376 / 658
374
Thursday, November 10
1 6 : 3 0 – 1 8 : 0 0
JOS12
What Kind of Democracy? International Perspectives on the NSA Scandal
J. Moeller
1
1
Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Department of Communication, Mainz, Germany
Edward Snowden revealed the NSA files to societies undergoing profound political, social and technological upheaval. The revelations unfolded within
the context of a world increasingly shaped by political responses to terrorist attacks, as well as the growing economic and political significance of media
technologies, which already facilitated the emergence of Wikileaks. In this sense, the NSA scandal is a reference point for key political questions – concern‑
ing the past, present and future of democracies. The revelations and the debates they have occasioned raise larger questions about normative ideas of de‑
mocracy, and the roles of concepts such as citizenship, privacy and security within these models. Looking backwards, we might ask what the basis is of our
current democracies? How can we understand the revelation against the backdrop of contemporary ‘surveillance societies’? Do security and surveillance
represent key current political challenges to justify political action? Which political instruments shall we rely on in making sense of these developments?
All of these questions are addressed across the presentations joined in this panel. In particular, we present five studies from an internationally comparative
research project of coverage of the NSA revelations in news media, including the USA, UK, France, Germany, Russia, China/Hongkong, Norway and Finland.
The panel opens with an overview over the NSA reporting across all countries under investigation and then proceeds to more particular conceptual dis‑
cussions. In particular, two presentations investigate in more detail how the case is used to justify past political decisions and current political actors and
bodies.The Russian example illustrates the public construction of digital sovereignty, while the UK examples show how surveillance is justified in public – as
necessary but uneasy and problematic.The following presentations, then, direct their focus to debates on future challenges to democratic conceptions. First,
the Norwegian case serves to investigate how journalists use the NSA event to discuss and reestablish their professional autonomy. Finally, the German
debate highlights a focus on the political role of media technologies as determining future political ideas of the citizen and democratic societies. Altogether,
the panel demonstrates that the NSA-Snowden case represents not so much a revolutionary media event, producing heavy ruptures in public discourse or
politics, but brings key questions regarding the past, present and future of democracies to the limelight. This underlines that we witness a key moment for
journalism. While newspapers and other media organisations are confronted with profound structural transformation challenges, they need to make room
for debates on democracy. The NSA case illustrates that the traditional role of journalism has lost none of its significance: If we want to find out how to build
a society that allows for a sustainable understanding of key concepts such as citizens, privacy and journalism, we need to learn about the old and basic ideas
of democracy, face current problems and discuss what future options are.
PN 127
The Prism of NSA: Journalism, Legitimacy and a Structural Transformation of Privacy
H. Heikkilä
1
, R. Kunelius
1
1
University of Tampere, Tampere, Finland
Edward Snowden’s leaks have intensified arguments about that we live in a surveillance society; a society organized around the collection, recording,
storage, analysis and application of user data collected from private individuals and social networks. Against this claim states, institutions and businesses
all around the world have been compelled to justify their actions in public. In the face of this pending legitimacy crisis, also journalism has a special role
to play. Firstly, it is tasked to facilitate an open debate over the many trade-offs pertaining to surveillance, and to deliberate whether or not these would
be acceptable for ‘the public opinion’. Secondly, given its task for independent investigation, journalism should help contemplating the potential futures
of social and political life: What does ‘surveillance society’ entail for our security, privacy and democracy? Thirdly, by facilitating such debates and inves‑
tigations, journalism elaborates and crafts key concepts of our democratic imaginations, which frame and define the democratic context of journalism in
the forthcoming confrontations between states and citizens. Based on a qualitative content analysis of opinionated texts published in mainstream news
media in eight countries (USA, UK, France, Germany, Russia, China/Hongkong, Norway and Finland), this presentation maps out discourses of justification
(Boltanski & Thévenot), which aim to resolve the legitimacy crisis triggered by Snowden’s revelations. Our focus will be on three dominant themes located
in the analysis of more than 800 opinion pieces. Dominant frames in the debate construct tensions and solutions for the case by referring to (1) the system
of international relations, (2) possibilities of political oversight and (3) the practice of whistleblowing. In these frames the revelations are understood as
an (1) instrument of politics of power (wherein it is only natural that “even friends spy on friends”, as a (2) problem of checks and balances (assuming
political systems are capable of self-repair), or as (3) a special case of whistleblowing, where selective transnational solidarity is reinforced between news
organizations, and to a lesser extent, between journalists and whistleblowers. The presentation discusses the emerging, deeper conceptual questions. In
the justification frames, digital surveillance often boils down to narrow political legitimacy questions: Are states accountable to their citizens, are citizens
able to think and discuss freely? These themes resonate with classic theories of the public sphere where‘privacy’mainly is rendered meaningful as precursor
for political citizenship. While this line of thought is still relevant, it draws from historical and political conditions very different from ours today. The em‑
phasis on political citizenship easily brackets out other important dimensions of privacy, which are also put at peril by digital surveillance. However, privacy
as reclusion or anonymity are not so much endangered by states, but by advertisers, internet service providers and media organizations. When combined
together, the changes pertaining to all three dimensions of privacy mark a deeper ‘structural transformation of privacy’, which should call for a broader
critical scrutiny by both academics and journalists.