4 - Reactive Surveillance

Summary

Chapter 4 discusses the topic of reactive surveillance, such as thermal imagers, decryption tools, and devices that reveal the phone numbers that are being dialed on a telephone. These are tools which the government needs in order to respond to privacy-enhancing technology used by private citizens. Although reactive surveillance tools can be very intrusive in some ways, in most contexts they are only being used to learn information that would ordinarily be public, but has been hidden by new forms of privacy-enhancing technology, such as heat lamps, encryption tools, and cell phones. In evaluating reactive surveillance, we need to consider both the level of criminal activity that is potentially masked by the privacy-enhancing technology, and how the privacy-enhancing technology has affected society’s expectations of privacy. In the context of encryption, we need to assist law enforcement even further, by creating a key escrow system which will give law enforcement the ability to decrypt any piece of data once they have obtained the proper legal authority