Aaron Mills
Research Assistant to Dr. Steven Davis

Aaron Mills is currently finishing the fourth year of his Combined Honours undergraduate degree in English and Philosophy. His studies have focussed on German Idealism (particularly Kant) and the form and structure of written texts, both formal and informal. He works full time for the Competition Bureau, and tutors learning-disabled highschool and university students using a critical thinking curriculum he developed for this purpose. After his undergraduate degree, Aaron plans to attend law school.

Research

My commitment to the anonequity project is twofold. Under Steven Davis I do research into the epistemological and metaethical foundations for and meanings of privacy, anonymity, identity and authentication. My own area of research focusses more directly on applied ethics and epistemology. I am investigating the impact of privacy-invasive intelligence techniques on the intelligence industry in Canada. I wish to help carve out the interstitial space between the post 9/11 fear-mongering rhetoric and the naive notion that any form of privacy-invasion is intrinsically bad. The topic of national security is the perfect forum for this discussion. As citizens, each of us is faced with the ethical dilemma of where we stand on the continuum of individual liberty (of which privacy is a necessary condition) and absolute safety and security of the person (which requires substantial state intervention, often based on intelligence services). It is a moral and legal debate which pits the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms against itself.

As a consequence of my research, I hope to demonstrate the immense value of the highly controversial decision made by the Federal Government of Canada in 1984 to dissociate intelligence services from enforcement agents, resulting in the creation of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS).