ABSTRACT
It is an inalienable truth of the modern era that there has been a revolution in communications technology. Indeed, in the past 20 years the accessible forms of communication have progressed from the written letter and the landline telephone, where access to someone’s personal photographs would only have been possible had they invited you round to their house, to a culture whereby nearly every member of society over the age of 14 has a mobile phone with a camera installed on it, and membership of a social networking website that allows them to share their (sometimes intimate) pictures with their friends and acquaintances and, depending on their privacy settings, the whole world.1 Prior to the great gains made by social networking sites, it required some level of personal connection to get to know another person’s most intimate details; now it just requires several clicks of a button. This particular change in society has been presented as a moment of personal empowerment, but within these new freedoms have come extreme dangers. The amount of information that can be discovered about an individual, routinely and without the cause that they are a person of concern, the profiling that can be done on that information and the exploitation of it not only by friendly intelligence agencies, but by competitor agencies too, has brought the ordinary citizen much closer to the intelligence agencies than ever before. Privacy campaigners often invoke the East German ‘Stasi’ as a cultural reference point for the modern era of electronic surveillance, but the unpleasant truth is of course that the Stasi could only dream of the opportunities that modern intelligence agencies (and private investigators) have with the wealth of technology and information available to them.
