Surveillance Is Not a Silver Bullet in the Fight Against ISIS

The Paris attacks have prompted renewed calls for surveillance and additional powers to the police in France and across Europe. Yet a quick look around Europe reveals perhaps too much surveillance rather than too little.

For all the criticism leveled to the United States by its European partners about violating basic rights to privacy, Europeans have been heading for some time on a similar path. Data retention laws, mass surveillance and bulk collection of data, weakened privacy protections and surveillance of those suspected of posing a threat are increasingly proposed and adopted in the United Kingdom, Germany and France, to name a few, with little oversight. As Europe grapples with questions around border security, it is worth reflecting on whether more surveillance, and more draconian laws, can indeed keep us safe and at what cost.

The problem with surveillance is that it relies on availability of data and ideally, relevant data. We cannot track what is not there or if it is lost amid too much information. In the case of Paris, the terrorists utilized communication sources that prevented authorities from accessing them. As technology progresses and attempts to safeguard the privacy of its users, it is also utilized by groups with an extremist agenda. The response by governments to limit privacy further, thereby prompting technology to offer alternative options to its users, raises a question of the measure’s efficiency. It is a catch-22 and one that reveals the limitations of surveillance but also our inherent responses in the face of fear, which is to raise walls, virtual and physical, to protect ourselves.

There is an opportunity here for Europe to learn from mistakes of the past, especially the U.S.’s program post 9/11. Surveillance is not a silver bullet, especially when it is indiscriminate and not independently monitored to ensure accountability. Rather, it has the potential to become a danger to the very society it is meant to protect as well as generate faulty data. What Europe needs right now is not more surveillance but rather better cooperation and exchange of information among the member states in order to safeguard the Union.

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