The New Statesman Panel Debate On Surveillance With Jimmy Wales

The New Statesman, the award-winning weekly politics and culture magazine, will mark its partnership of this year’s Secrets and Lies-themed Latitude Festival by holding a special preview event in London on the limits of surveillance.

Speakers at the New Statesman/Latitude 2014 debate, to be held at King’s College London on Tuesday 3 June at 6pm, will include the Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales; the foreign correspondent and author of The Snowden Files, Luke Harding; Sir David Omand, the former director of GCHQ and permanent secretary at the Home Office; Eric King, deputy director of Privacy International; and Emma Carr, acting director of Big Brother Watch.

The panellists will go head to head on an issue that has been in the headlines since the American whistleblower Edward Snowden sensationally leaked documents exposing the extent of surveillance programmes run by the US National Security Agency. Do we have a right to know how far surveillance goes, they will ask, and should we be imposing stricter limits on state surveillance of ordinary citizens?