Journalism, Citizenship and Surveillance Society

Karin Wahl-Jorgensen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000038873
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Journalism
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book shows how surveillance society shapes and interacts with journalistic practices and discourses. It illustrates not only how surveillance debates play out in and through mediated discourses, but also how practices of surveillance inform the stories, everyday work and the ethics of journalists.

The increasing entrenchment of data collection and surveillance in all kinds of social processes raises important questions around new threats to journalistic freedom and political dissent; the responsibilities of media organizations and state actors; the nature of journalists' relationship to the state; journalists' ability to protect their sources and data; and the ways in which media coverage shape public perceptions of surveillance, to mention just a few areas of concern. Against this backdrop, the contributions gathered in this book examine areas including media coverage of surveillance, encryption and privacy; journalists' views on surveillance and security; public debate around the power of intelligence agencies, and the strategies of privacy rights activists. The book raises fundamental questions around the role of journalism in creating the conditions for digital citizenship.

The chapters in this book were originally published in a special issue of the journal, Digital Journalism.

SURVEILLANCE AND THE STRUCTURAL TRANSFORMATION OF PRIVACY

Mapping the conceptual landscape of journalism in the post-Snowden era

Heikki Heikkilä and Risto Kunelius

This article provides a conceptual and methodological outline for studying the social and political implications of digital surveillance, as it opens itself to journalists and media researchers. Digital surveillance yields a profound social transition, which can be tentatively called as “structural transformation of privacy”. We propose that the empirical analysis on this gradual and abstract process can proceed in two phases. Firstly, attention should be paid key stakeholders and their deeply conflicted positions on the issue of digital surveillance. Secondly, an analytical focus should be set on the dominant discursive principles and justifications that inform the suggested public solutions. This framework is illustrated by some empirical findings from a transnational empirical study that analysed opinionated journalism on Edward Snowden’s revelations from June 2013 to the end of 2014.

Introduction

Edward Snowden’s revelations on the intelligence community’s capacity to sweepingly monitor mobile phone and internet communications have prompted fierce public debate and lengthy policy consideration across the world. The disclosures have also re-energized dualistic environmental metaphors about the online world, such as the one by danah boyd and Kate Crawford (2011, 2): “Data is digital air: the oxygen we breathe and the carbon dioxide we exhale”. In their metaphor, information and digital is like the oxygen enhancing our everyday lives, whereas the digital trails of browsing histories, clicks, and likes compare with the carbon dioxide left behind.

Rather than celebrating the metaphor, Shoshana Zuboff argues that it illustrates how extraction and analysis of data help to advance a new economic logic. The modus operandi for “surveillance capitalism”, she contends, is that of incursion into undefended private territory, against which “nothing in past experience had prepared people for” (Zuboff 2015, 85). As her coupling of surveillance and capitalism suggests, digital monitoring connects to broader asymmetries of power between surveillance institutions and individuals, social groups, and populations directly or indirectly under their gaze. This coupling makes it seem credible that current forms of digital surveillance would pave the way towards “sensor society”, where information-gathering features can be attached to any electronic device, from drones to refrigerators (Morozov 2013).

Gloomy predictions may fall beyond the radar for many internet users, but a popular observation after the Snowden revelations is that understandings of (online) privacy have changed (e.g. Pew Research Center 2015). In addition to questions of political legitimacy and trust, digital surveillance cuts more deeply into the modern political imagination: What does privacy actually mean in these new circumstances? What is its value—and to whom? Is it possible to subject these developments to greater public debate and democratic control? How do we consider the role of journalism and media research in facilitating such debates?

In law and surveillance studies, these questions have been tackled for many years (Lyons 2007; Solove 2011), while in journalism and media studies they have gained more prominence only in the post-Snowden era. In journalism research, privacy has been a less central topic than the idea of the public. However, their deep historical linkage suggest it may be productive to look at apply well-elaborated figure of thought on the public sphere to today’s digital private sphere, and argue that we are facing a moment of structural transformation of privacy.

