Silent persecutions: espionage, surveillance and democracy

The different surveillance forms that exist entail an attack on privacy and are contrary to international standards on human rights protection. Through surveillance practices, governments can obtain personal information that reveals private and sensitive information like details about a person’s political ideology, sexual orientation, and religious practices. The cases of Colombia and Mexico show that surveillance aims to monitor individuals and groups that share a common feature: oppose the official power. If the retrieval and use of the data is intended to intimidate and silence those who exercise opposition, the possibilities of guaranteeing political plurality in a State are destroyed.

Surveillance is not only a threat to personal privacy, but a threat to the democratic ideal. It is one of the mechanisms used by governments to silence and intimidate opponents and social groups, including journalists and human rights defenders. This type of intimidation follows the rationale of authoritarian states, which seek to eliminate counter-power through different pressures and threats. Thus, spying on government opponents contributes to the global phenomenon of the closing of civil society spaces. Together with practices like censorship, persecution, and funding restrictions, it becomes part of the repertoire of actions that seek to destabilize certain groups of citizens.

Surveillance also affects the ideal of democracy because it delegitimizes its purposes. One justification for surveillance points at the need to fight against dissident threats that affect security and order. The message that is sent is clear: surveillance is carried out to protect democracy. If this speech is used to legitimize all types of surveillance, including espionage, the effect will be the instrumentalization of democratic purposes to justify the persecution and the indictment of those who denounce government actions and resist as part of the political opposition. As stated by the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman, surveillance increases the distrust that we have in the state, reduces the credibility of the institutions, and further undermines the liberal conception of the legitimate monopoly of force. This monopoly stops being something necessary for the protection of citizens and begins using intrusive mechanisms to achieve illegitimate purposes: intimidation and stigmatization of certain individuals and social groups.