Global surveillance and the boundary problem: What challenges does international surveillance pose to democratic theory?

Abstract

The article analyses how the emergence of bulk international surveillance impacts the boundary problem in political theory. It first describes how the boundary problem was defined and developed as well as the solutions proposed in the literature. Then, the paper analyses surveillance as a violation of privacy which has a chilling effect and presents the specificities of bulk collection of electronic information. The main argument of the article is that the permanent uncertainty that bulk international surveillance causes triggers the need for a cosmopolitan legal regime to govern it under any of the solutions proposed to the boundary problem.