With the SpyFiles release we have seen the universal surveillance state that we now live in. No longer are spying activities limited to ‘persons of interest’; we are all persons of interest. Technology has allowed State and corporate actors to implement mosaic theory on a scale never dreamt of by the spies of the Cold War. Whole countries’ communications are tracked and recorded, and the data is stored so that it can be mined for random mentions of key words which, when matched with perhaps an email, a tweet or a mobile phone call, will set off an alarm bell. Some people will say this is a sacrifice to our civil liberties that we must accept if we are to be safe. However the gradual acceptance of this scattergun approach to the collection of intelligence - about all citizens - has had other effects beyond breaches of our privacy and a gradual erosion of our civil liberties. Requests for access to government information under Freedom of Information laws are rejected not because of intrinsic sensitivities in the information but because it may form part of a jigsaw of evidence against someone at some unspecified point in the future. The same assertions based on mosaic theory are made in many jurisidictions in relation to the determination of access to archival records. So the end result is that not only are we subjected to universal, secretive and intrusive surveillance, but the data is matched with multiple other sources, kept forever, and we are not allowed access to it.
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