Christian Fuchs and Daniel Trottier (2015, 116–117) summarize Habermas’s genealogy of modern society, where the private sphere emerged as a result of the separation of the economy from the family and household. This distinction not merely contributed to the rise of the political public sphere, where rational public opinion was reportedly formed. It also created privacy as the sphere of intimacy, reproduction, and consumption. While privacy found its base in family life, its impact extended to the cultural sphere or the “life-world”, where private experiences and feelings could be harnessed for identity work and social self-organization (Habermas 1987). In this sense, privacy and publicness were transformed as mutually constitutive realms.

Such historical analysis has paved the way to a critical theory of structural transformation, where the independent status of publicness dries out due to colonializing powers of state and market. In Fuchs and Trottier’s view, a parallel development is now imposed on privacy. As we spend more time online, a great portion of our working and free activities time become accessible, traceable, and analysable—in real time and to institutions with whom we do not necessarily have a relationship of trust. Their scenario for the future is as bleak as was the Habermas scenario some 50 years earlier: “we create a society that is totalitarian in the double-sense of being a dictatorship of the market and capitalist logic as well as a state dictatorship” (Fuchs and Trottier 2015, 130).

In this article, we aim to outline a meta-analytical framework for studying the political and public debate on the new conditions and realities of privacy and digital surveillance. First, we focus on the networks of stakeholders and their contradictory interests and claims on privacy. Second, we look into a set of discursive principles in the debate, which are deployed for explaining and justifying a particular course of action with regard to surveillance and privacy. In the former, our overview is schematic, and it draws from a broad review of research reports, policy documents, news coverage, and editorial commentaries. In the latter, our reading derives more directly from a cross-national analysis of media debates on Snowden and surveillance as they opened in the opinion sections of newspapers in eight countries: the United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia, China, Norway, and Finland.

Dislocations and New Directions

Historical events seem to develop because a set of particular conditions come together. Historian William Sewell Jr. (2005) puts this well by claiming that during such moments it becomes clear that material and symbolic structures have become dislocated, leading to practices and meanings that set off history in a new, irreversible direction. The people who take part in the process recognize and feel the significance of the process emotionally, but the full consequences of the process—how material and symbolic resources of power are transformed—can be seen only afterwards.

In digital surveillance, there were many pre-Snowden signs that pointed to dislocated and relocated structures. Journalists and political activists, for instance, had been aware of increasingly intensive attempts by intelligence agencies to monitor their activities. Against this backdrop, however, Snowden’s revelations made a dramatic difference. The National Security Agency (NSA) programmes exposé underlined the way various sources of data and metadata in anybody’s digital footprints could be merged and effectively analysed. The revelations thus made new claims about the all-pervasiveness of surveillance and data gathering, bringing the question of everybody’s privacy into the centre of the debate. The public debate extended beyond a wide range of system actors (state security agencies, political institutions, internet companies) to the everyday moments of life in which people act as consumers, citizens, lovers, and friends. The whole spectrum of surveillance, from system to life-world, was at play (cf. Lyons 2007, 4).

By bringing into focus the relationships between different institutional actors and the everyday roles of people, the NSA revelations also cast sharp light on the latent contradictions and asymmetries that had developed during the previous decades. The leaks and the debate that followed helped to further explicate how digitalized privacy had become a politically, commercially, and socially central terrain. An analytical sketch of this disruptive moment and the contested and contradictory definitions of different stakeholders serves as our first entry point to the ongoing structural transformation of privacy. In Table 1, we have singled out three distinct system stakeholders (the intelligence community, politicians, and digital market actors) and three life-world roles (citizens, consumers, and individual self). These six analytical positions and their tensions help focus on the key legitimacy problems embedded in the ongoing digital transformation of privacy.

