The Ethics of Mass Surveillance

In the last decade or so, surveillance of the population by governments and others has expanded tremendously: it is now practised on an industrial scale. In the process, the surveillance industry now employs many experts – for example, mathematicians, sociologists and engineers – who now face challenging and novel ethical and legal problems.

Simultaneously, because of mass data collection, the existing ethical and legal norms are not easy to apply to current activities. What norms should we now apply to what surveillance activities now do?

Our discussion will be led by Dr Tom Leinster, Chancellors Fellow at the School of Mathematics, Edinburgh and Dr Willam Marsh, Senior Lecturer at Queen Mary University. We will be speaking on the ethics of working in the security industry, followed by an open discussion with questions such as What are the intelligence agencies really up to? What are the safety expectations of the software user? How do you balance the demands of keeping the country secure against the expectations of privacy? Come join us to discuss security, technological and social developments in this post-Snowden era.