Seminar 2 Position Statement: Dr Madeline Carr (International Politics)

From Micro to Macro: PSST in International Relations

Advances in information and communications technology over the past two decades have contributed to a tension in many societies between expectations of privacy, security, transparency and accountability. We see this demonstrated clearly at an individual or societal level. At the same time as we object to the intelligence community’s access to our personal data, the parents of three young British girls who absconded to Syria protest that Scotland Yard should have picked up on Twitter messages that could have alerted them to their children’s plans. We are conflicted about our expectations of privacy and security, about appropriate behaviour for a range of social, political and security actors and about how to balance the opportunities presented by ‘big data’ with the potential pitfalls.

This societal tension is reflected in international relations where we have seen some real struggles to apply existing international law and also to reassess norms of state behaviour in this regard. Debates about appropriate levels of state surveillance of civil society as well as political actors have arisen in several contexts recently. The Arab Spring uprisings that made such effective use of social networking media also revealed the extent to which authoritarian regimes used surveillance technology (often provided by Western firms) to track the movements of protesters, identify them and collect data for subsequent prosecutions. This ‘dual-use’ technology leads to questions about export bans and qualitative judgements about which governments should have access to these tools and which should not. And who should make those decisions.

Of course, these debates are not limited to authoritarian states. Both Wikileaks and the Snowden leaks raised questions about the relationship between the state and civil society in the West which speak to the themes of sur/sous/veillance. Wikileaks prompted debate about foreign policy transparency and state accountability. Julian Assange encouraged us to consider a world in which foreign policy was constructed and practiced without secrecy. He challenged the long held assumption that diplomacy is most effective when conducted in some degree of privacy and he opened space for considerations of how more transparency might transform international relations.

The Snowden revelations have suggested that oversight of the intelligence community has been lacking through the recent technological transition. While we may wish law enforcement and intelligence agencies to be able to make full use of data to protect us, there remains a strong expectation that these powers will not be abused and it is clear that we do not yet have mechanisms in place to ensure that. Loopholes that have facilitated states spying on their own citizens contravene legal and normative frameworks and threaten to undermine trust in the state. However, in a context of globalisation and post-Cold War conflict, the distinction between domestic and international becomes somewhat less distinct.

All of this has to be considered within the context of the role of the private sector – the receptacle of most of our personal data that ends up online. The unrestrained and ungoverned collection of data by private corporations which is then commodified and distributed for profit is at the heart of these tensions of privacy, security, transparency and accountability. While much of the focus of these discussions is on state actors (as it should be) much less attention is paid to private actors which operate without transparency and with accountability to their shareholders only. Private sector led mechanisms like the Global Network Initiative, established to provide guidance to online data services facing requests from governments seemed to have been entirely ineffectual in the West. Concerns about geo-location services, excessively liberal terms and conditions, and an almost complete lack of access to information about how our data is repurposed seems to be consistently ignored in favour of ‘free’ applications and services and ultimately, profits. Essentially, if the law enforcement and intelligence communities require more oversight, certainly one could argue that the private sector does as well.

All of these questions can and should be considered within the context of the recently adopted UN Resolution on the Right to Privacy in the Digital Age. This Resolution provides a framework for the way that norms in international relations are developing to accommodate and adapt to the rapid increase in personal data available online and the challenges this poses to our expectations of privacy, security, sur/sous/veillance and trust.

Seminar 2 Position Statement: Prof.Carole Brooke (Computing & Social Responsibility)

Faith, values and the trajectory of ICT

I have more questions than answers!  My questions are located around the role of personal faith, values and beliefs.  In particular (but not restricted to) the influence that spiritual-religious beliefs play in decision-making processes around ICT, its use and development. 

‘Religious’ and ‘spiritual’ aspects of life are not usually represented within ICT discussions as a core concern. Whilst much more can be said about operational definitions for these words (Brooke and Parker, 2009), for the purposes of this position statement, I am referring to the deep presuppositions about the nature of reality that influence our life-and-world-views (Basden et al, 2011).  The relationship between these presuppositions and ICT is usually invisible until exposed, which explains why many have assumed that technology can be neutral.

