Just surveillance?

There is little written specifically on the ethics of surveillance. David Lyon has proposed three categories of concern (Lyon 2001), John Kleinig five (Kleinig 2009) and Gary Marx twenty-nine (Marx 1998). However, these categories are rarely defined or defended philosophically and lack any underlying ethical theory. Further, while Lyon, Kleinig, Marx and others have elements in common, each raise issues that the others neglect. I argue that the just war tradition can form a framework by which the ethics of surveillance practices may be judged. This separates out questions of who is conducting surveillance, why they are doing it, whether surveillance is proportionate, whether it is necessary, and what its chances of success are. Questions are also raised regarding the ability to discriminate and the proportionality of the means of surveillance. Thus this framework raises all the questions which should be asked of an ethical approach to surveillance and neglects none. We can also employ the just war tradition to inform the content of the debate. For example, how discrimination is dealt with in war could be instructive as to how it should be employed in surveillance. This tradition thus provides a rich, relevant and long-lived discourse on which to found an ethics of surveillance.