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IntroductionGus HoseinExecutive director, Privacy Internationalwww.privacyinternational.orgThe extent to which we communicate is part of whatmakes us human. The quest to articulate our needs,desires, interests, fears and agonies motivateddrawing, the gesture, the spoken word and its writtenform. Conversations led to letters, couriers ledto the post, followed on by telegraphs, telephones,mobiles and internet working. We now relay ourmost intimate thoughts and interests over communicationsmedia. Yet with new revelations andinnovations, we are seeing the growing ambitionsof governments and companies to track, monitor,analyse and even monetise the communicative actionsthat are core to our being. To protect humanautonomy in modern society, it is essential for us togovern communications surveillance.Social and technological changes have increasedthe power and pervasiveness of surveillance. First,nearly everything we do today is a communicativeact that is digitally observable, recordable, andmost likely logged, and analysed from the earliestof stages, retrospectively, and in real time. Even ourmovements are logged by service providers.Second, unlike our ephemeral spoken wordsamongst friends in a room, nearly every communicationcan now be collected, analysed, retainedand monetised. It is now possible to capture thecommunications of an entire nation – the modernequivalent of listening to every private and publicconversation in rooms, in homes and offices, townhalls, public squares, cafés, pubs and restaurantsacross the nation.Third, every communication generates increasinglysensitive metadata – data related tothe communications – that is captured, logged,rendered accessible, and mined to draw lists ofsuspects and targets, and to understand our relationshipsand interactions.Fourth, nearly every communication today involvesa third party – the post office, the mobilephone company, the search engine, and the underseacable company, who are likely to be tasked withsurveillance on behalf of the state.Fifth, all of this surveillance can now be donein secret – the tampered envelope is now replacedwith perfect, secretive replications of communications,captured at a number of points in a network.Because of these structural changes to communicationsand the ways we live our lives, there is anew urgency to govern the capabilities of governmentsto trample on privacy.• Following us or knowing everywhere we havebeen is now possible, as our mobile phonesroutinely connect with nearby mobile phone celltowers. Governments seek to access these logseven as companies seek to data-mine the informationfor profiling and “big data” analyses.• Web surfing, the modern equivalent of a walkdown the high street and around the public square,is now monitored by analytics companies and, inturn, governments. Both are keen to understandour interests and desires. Consequently, identifyingeveryone at a public event or in a given areanow requires only accessing records from nearbycell towers, or even launching a police-run mobilebase station that identifies every proximate mobiledevice. The powers of “stop and show yourpapers” will be replaced with the automated andsecretive deployment of device scanners.• While we previously needed secret police andinformants to identify people’s known associates,governments can routinely generate listsof relationships and track interactions by monitoringour communications metadata from chat,text messaging, social networks, emails, and ofcourse, voice communications. This also helpsgenerate lists of previously unknown suspectsor targets. “Guilt by association” could be assessedby who you follow on Twitter, and friendsof friends on Facebook.• And whereas before governments needed to trainspies to infiltrate our friendships and other networks,and to search our homes and go throughour files, they can merely compromise our computersand mobile phones, surreptitiously turnon our cameras and microphones, and gain accessto all our correspondence, documents,images and videos, and even passwords.Introduction / 9