David Lyon, Director of the Surveillance Studies Centre at Queen's University (Kingston, Ontario, Canada), introduced the sixth debate in the series and made a presentation on how surveillance rights and freedoms are coexisting in a world of digital devices.

In his exposé, David Lyon argued that democratic security was not only about physical security and the rising threat of terrorism, however. He invited to consider that privacy and the right not to share our personal data constitute a sense of security in the democratic context. He guided us through a tour of our surveillance rights and freedoms in the age of digital modernity.

Present-day state and commercial surveillance might claim to discriminate between context and content, but for Lyon, this is a misleading and superficial distinction. He wonders whether the performative aspect of our digital behaviour had not unwittingly endorsed such a surveillance society. Lyon argues that, even though we often lament the loss of our data privacy, we are also highly complicit in encouraging a state of surveillance in many ways. Privacy becomes the privilege of certain surveillors, not a general right of the surveilled. It is this wide-spread “culture of surveillance” that poses serious questions about our rights and freedoms. The key to safeguarding these rights, in Lyon’s view is through resistance and democratic participation – our own proactivity concerning cybersecurity and whether we submit complaints to data protection bodies directly affects how far surveillance can go. Our activities contribute to the creation of surveillance culture; our activities will contribute to its modification and re-direction.

Professor Lyon hopes to bring together today's 'surveillance culture' and the challenges of rights and freedoms.

David Lyon is the author of many books, including Surveillance after Snowden, published by Polity in 2015.

  Watch the video of the debate

  Watch the interview for Council of Europe TV Journal

  David Lyon's biography