Explore how surveillance reshapes power, privacy, and ethics in the modern world—from AI and facial recognition to global case studies like China, Israel, and Serbia.

Modern surveillance technologies have redrawn the boundaries between security, privacy, and civil liberties. What began with Bentham’s Panopticon now spans AI facial recognition and global data tracking. While these tools can serve safety and efficiency, they often do so at the cost of human rights and accountability. From China’s Xinjiang crackdown to facial recognition in the West, the rise of surveillance has raised urgent questions about proportionality, consent, and democratic oversight.

Historical and Theoretical Foundations

Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon proposed an architecture of constant visibility to reform behavior. Michel Foucault expanded it into a metaphor for modern disciplinary power. In today’s networked world, this panoptic gaze is no longer confined to institutions; it’s embedded in our phones, apps, and smart environments—monitoring, shaping, and predicting behavior under the guise of optimization.

Actors and Technologies

Surveillance today is powered by both states and private corporations. Governments use CCTVs, drones, and biometric scanners, while tech firms harvest personal data for profit, influencing consumer behavior via algorithms—what Amnesty International calls "surveillance capitalism." During COVID-19, digital contact-tracing blurred public health with privacy intrusion. Emerging AI systems like predictive policing and facial recognition, while efficient, often reproduce racial and social biases due to flawed training data.

Ethical Issues

Privacy and Consent: True consent is absent in most surveillance contexts. Users unknowingly agree to lengthy privacy policies, while institutions exploit vast data asymmetries to gain control. The result is surveillance without awareness or alternatives.

Power Asymmetry and Accountability: Surveillance is rarely neutral—it benefits those already in power. Examples like Serbia’s use of spyware to suppress dissent, or China’s digital control of Turkic Muslims in Xinjiang, show how surveillance tools can erode civil liberties and suppress minority voices.

Bias and Discrimination: AI-powered surveillance systems disproportionately misidentify women and minorities, leading to arrests, harassment, and exclusion. Without regulation, these systems risk codifying existing social inequalities under a guise of objectivity and automation.

Legal Safeguards

The EU’s GDPR is among the strongest legal frameworks, demanding informed consent and proportionality. Article 32 requires risk-based safeguards, but implementation outside Europe is limited. The U.S. lacks comprehensive federal privacy law, relying on a patchwork of state and sector-specific regulations. This weakens global protections and leaves room for corporate exploitation.

Ethical Principles

Organizations and international bodies have created non-binding frameworks to promote ethical AI and surveillance. The European Commission’s Trustworthy AI guidelines and the OECD AI Recommendations promote transparency and respect for rights. However, voluntary adherence offers no guarantee of compliance, and ethics without enforcement can be meaningless.

Case Examples

China’s Xinjiang Surveillance: An extensive network of biometric checkpoints, camera surveillance, and mobile monitoring targets over 13 million Turkic Muslims. These systems facilitate arbitrary detention and cultural suppression, exemplifying how surveillance can be weaponized against marginalized populations.

Israel’s Biometric Controls: Programs like Blue Wolf and Red Wolf harvest facial data of Palestinians to restrict movement and automate control, without due process. These methods raise major concerns regarding legality, discrimination, and dehumanization under international law.

Serbia’s Spyware Use: Serbia’s domestic intelligence agency has used spyware akin to Pegasus to monitor activists and journalists, suppressing dissent and compromising democratic processes, as reported by Amnesty International.

Toward Ethical Surveillance

Surveillance can serve legitimate goals—crime prevention, health protection, and efficient services—but only with accountability. Ethical surveillance must include transparency in operations, necessity and proportionality assessments, independent oversight, and redress mechanisms for rights violations. Legal reforms should embed ethics into system design and deployment through binding norms, such as those proposed in the U.S. federal privacy draft and OECD AI governance models.

Conclusion: Surveillance is no longer an exception—it is the default. Yet its ethical use requires checks and balances rooted in human rights. From Foucault’s warnings to current global practices, the lesson is clear: unchecked observation empowers the observer and diminishes the observed. Democratic societies must ensure that technologies serve freedom—not erode it—through strong laws, enforced ethics, and vigilant public oversight.