DATA-PSST! Debating and Assessing Transparency Arrangements – Privacy, Security, Sur/Sous/Veillance, Trust
http://data-psst.bangor.ac.uk/index.php.en
Debating the Technical & Ethical Limits
of Secrecy and Privacy
24 th March 2015, University of Sheffield, 11am to 6pm
This is the second of six seminars in the ESRC-funded seminar series. We
continue the series by briefly reflecting on key themes emerging from Seminar 1,
Transparency Today: Exploring the Adequacy of Sur/Sous/Veillance Theory and
Practice. We then explore technical possibilities regarding secrecy and privacy in
the digital age, debating what is socially desirable by bringing in experts in
digital and social media, philosophers of privacy and media and intelligence
ethicists and opening up the debate to end users with different views on the
value of secrecy and privacy, or to what these should be applied. The aim is to
detail what technology is making possible and then ask whether it is politically,
socially and ethically desirable. Participants will come together from different
fields of expertise to assess the value of secrecy and privacy and how these
concepts interact with a digitising society.
The seminar will be organized around key questions and all participants will be
able to actively contribute to the debate:
- What are the main commercial, political, legal and social features of secrecy?
- What is the relationship between technology, state surveillance and secretkeeping and individual privacy?
- What social good do privacy and transparency offer and under what
conditions can these be ethically and technically limited?
- Are our current conceptual tools adequate to the task of addressing
contemporary transparency practices?
To encourage participants’ engagement, the seminar will function primarily by
means of position statements, roundtable discussions, and open discussion.
Participants include:
o Dr Jo Pierson, Free University of Brussels (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)
o Dr Andrew McStay, Bangor University
o Dr. Steve Wright, Leeds Beckett University
o Dr Ross Bellaby, University of Sheffield
o Dr Emma Briant, University of Sheffield
o Iain Bourne, Information Commissioners’
Office (Group Manager, Policy Delivery)
o Col Ian Tunnicliffe, Director, i to i research (& Former MoD Strategic
Communications Advisor)
o Col Angus Taverner, GeoIncognita (and formerly MoD Media
Operations)
o Birgitta Jónsdóttir, International Modern Media Institute
Three line position statements from experts
DATA-PSST! Debating and Assessing Transparency Arrangements – Privacy, Security, Sur/Sous/Veillance, Trust
http://data-psst.bangor.ac.uk/index.php.en
Dr. Jo Pierson
In order to enhance empowerment and mitigate disempowerment of
citizens/consumers in a culture of connectivity and datafication, we need to
understand and interfere with the socio-technical design and use of media
technologies.
Iain Bourne
How do we deploy technology to deliver new services whilst ensuring
consumers are empowered? What degree of choice and control do people want
and how do they exercise this? How do we reconcile the permanence and
availability of personal information online with ‘traditional’ privacy rights?
Ian Tunnicliffe
‘Through a glass darkly’ - between the intelligence world and the public world
there has emerged a clear difference in perspectives, but this is now a difference
that has been dramatically worsened by the media, popular entertainment and
culture.
Dr. Steve Wright
Can adequate democratic frameworks of accountability be set against an
authoritarian clamour for ever more surveillance tools and an accelerating
erosion of hard-won constitutional privacy laws against warrantless
wiretapping?
Dr. Andrew McStay
Privacy is best clarified by first thinking of it outside of technological, technical
and surveillance terms. On understanding privacy as a basic principle of
interaction between people, we can see it as an affective protocol. Once
recognised as agreed protocol that orients and guides dealings with others, we
can apply this to technical objects, legislation and decision-making on
informational privacy.
Dr. Emma Briant
Where technologies of secrecy and surveillance are developing faster than
research, policy and legal frameworks respond, how do we ensure the rights of
citizens, and the work of journalists and researchers, are protected and not
surrendered by default to more immediate concerns?
DATA-PSST! Debating and Assessing Transparency Arrangements – Privacy, Security, Sur/Sous/Veillance, Trust
http://data-psst.bangor.ac.uk/index.php.en
Dr. Ross W Bellaby
Intelligence is an inherently secretive affair. However, this secrecy comes into
conflict with our democratic principles of transparency and accountability. So,
how secretive should the intelligence community be? Where should the balance
be set? And should we condemn or praise whistle-blowers?
Dr. Adi Kuntsman
We are living in times when privacy and secrecy are, paradoxically, both
increasingly guarded and increasingly unstable. Our daily routines include
entering multiple password and constant adjustment of privacy settings; and yet
the dominating practice of social networking today is that of perpetual sharing.
Our virtual and material environments are filled with technologies of protection;
our governments adopt new defenses in light of Wikileaks or the Snowden affair,
knowing that more similar exposures are likely to come. And yet, the everyday
fabric of social media culture is that of constant exposures: embarrassing
personal information, incriminating or incident photographs, or even stories of
abuse and cruelty, shared willingly and joyfully on YouTube, Instagram,
Facebook of Twitter. So while big concerns over individual privacy and national
secrecy are steadily taking over the agenda of researchers, journalists,
intelligence leaders and software developers, what is often left in the shadows
are questions of mundane digital sociality, its ordinary routines and their, at
times unexpected, political effects. Whose privacy are we talking about there,
and whose secrecy? To whom, in other words, are we accountable, when we
praise -- or condemn -- digital exposures, or when we protect -- or disregard -digital privacy? For example, when social media becomes an archive of willing
self-recorded perpetration (soldiers documenting their own abuse of civilian
populations, or beautifying acts of war through Instagram filers); or when social
media scandals simultaneously expose and excuse the “public secrecy” (Taussig,
1999) of racial or colonial violence. In my talk I will attend to the conceptual,
ethical and political complexities of studying privacy and secrecy in social media
at the intersection of big politics and ordinary violence.
