The changing nature of contemporary conflicts is legitimizing the introduction of mass surveillance tools even in the absence of a formally declared war, redefining the relationship between security and freedom in Western democracies by Andrea Monti – Initially published in Italian by La Repubblica-Italian Tech
Anthropic’s insistence on refusing to make its AI available to the military to manage mass surveillance programs (of American citizens only) and Palantir’s role as an aggregator of data coming from any—and I mean any—source are two sides of the same disturbing coin. On both sides, it reveals the menacing face of preventive, indiscriminate, and pervasive state control over the lives and thoughts of every individual.
Mass Surveillance in War and Peace
In “peacetime,” no democracy worthy of the name could afford to carry out mass surveillance of this magnitude, nor allow private entities to do so. Even the Fascist-era consolidated text of public security laws, still in force in Italy, prohibited and still prohibits entities not authorized by the Ministry of interior from creating individual dossiers and archives; subsequent regulations limit their content and use, and judicial oversight ensures that (at least on paper) this data cannot be abused.
In “times of war,” however, the need for survival of an attacked country or the aggressor nation’s determination to prevail at all costs alters the hierarchy of objectives and necessitates the use of control measures that would otherwise be intolerable and that, even in the midst of a conflict, raise—to put it mildly—“concerns.” This applies, in particular, to the roundups of foreign nationals and naturalized citizens from belligerent countries, such as those authorized by President Roosevelt during World War II. Issued on February 19, 1942, Executive Order 9066 ordered the internment of Japanese-American citizens for reasons of national security regardless of the existence of evidence of their dangerousness, and a similar fate befell citizens of German and Italian origin under Proclamation 2527.
The rationale behind such decisions is typically invoked in matters of national security, based on the principle of “better safe than sorry.” Thus, in the absence of systematic and widespread surveillance systems—such as, for example, those employed in Tsarist Russia by the Okhrana, the political police—the systematic rounding up of potentially dangerous individuals appeared to be an unavoidable choice.
From wordplay …
Let’s fast-forward the tape of history and arrive at the present day. For some time now, (almost) no one has “waged war” in the legal sense of the term—complete with a declaration delivered to the ambassador of the (now) enemy country—but many engage in operations variously described as “international policing” or “special operations,” sometimes under the mandate of international bodies, other times based on essentially unilateral decisions.
This formal choice has substantial implications because a state that is not at war cannot (or rather, could not) avail itself of exceptional powers that, precisely, are exercisable only in extreme cases. Yet, that is what is happening. We have not yet reached the point of rounding up foreign residents in the U.S., but we have already, by the express admission of the U.S. military command, reached the stage of generalized surveillance—it bears repeating—of anyone who is not a U.S. citizen and is therefore not protected by constitutional guarantees. In other words, a situation has been created in which “war measures” can be applied even if the conflict is not legally classified as such.
… to the loss of rights
This has been made possible in part by the acceptance of the concepts of “hybrid war” and “cyberwar,” as well as the ambiguity of the notion of “national security,” invoked without distinction in criminal, terrorist, and, indeed, military contexts.
In the name of these rhetorical devices—the very same ones that allow civilians massacred during combat to be called “collateral damage”—undeclared war is disguised as the “fight against terrorism,” a “state-sponsored threat,” or even “cyber resilience.” However, whatever name we choose to give this rose, the scent remains the same—and it is, quite literally, the legitimization of mass surveillance for military necessity, as the only way to prevent hostile actions on the territory.
The concrete result of this strategic shift toward prevention—including for military purposes (not necessarily only defensive)—is the granting of extraordinary powers to the military in peacetime that, at least in Italy, would be inconceivable even if conferred upon the judiciary, despite the latter already possessing extensive technological surveillance capabilities.
The consequences for EU citizens
If the approach to technological surveillance developed by the US were to take hold in the EU as well—an early sign of this is the discussion on client-side scanning—this could render the treaty limitations that prevent the EU from handling defense and security matters circumventable. This comes with an aggravating factor and a consequence.
The aggravating factor, for the EU, is that it would inevitably have to resort to tools and technologies over which it has no control.
The consequence is that data and information about us—which, otherwise, the major players in the technology sector and their government clients would have had to work hard to obtain—would become readily available to them.