After the recent flurry of Calls, here's another conference recap
with relevance to STS and surveillance studies. This year's edition
of CPDP, which took place in Brussels last week, was indeed heavily
coined by the “Snowden revelations” and the ensuing international
political debates on PRISM, Upstream, and whatnot. Thus, while CPDP13
had its main scope on the (still ongoing) reform of the European data
protection framework, this year it was all about the relationship
between privacy (and data protection) and security and surveillance.
Highly intriguing! [oh, and just to respond to an emerging theme of
the STSS repository: there was pleasantly little explicit talk of
“Big Data” - however it was of course always implicitly present
as the specter that haunts contemporary discourses on privacy and
data protection :)]
As CPDP gets bigger by the year (one of the organizers told me they
had 800 people this year, as opposed to last year's 500 – which
unfortunately resulted in quite the number of fully packed sessions
without a chance for a seat) and is now a 4-track event, my account
is necessarily limited to an individual perspective and is of course
far from any comprehensive claim (and yes, I admit I skipped a couple
panels in order to have a coffee/beer with old colleagues and
friends...). Nonetheless, I tried to attend the surveillance related
panels and here are some personal impressions and highlights:
As someone who has in fact never engaged with issues of hacking, I
felt compelled by the question whether “hackers” should be
conceptualized as legitimate and in fact highly ethical actors who
unveil governmental/industrial malpractices, empower potential
whistleblowers and eventually defend privacy (in some sort of Robin
Hood-esque fashion), or whether they should be seen as “criminals”
alongside a rather legalistic viewpoint, independent of intentions
and outcomes of their activities. What became quite clear during the
highly controversial panel was that hacking as a practice of
il/legitimate civil disobedience has in fact come a long way from the
basements of the 1980s, and that the proportionality between
unlawfulness and the public good might actually benefit from some
reconsideration with regard to “hacking”.
Resilience as such right now appears as much as an “en vogue”
concept as a vague analytical term. In fact, the panel on “Resilience
to Surveillance”, organized by the IRISS project, did benefit
largely from the conceptual clarification offered by Pete Fussey. His
take on the evolution of resilience from robustness to recovery and
eventually to adaptability provided a much needed common analytical
denominator for the presented case studies in order to properly
contextualize distinct forms of resilience across multiple settings.
What became apparent during the discussion was that the relationship
between resilience and surveillance indeed still needs to be sketched
out and that resilience as a distinct concept needs to find its place
alongside the notions of counter-surveillance, vigilantism,
resistance, and such.
Another major trajectory of CPDP14 was the conflict of security vs
privacy (I myself presented a paper on the framing of this conflict
within security research and its envisioned “resolution” through
privacy-by-design) and its often proposed conceptualization as a
trade-off. In particular, a panel organized by the PACT, PRISMS and
SurPRISE projects intended to go “beyond the trade-off model”.
While all presenters basically agreed in their critique that the
model was too simplistic in its assumptions about both its key terms,
as well as rather skewed towards security, it became quite clear that
it is not that easy to conceptually challenge the notion of a
trade-off without in some other way reinforcing it – especially as
the “model” has gained a quite powerful status as current
“political mantra”. Possible ways eventually were pointed out by
Jenneke Christiaens, who, from a criminological perspective,
highlighted the importance of fear of crime, trust in security
providers, and the need for a disentanglement of the notion of
privacy, and by Govert Valkenburg, who emphasized the need for an
empirical account of how both security and privacy become translated
into elements of socio-technical assemblages.
And what about the analytics of publicly available information? This
question, which in fact has been on my mind for quite some time
without a satisfactory conclusion, was tackled by a panel on “Open
Source Surveillance and Online Privacy”, organized by the
Panoptykon Foundation, Bits of Freedom, and Privacy International.
And oh boy, those were entertaining 75 minutes! As could be expected
from a group of speakers that featured representatives of Privacy
International, facebook and the UK Association of Chief Police
Officers, the Q&A part turned into more or less open warfare.
After sketching out the issues at stake (the definition of “open
source”, the practical use of publicly available information in
policing and commercial practices, the automation of collection and
analytics, questions of the length of data rentention, etc.),
facebook's Richard Allan and Ian Redhead from the UK ACPO found
themselves under heavy normative fire from the audience and sought to
retreat to safe legal terrain. If not for the actual severity of the
topic, it would have been delightful!
So much for a couple highlights – I am of course aware that this
brief recap can only account for a small fraction of the overall
event, and it should thus not be misread as any form of definitive
judgment or such. Rather, it should be understand as a highly
subjective take on what has once again been a great event. My humble
intention here was to highlight the fact that STS and the
surveillance studies do play an increasing role when it comes to the
still legally dominated debates on privacy and data protection –
however, unfortunately triggered by rather unpleasant developments on
the global scale...
No comments
+ add yours