Dr. Clare Birchall
Secrecy of the Left
Secrecy and its productive possibilities have been obscured both by the fear that
secrecy is always a gateway to micro-fascism and a moral attachment to
disclosure. Recognizing this could open up a new way of understanding the
political and moral alignments of concealment and disclosure. Should the radical
Left jump on the bandwagon of Liberal (and neoliberal) transparency as a way to
instigate change, or should it experiment with a politics of the secret?
When referring to a secrecy of the Left, I am thinking of different spaces,
subjectivities and relations opened up by critical theories of, and aesthetic
DATA-PSST! Debating and Assessing Transparency Arrangements – Privacy, Security, Sur/Sous/Veillance, Trust
http://data-psst.bangor.ac.uk/index.php.en
experiments with secrecy. For instance, Jacques Derrida has a ‘taste for the
secret’ (2001), but not the common, contextual secret that hides somewhere
waiting to be revealed. He is interested, rather, in the unconditional secret: ‘an
experience that does not make itself available to information’ (1992: 201).
Eschewing the hermeneutic drive and circumventing attempts to anticipate
revelation, the unconditional secret within a text should be thought of as an
encounter with the Other through which a responsibility of reading is made
possible (and impossible). The secret, here, is fashioned in a productive capacity,
in the service of ethics. In terms of democracy, Derrida defends the secret qua
singularity, seeing it as an alternative to ‘the demand that everything be paraded
in the public square’ (2001: 59). ‘If a right to the secret is not maintained,’ he
writes, ‘we are in a totalitarian space’ (2001: 59). In light of such a formulation,
we should be concerned for those who do not want to adhere to the dominant
doctrines of democracy, including the doctrine of transparency. The subject of
democracy is not simply one who is asked to be transparent to the state and act
on transparency but also, in the guise of Derrida’s non self-present subject, one
that is constituted by a singularity that prevents full capitulation to the demands
of transparency.
For further inspiration, we can draw on the politico-aesthetic imagination of two
collectives that span both ends of the twentieth century: Acéphale (1936-9) and
Tiqqun (1999-2001). Georges Bataille wanted to ‘use secrecy as a weapon rather
than a retreat’ (Lütticken, 2006: 32) and imagined how a secret society named
Acéphale (which translates as ‘Headless’) could regenerate or revolutionise
society at large by instigating the kind of unorthodox values he championed
throughout his oeuvre including expenditure, risk, and loss. In their ‘Cybernetic
Hypothesis’, the collective, Tiqqun, who were highly influenced by Bataille
among others, call for ‘interference’, haze’ or ‘fog’ as the ‘prime vector of revolt’
(2001/9). They see opacity as a means to challenge the political project of
cybernetics and ‘the tyranny of transparency which control imposes’ (2001/9).
We can also look to certain technological practices that question the promise and
probe the political economy of openness. Take, for example, Freedom Box and
TOR, which both, in different ways, try to facilitate secure networks and online
anonymity; TrackMeNot, a browser extension that aims to derail surveillance
and data-profiling by flooding engines with random search terms; the (now
defunct) Web 2.0 Suicide Machine that scrambled one’s online identity by
erasing individual data and friendship links on social media sites; or the
decentralised hacktivist culture that connects under the title Anonymous.
While such theories of, and experiments with secrecy won’t alone be enough,
they might offer a ‘space’ in which a form of visibility that works for rather than
against social justice might be imagined. Experiments with both secrecy and
transparency, with existence through the play of optics, might just offer the
conditions under which politics can be rethought.
Dr. Helen Kennedy
DATA-PSST! Debating and Assessing Transparency Arrangements – Privacy, Security, Sur/Sous/Veillance, Trust
http://data-psst.bangor.ac.uk/index.php.en
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What do ‘ordinary’ internet users think about privacy, security, surveillance,
trust in relation to their data, and how should we account for their views
when we discuss these topics?
How do we engage ordinary internet users, and people doing what might be
considered ‘ordinary’ data mining (such as a museum interested in visitors’
responses to an exhibition, a local council wanting to know what people think
about cost efficiency measures) in debates about the ethics of data mining?
Do we need to differentiate the types of data practices which we would want
to subject to transparency or other regulatory measures?
How do we contrast transparency with accountability and argue that the
latter is more important?
Craig Hamilton
My PhD research project concerns popular music consumption in the digital age.
The collection, use, availability and ownership of data generated by and about
music listeners is an important concern of my project, particularly since the
music industries are increasingly harnessing the potential of data to inform
decisions about all aspects of their production, distribution and consumption
processes.