Crowd-Sourcing, Surveillance, and the Era of the Synopticon


LSE, 17.3.2015, London

LSE IDEAS is organising the final public lecture in the Philippe Roman Lecture Series 2014-15, entitled ‘Crowd-Sourcing,Surveillance, and the Era of the Synopticon’ on Tuesday, 17th March 2015.

“Big data” poses a massive challenge to the democratic accountability. Over the last four years the U.S. has quadrupled the amount of information that it classifies annually. This growth has become unmanageable, causing massive leaks, an unprecedented number of prosecutions, and a dysfunctional declassification system that is breaking under the strain. Luckily, the information revolution has also provided citizens with the means to address these challenges, such as crowd-sourcing the otherwise impossible task of creating a virtual archive of declassified government documents. By mining this data, we can detect patterns in classification and declassification, and automated tools to identify records that really do have to be kept secret. No longer just a tool of surveillance, data-mining can also help preserve the principle of open government.