NSA Headquarters, Fort Meade, Maryland. Wikimedia Commons/NSA. Some rights reserved.Rosemary Bechler (openDemocracy Editor): We have been invited to think about the apparently widening and wide-reaching trust deficit between European citizens and their states, in preparation for a meeting in Vienna later this October (#rebuildingtrust). Might we begin by getting to grips with the sources of mistrust in our societies. Looking at the global city today, where would you locate these?
Saskia Sassen: There are many such sources, and many have long existed. If I think of major new sources, one key item is the new surveillance apparatus that more and more of our ‘democratic” states are implementing. These technologies have created a whole new domain: the gathering of massive amounts of information by a state about its own citizens.
This is not old-fashioned spying on the enemy. The logic of these all-encompassing systems, is that for our own security we first must all be suspect. This then rationalizes the gathering of data about all those who are in the territory of a country. I gather--there is no hard evidence on this available to the general public--that if you were in the United States as a tourist, you are probably also in that data set. So take a look at the list:
