Introduction to the Special Issue on the Ethics of State Mass Surveillance

Recent decades have seen an unprecedented proliferation of surveillance programs by government agencies. This development has been driven both by technological progress, which has made large scale surveillance operations relatively cheap and easy, and by the threat of terrorism, organized crime and pandemics, which supplies a ready justification for surveillance. For a long time, mass surveillance programs have been associated with autocratic regimes, most notoriously with the German Democratic Republic and the Stasi, its secret police. A more recent case in point is the efforts of the People’s Republic of China to set up a comprehensive surveillance system that assigns citizens a score reflecting their social and political conformity (Denyer 2018).