in the existence of a divine law giver as the source of such obligation.

For the more serious levels of harm that might impact society through the delivery of mass surveillance the key people making the decision are under the control of elected officials, Prime Ministers or Presidents. These individuals are elected by society. They are the “they”, the people we have chosen. This imposes an obligation on government to justify such measures publicly, to submit them to judicial review, and to circumscribe them with sunset clauses so they do not become permanent. Rights do not set impassable barriers to government action, but they do require that all rights infringement be tested under adversarial review (Ignatieff, 2005, p. vii).