I suggest that there are at least 3 ways in which we should recognise the relevance of these aspects to our discussions on privacy and secrecy issues (ibid).  They are:

1.     The existence of religious attitudes (e.g. Campbell, 2005)

2.     The possibility of the application of religious concepts and/or metaphors (e.g. see Bauwens, 1996; Coeckelbergh, 2010; Wilford, 2013)

3.     The deep religious presuppositions that underlie our ICT (Basden et al, 2011)

The first two types of relationship between ICT and personal values may be much more prevalent than we think. The third type of relationship means that our ICT is inherently and inescapably religious, even though this is frequently ‘unseen’.

The religious-spiritual roots of ICT:

Consideration of the religious-spiritual aspects of technology has a history within academic writings that we can draw upon for the current debate.  Some (e.g. Noble, 1997) have argued that ICT should be kept separate from any discussion of spirituality or religious attitude. Others present a compelling argument for the inextricable link between the two.  Coeckelbergh (2010, p.959) presents at least seven arguments for the ‘intimate connection’ between technology on the one hand and religion and spirituality on the other.  Another interesting statement is made by Wilford (2013) that reflects possibly at least 1 and 2 of the three ways I listed earlier:

“Through the mechanisms of data doubles and cyber lives however, we may be travelling a road that, rather than taking us forward towards greater freedom of expression and choice, may actually be having the opposite effect and leading us to reversing our freedoms in favour of social norms and expectations based on global community expectations, self-imposed censorship and the creation of social media silos.  In this way we may come to have more in common with the pre-reformation society than that of the enlightenment.”

ICTs have come a long way since the publication of ‘In the Age of the Smart Machine’ (Zuboff, 1988).  Even so, we still need a basis for differentiating between the benign and the malign opportunities and constraints, don’t we (Basden et al 2011)?

Bijker and Law (1992, p11.) said:

“Technology does not spring, ab initio, from some disinterested fount of innovation. Rather, it is born of the social, the economic, and the technical relations that are already in place. A product of the existing structure of opportunities and constraints, it extends, shapes, reworks, or reproduces that structure in ways that are more or less unpredictable. And, in so doing, it distributes, or redistributes, opportunities and constraints equally or unequally, fairly or unfairly."

This is a useful reminder for us today. To what extent are we informed about the “social, the economic, and the technical relations that are already in place” or the “existing structure of opportunities and constraints”? 

Stahl (1999) argued that a sort of ‘unacknowledged mysticism’ lies beneath much of our discussions around ICT and that this non-neutrality is religious in nature, not merely sociological. Furthermore, by not recognising this we run the risk of missing out on ethical and intellectual resources that could assist and guide us with respect to ICT’s impact upon humanity. 

If there is an "implicit religion" in ICT then this will be an important aspect of the ‘relations’ (in Bijker and Law’s terms above) which we need to recognise, understand, and take into account when considering the technical and ethical limits of secrecy and privacy.  In essence, then, my approach here is that the religious and the spiritual underlie technology and that this is not optional but inescapable. The way ICT is developed and used is, thus, shaped by ‘religious commitments’ that are of a tacit and inexplicit nature.

Data, what data?

The textual nature of computing has long been established in the literature (e.g. Wittig, 1978). Issues surrounding textual production and data are very central to privacy and security, whether that be decisions concerning what to collect, how to collect it, or what will be the end use of the collected data.  Indeed, even the very definition of what counts as ‘data’ is a site for debate.

There are also interesting possibilities for discussion around conscious (explicit, planned, and deliberate) versus sub-conscious (consequential, unintended, and disregarded) data collection, as well as the concomitant issues of remote control and representation that are entailed (Brooke, 2001).

If making a distinction between a human as a thinking being and a technological device as a non-thinking being  - a challengeable distinction in its own right if we consider ‘the second self’ and ‘cyborganization’ (Turkle, 1984/2005; Haraway, 1999) - then one might also add into this discussion aspects of  ‘unconscious’, as opposed to ‘sub-conscious’, data production?

