Surveillance in times of insecurity: a wicked and stupid strategy

Sweden’s misguided approach to societal challenges: increased surveillance and repression

Sweden has been grappling with crime-related challenges in the past years. The difficulty to address violent crimes in cities notably has triggered extensive legislative reforms to increase surveillance and repression, including that of children. Tougher criminal penalties, widespread video surveillance, mass electronic monitoring and government hacking are just a few examples illustrating the Swedish government’s attempt to counter public safety threats.

However, this approach is not only misguided, as no evidence of its effectiveness exists, but also harmful to the fundamental right to personal integrity and thus to Swedish democracy. Furthermore, its impacts disproportionately fall on communities already marginalised and overpoliced.

Privacy is there for a reason

Personal integrity is a key principle firmly embedded in the Swedish constitution. Between 2004 and 2017, the Swedish government tasked several inquiry committees to assess the impacts of new technologies on democracy and privacy, which led to important constitutional amendments reinforcing protections. And for very good reasons. The right to privacy ensures the respect and protection of people’s self-determination and their freedom of expression, assembly and association, the exercise of which is a sine qua non for democratic societies.

Privacy is neither a luxury nor a niche concern to the most computer-savvy. Examples of data breach, abuse and exploitation show how people lose power when their data, communications, movements, and associations are captured, monitored and exploited. In the digital age, nobody has “nothing to hide”.

In 2020 the New York Times revealed that the US company Clearview AI had amassed a database of billions of photos of people’s faces by scraping them from social media without their knowledge or consent, in order to provide a facial recognition tool to police forces. Clearview’s tool was used by hundreds of law enforcement agencies across the world, including in Sweden where the Data Protection Authority had to intervene to stop and sanction the unlawful processing of people’s sensitive biometric data. Whether you chose for your face to appear online or not, it is crucial for your right to privacy and for a flourishing and open Internet where you can freely express yourself that no private company steals your photos and shares all that information with the police for no valid reason.

For some categories of the population, privacy is even a lifeline. In 2023, a mother and her daughter were convicted for allegedly carrying out an illegal abortion in the US after Facebook transferred their private conversation on Messenger to the police. This case example underlines the importance of minimising the amount of user data internet companies should be able to access and store, especially in a context of increasing restrictions imposed on reproductive rights in many countries. Services offering access to safe abortion rely on secure and private communication channels, such as encrypted platforms, to protect themselves and their patients against multiple threats.

Privacy enables autonomy, dissent, and democratic participation. It acts as a shield when activists, journalists and even ordinary people get criminalised. If privacy goes down, all rights start falling like dominoes. Protecting our collective and personal boundaries today preserves freedom tomorrow.

Surveillance creates more insecurity, not less

Surveillance measures to tackle insecurity are doomed to fail. They are usually sold by politicians as quick technological fixes to complex societal issues. Yet, they are never backed up by robust evidence to prove their efficiency.

The presumption that videosurveillance cameras in public spaces help investigations or contribute to reducing crime rates has long been debunked by research studies. In 2016, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) declared the Swedish regime of mass retention of telecommunications data illegal under European Union (EU) law because the Court found no objective evidence supporting the fact that putting everyone under surveillance, regardless if they are suspect or not, was necessary to combat criminal offences.

Not to mention the huge side-effect of increased digital vulnerabilities. The more the government collects and stores people’s data for surveillance purposes, the more personal data becomes a prey to cybercriminals. Cyberattacks linked to the Chinese government that compromised US critical infrastructures and telecommunications networks demonstrate how government-mandated vulnerabilities in digital systems can quickly backfire for the population.

Worse still, surveillance measures can have disastrous consequences and generate more public safety problems. In 2021, the Dutch, Belgian and French police revealed that they had infiltrated and shut down the encrypted communication network named “Sky ECC” to target drug trafficking criminal groups. They secretly collected and analysed millions of messages exchanged, leading to mass arrests across the continent. However, a study commissioned by the European Commission found that “not only has the Sky ECC operation failed to reduce violent crime rates in Belgium and the Netherlands, but the displacement of cocaine shipping routes provoked by disruptive law enforcement methods may have contributed to rising violence in areas which are increasingly exploited by [organised crime groups] seeking new avenues to import cocaine into Europe“. The bulk hacking of the platform simply displaced the problem of violence geographically: the operation had even contributed to a slight increase in homicide rate in Belgium and created new cocaine import hotspots to the detriment of local residents in the impacted neighbourhoods.

Surveillance is the symptom of repressive and punitive approaches to societal challenges, which consistently fail to properly address them. Although they give an appearance of security, they don’t actually contribute to increasing real-life security. People working on the frontline of these issues, such as marginalised youth alienation, know that other solutions are needed, and those are not to be found in the criminal justice field.

The way forward?

Issues faced by Sweden, like other EU countries, are understandably tough to solve. But using more surveillance and control, thus undermining privacy, is elected officials shirking their job and attempting to score political points. Instead, they should tackle safety issues at their root causes: growing socioeconomic disparities, poverty, lack of opportunities, lost sense of community belonging, racism in institutions, etc.

Rather than undermining our rights, we should work towards finding measures that reinforce our care systems, our collective accountability, our dignity, our connections to each other, and our universal right to live freely. That is exactly what should be understood by Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson when he called for “the collective power of society” to reduce violent crime, surveillance is not.

This article was first published in Swedish by the Liberal Debatt.