I’m quite sure many legal professionals are watching what’s happening in Hong Kong with as much bewilderment as I am. Protests have been going on for months, and it’s unclear when they will end - what started as a move against an extradition bill has become a broad movement against control by Beijing. One of the most important elements in the fight is Hongkongers’ fears of a surveillance state. This fear can be seen in other regions of the globe, too. Some British citizens have certainly expressed worries over the use of CCTV cameras and other technologies.

There are a number of problems with evaluating whether or not you’re in a surveillance state and how to enact laws to prevent one from being birthed. The most obvious problem is that surveillance states come about gradually in most cases - the government certainly won’t be inclined to let you know they’re installing facial recognition software everywhere. In fact, citizens are likely to be a part of the surveillance state without realizing it. Take, for example, doorbell cameras. On the one hand, they’re handy for knowing who showed up at your door, they can protect you to some degree from criminal activity, and they give you a sense of safety. On the other hand, if the police want to find someone, they may come knocking on your door to get footage from your camera. While you can refuse in many cases, most folks won’t - police requests are often viewed as demands by the general population.

The second problem is that the government can quite easily justify installing CCTV cameras and other surveillance equipment. As long as you don’t have a reasonable expectation of privacy, you can be recorded, and that means recordings can happen in most public places. People are recording what’s happening around them all the time, too, and if that information just so happens to get into the hands of the government - well, that’s fair game. When this line of reasoning starts to spill into “surveillance state” is almost impossible to say - like the “boiling frog” analogy.

The best way to avoid mass surveillance, as far as I can tell, is to increase public awareness about the threats of mass surveillance. Our advantage over Hong Kong is that we’re not under the de jure rule of a one-party state; our politicians are accountable to us (to some degree), and we can protest surveillance through our democracy. Surveillance technologies can be used for good - cameras that monitor traffic flow, pedestrian activity, nighttime activity, and other data points that can be useful for creating meaningful policy. When they are used in order to increase the power of particular institutions, however, they can become toxic. We must be vigilant.

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