Digital Surveillance and Citizenship

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

Digital surveillance affects the core of contemporary forms of citizenship, as the post-Snowden debates have demonstrated. It raises questions regarding the nature of civil rights in digital environments; highlights the challenges of online civic activities and political dissent; questions the nature of the security state; and complicates legal frameworks of national jurisdictions in a context of cross-border communication flows.

As a growing range of our social, political, economic and cultural processes is mediated through digital communication infrastructure, citizens around the globe increasingly enter the sphere of civic activity through digital media and are both empowered and restricted by the characteristics and affordances of these media, as well as the norms and regulations that govern them in different contexts. Digital tools enable the development of new civic practices but also provide the state and the private sector with new powers to intervene, monitor, analyse and control. Digital surveillance and citizenship thus affect each other in multiple ways.

If citizenship denotes both the position of a person in the context of law, public discourse and civil society, and the active engagement of the person with that environment, it is vital to investigate the implications of surveillance for key areas of citizenship such as policy, technology, civic engagement, and news media. In this panel we combine the research projects of different scholars who have all explored the implications of the Snowden leaks across a number of different themes and contexts that relate to questions of citizenship in contemporary society.

Sub Unit

• Global Communication and Social Change

Chair

• Arne Hintz, Cardiff U - JOMEC

Individual Presentations

• The Snowden Revelations and the Mediapolis - Adrienne Russell, U of Denver; Risto Kunelius, U of Tampere

• Living in Surveillance Society: From Regimes of Justification to Surveillance Realism - Lina Dencik, Cardiff U - JOMEC; Arne Hintz, Cardiff U - JOMEC; Karin Wahl-Jorgensen, Cardiff U - JOMEC

• Surveillance, Intelligence Agencies, Persuasion, Influence and Accountability: Problematic Silences in Civil Society - Vian Bakir, Bangor University

• Surveillance, Encryption and Citizenship - Einar Thorsen, Bournemouth University

• Balancing Surveillance and Internet Freedoms: Brazil and Snowden's legacy 3 years on - Debora Moura Medeiros, Free University of Berlin