Dr. Fabre is Professor of Political Philosophy and Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, University of Oxford. She will address the ethics of placing entire populations under mass surveillance for the purposes of ascertaining who, amongst them, is planning directly to take part in rights-violating policies at the behest of or in deference to foreign actors.
The word `mass' denotes both the sheer number of individuals on whom intelligence agencies can spy upon, and the sheer amount and range of information about those individuals which they can collect and analyze. I consider the claim that mass surveillance constitutes an unacceptable violation of the right to privacy. I next consider the claim that mass surveillance practices manifest and entrench existing unfair inequalities. I argue that the privacy objection is not as decisive as we think, and that the unfair inequalities objection is powerful but contingent on extant practices and the background of injustices against which they are deployed.