Surveillance or Privacy?
Ross Anderson · 2020
Governments have ever more interests online, ranging from surveillance to censorship, from privacy to safety, and from market competition to fair elections. The COVID-19 pandemic looks set to increase state surveillance, with the trade-off being not privacy versus security but privacy versus health. This chapter explores the nexus of surveillance, censorship, forensics and privacy. Talk about terrorism has driven a lot of policy around surveillance and privacy, especially since 9/11. Nowadays some services are blocked and some aren't, depending on whether the service provider is prepared to help the regime with both surveillance and censorship. The tensions between privacy and censorship may continue to work out in unpredictable ways. Privacy and data protection are one subject on which the USA and Europe have taken separate paths. A patchwork of data protection laws started to appear starting with the German state of Hesse in 1969.