TABLE 1
Stakeholder positions in the digital surveillance debate

System actors (institutions)				Life-world positions (roles)
Stakeholder	Intelligence community	Politicians	Digital market actors	Citizens	Consumers	Self
Stake	Security	Public opinion	“Free market”	Recognition	Inclusion in (digital) society	Authenticity
Privacy as…	Privilege	Constitutional contract	Commodity	Pluralism	Currency	Human right
Legitimacy through…	Efficacy	Public trust	Consumer loyalty	Resistance	Utility, trust, irony, cynicism	Identity

System Actors

The Snowden revelations challenged national intelligence communities around the world. The leaks showed that from their perspective privacy is a secondary value, conditioned by the demands of state security and political stability. For intelligence agencies, privacy is a privilege, a qualified right stipulated by loyalty to one’s state. At the same time, privacy appears as a terrain of doubt, a potential breeding ground of unrest and revolt. The revelations highlighted the strong institutional forces that tilt the definition of privacy towards suspicion. They exposed the paradoxical logic of the security and intelligence community: citizens and people can keep their privacy as long as they constantly redeem it by accepting surveillance.

Politicians were put into a different kind of awkward light because privacy holds a foundational place in the imagination about political representation. It is the thoughts, desires, and opinions of private persons that politicians aim to represent. Thus, the notion of unviolated, authentic privacy is the core of a legitimacy based on public opinion. At the same time, contemporary poll-driven politicking aims to manage and manipulate this “opinion”, intensifying the need of politicians to survey their constituencies continuously. The Snowden revelations translated this dialectic into a disturbing dilemma for politicians. Either they had to admit that key power resources of states were not really under democratic control, or that they had known this all along and just accepted it without debate about public consent. If politicians did not choose to submit publicly to the legitimacy rhetoric offered by security professionals (and some of course did not), they had to insist that people should trust the oversight institutional arrangements in place, or at least retain faith in their ability to reform.

For the digital market actors, the unfolding leaks were also an ambiguous news event. On the one hand, public outrage over surveillance bolstered corporate arguments against intrusive state regulation of the digital markets. On the other hand, the revelations explicitly exposed the affinities between the logic of surveillance and digital business models. They also posed questions about the ability and willingness of communication conglomerates to protect customer privacy effectively. What was at stake was the consent of consumers to let companies harvest, analyse, repackage, and monetize detailed information about users. Although consumers experience this invasion of privacy through targeted marketing, the NSA debate highlighted the structures and called for broad public debate on surveillance policies, potentially opening deeper tensions in the overall argument about “free markets”. To some degree, the internet companies and service providers were able to present themselves as champions of liberty and privacy. By doing so, however, they also disclosed their key position in the social and political infrastructure, and spotlighted their strategic power over the “free individuals” whose personal information they have come to monetize.

Life-world Roles

The differentiated claims for defining privacy point to systemic tensions between different stakeholders. At the same time, contradictions also emerge between the system world and roles and positions that users take in the life-world.

As consumers, people are left in a highly ambiguous position. In a Pew poll (Pew Research Center 2015), over 90 per cent of Americans worried about who can access their private information and how it might be used, but only 9 per cent felt they had the power to safeguard their information. Evidence from polls demonstrate that also consumers in Europe are well aware of these contradictions (European Commission 2015). They see clearly that not taking part in the digitally enhanced networked life is not a realistic option. They also know few alternatives to the routine contracts whereby they are forced to agree to trade their privacy for digital services. This dilemma triggers a sense of uneasiness, which prompts a choice between celebrating the utility of digital services, trusting corporate actors and the government authorities, or lapsing into irony or cynicism.

For citizens, privacy is the guarantee of political pluralism. The value of privacy lies in the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Journalism, citizenship and surveillance
• 1 Surveillance and the Structural Transformation of Privacy: Mapping the conceptual landscape of journalism in the post-Snowden era
• 2 Not Interesting Enough to be Followed by the NSA: An analysis of Dutch privacy attitudes
• 3 Cryptic Journalism: News reporting of encryption
• 4 A “Massive and Unprecedented Intrusion”: A comparative analysis of American journalistic discourse surrounding three government surveillance scandals
• 5 Chilling Effect: Regional journalists’ source protection and information security practice in the wake of the Snowden and Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA) revelations
• 6 “Comparative Silence” Still? Journalism, academia, and the Five Eyes of Edward Snowden
• 7 Framing Resistance Against Surveillance: Political communication of privacy advocacy groups in the “Stop Watching Us” and “The Day We Fight Back” campaigns
• 8 Surveillance Normalization and Critique: News coverage and journalists’ discourses around the Snowden revelations
• Index