why surveillance matters
by Margot | October 13, 2009 | Privacy, Surveillance, first amendment, lamp | Comments Off
As a follow-up to Nabiha’s great post on terrorism and open access:
As Nabiha said, our interest in terrorism-related issues has to do with the barriers the government places to access.
Our interest in surveillance speaks more generally to the democratic conditions necessary for newsgathering. Newsgatherers cannot properly gather news if they know that they’re being watched. And journalists and protestors are often the deliberate targets of surveillance, alongside more conventional “threats”; see Ken Krayeske’s experience, or the experience of anti-war protestors with the TALON database.
