J. K. Bowden Discusses Snowden Saga and Surveillance Technology

Today more than ever, as society becomes increasingly dominated by smart technology, personal exchanges of all varieties are taking place over the internet, and often as people go about their day to day activities. The rise of smart-phone technology has made lives more comfortable and efficient, but with this comfort comes an ever-growing risk to privacy and the deeper threat this could potentially pose to basic freedoms.

The lesson to be learnt from the recent N.S.A. leaks by Edward Snowden and his subsequent exile is that, at any given time, intelligence agencies across the world could be accessing the personal information, including emails and SMS messages, of any citizen under suspicion. Snowden's willingness to sacrifice his own safety and comfort in order for the truth to be heard seems to imply that the information such organisations are already accessing violates perceived rights to privacy.

For speculative fiction author J. K. Bowden, the news comes as unsurprising. For years he has been writing novels with a strong emphasis on government surveillance and systems of control, and he sees the recent revelations as only scratching the surface. "It is heartening that this kind of information is coming out, but it is just the beginning. Technology brings a lot of freedoms, but it also creates the capacity for those freedoms to be more easily taken away."

The evidence of this is clear now, with governments going to extraordinary lengths to quell the threat of terrorism, even creating laws that remove basic freedoms where national security is believed to be at risk, all the while utilising high-technology intelligence to gather their data and pinpoint growing risk factors. Warfare and security is moving more and more into the digital sphere, where more and more of our private exchanges are also taking place. Hackers, like those backing the wikileaks movement, and journalists such as the recently deceased Michael Hastings, now pose potentially greater threats to governments than militaries do, and they face ever increasing penalties for their actions.

The authorities collecting this data claim that if 'you are not doing anything wrong, then you will not fall under suspicion, and your privacy will not be affected'. However, those on the other side of the fence believe that while this may be true for the time being, the allowance of such tactics creates a stepping stone towards a police state, and as laws change these legislations will exist to support even more drastic invasions of privacy. One example is the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) which gives law enforcement in the U.S. more power to combat copyright infringement online, potentially criminalising a portion of the population for downloading content deemed 'illegal', and monitoring their internet activities without their knowledge.

Of course, many still champion the freedom of the internet and the individual's right to privacy. Bowden's thrilling new fiction series, Bioweapon, openly challenges notions of government surveillance, and depicts a frightening dystopian world to which society appears to be drawing closer with each passing day. He follows in the footsteps of literary visionaries such as Orwell and Huxley, attempting to make people question the preconceptions of today by projecting them into a fictional future.

With the influence of government agendas on internet censorship already apparent in many countries, including Australia and the U.S.A., there is as yet nothing to stop technology continuing to develop under Big Brother's watchful gaze. As such it will inevitably be molded to increase the efficiency of this surveillance, for the sake of safety and protection, or so civilians are told.

Yet for every method of control conceived there comes an even more inventive method of maintaining that privacy, and with it, some semblance of freedom. For now the world can only watch and wait as this global tale of science fiction and espionage continues to unfold.

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