Tamar Megiddo

Crowdwashing Surveillance; Crowdsourcing Domination

  • Law
  • Sociology and Political Science
Save to CiteDrive Show PDF

Abstract Governments regularly rely on citizens’ cooperation in exercising their authority, including the enforcement of rules. This is not only common, but also a necessary practice in a legal system. Technology makes such reliance easier, facilitating increased enforcement of law at little cost. Emergency provides an added legitimizing logic, encouraging citizens’ cooperation and leading them to uncritically follow the government’s lead to reduce the risk to the nation and to themselves. This article considers governments’ crowdsourcing citizens to monitor and surveil other citizens. One central concern this practice raises is that it allows governments to circumvent the limits of their legitimate authority and to augment their power while also obscuring the actor responsible for the surveillance and enforcement action. Consequently, accountability and public oversight over the government are diminished. Where does conventional enlisting of cooperation from law-abiding citizens end, and crowdsourcing totalitarian mass mobilization of citizens against fellow citizens begin? The article’s principal claim is that a bright line should be drawn where governments’ crowdsourcing of information from citizens serves as a means to circumvent democratic checks on their power to collect information, while also disguising the actor responsible for the surveillance. Such practice severely erodes social trust between citizens, jeopardizing their ability to organize and collaborate as engaged citizens and thus serve as a check on government. It further grants excessive power to some citizens over others, endangering the latter’s freedom, especially where the information gathered is used to symbolically or actually exclude certain individuals from the political community.

Need a simple solution for managing your BibTeX entries? Explore CiteDrive!

  • Web-based, modern reference management
  • Collaborate and share with fellow researchers
  • Integration with Overleaf
  • Comprehensive BibTeX/BibLaTeX support
  • Save articles and websites directly from your browser
  • Search for new articles from a database of tens of millions of references
Try out CiteDrive

More from our Archive