Smart devices, cell phone cameras, social shaming and the loss of the right to a private self: Interview with Michel Paradis about the modern panopticon

Abstract

Michel Paradis teaches courses at Columbia University Law School on national security law, international law, the constitution, and the law of war, and is a fellow at the Center on National Security and the National Institute for Military Justice. He is also a senior attorney with the US Defense Department’s Military Commissions Defense Organization, where he has been helping to wrap up the situation with the very last of the detainees of Guantanamo Bay, who are still in legal limbo. (People seem to forget that there are 37 people still detained there.) He was part of a Bar Association presentation last December called “Guantanamo Bay, Torture and Drones: Are We Countering Violent Extremism . . . or Fueling It?” In this interview, Paradis talks with the Bulletin’s executive editor, Dan Drollette Jr., about the the law and the use – and mis-use – of high-tech surveillance in a democracy. Paradis wrote a book in 2020 titled “Last Mission to Tokyo,” about the war crimes trials in the Pacific after World War II. He received his PhD from Oxford University and his law degree from Fordham Law School in New York. (Editor’s note: This interview has been condensed and edited for brevity and clarity.)