Seminar 2 Position Statement: Dr Emma Briant (Journalism)

Secrecy, Security and Social Science

C Wright Mills called on his fellow social scientists in 1956 to illuminate the 'power elite' because democracy "implies that those who bear the consequences of decisions have enough knowledge - not to speak of power - to hold the decision-makers accountable" (1999: 325). The responsibility is upon social science to evaluate the ethics of certain practices used by government and facilitate fuller debate of policy and practice. However, David Miller and Tom Mills (2010) argue that since 9/11 increasing numbers of what they call ‘terrorologists’ have emerged in Britain: a community of security ‘experts’ or academics who lack independence and have connections to government or contracting. There is often a resistance to social scientists offering critique from outside of security studies and terrorism studies approaches, and many academics find a problematic secrecy and exclusion from debate. A gulf was visible in my own research with academics sometimes being viewed as 'outsiders' - barriers are then sometimes produced where practitioners working on security feel their activities 'misunderstood' (Briant, 2015). In one US interview, Dennis McBride, who following a military career worked for a contractor and Washington think-tank the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, commented: “things’ve changed a little bit but there’s still this attitude that ...we get from academic social science in particular that comes across as they’re above, they’re better than soldiers and... they’re not gonna participate in what we call here ‘baby-killing’.” (Interview: McBride, 5th June 2009 quoted in Briant 2015: 180).

Those working within security often find frustration themselves in the insularity of government agencies, often referred to as 'stovepipes', acting as an echo chamber and preventing the emergence of new ideas (Briant 2015). Some stress concern about a culture towards secrecy UK Former Director of Targeting and Information Operations Graham Wright observed a popular military perception he found concerning, that discussing Abu Ghraib might ‘inflame’ criticism and ‘put soldiers at risk on the ground’ resulting in secrecy over such incidents (Interview: 1st June 2009). Likewise, in the US, former US Navy Chief of Information Frank Thorp observed that 'There were those who said ‘Why should we even talk about that publicly?’ – because if we talk about it the enemy will take advantage of it. Well that’s true, but the issue is not not to talk about it the issue is not to do it. It will become public one way or another. (Interview: 24th August 2009; quoted in Briant 2015: 59). Likewise Mackay and Tatham have criticised internal stovepipes and have observed that many of the ‘lessons’ the MoD identified in Iraq are kept in a database in Shrivenham, ‘overclassified, to prevent criticism becoming public’ (Mackay and Tatham, 2009: 27).

A gulf in perceptions results between some practitioners working in security and academic and legal judgement on security matters that have arisen since 9/11 which may feed into, in some cases, the emergence of practices (discussed in other papers at this event) that have been widely seen as unethical and their subsequent concealment even from others within government. There are degrees of removal from wider society implied by the secrecy of government organisations which have produced a gulf between some practitioners' understandings, and wider public concern and distrust. In extreme cases, the gulf between the 'outsiders' and those accountable to them has set alternate moral standards and allowed abuse. McBride further described outsider reaction to torture as 'the most overblown thing I think I have experienced'; he pointed to what he calls 'the fastidiousness of the five-sided building' and contrasted the US Defense Department approach - obeying a list of things allowed and not allowed - with what he saw as an unscientific 'judgmental' attitude of social science - 'this feels like torture' (Interview: McBride, 5th June 2009 quoted in Briant 2015: 180). Of course, the Pentagon must not be above morality as defined by those to whom it is accountable and in order to ensure this there must be greater access by independent researchers to government and greater willingness to engage in dialogue with critics.

Secrecy and exclusion can result in some of the complexity of actual practice being lost from academic enquiry through over-reliance on leaked documents. It also may reinforce a simplistic attitude of 'them' and 'us' that prevents us seeing the agency and differentiation of opinion of those in government which could actually allow scope for real change. Greater openness of government to researchers would result in academic enquiry based on strong evidence being able to inform attempts to reform systems and broader ethical debates would encourage an informed electorate. I am very keen to hear what all speakers, but particularly those with first hand 'insider' experience, think of the evidence and arguments I have presented here and welcome their ideas on the ideal way for all concerned to proceed.

Seminar 2 Position Statement: Dr Clare Birchall (Institute of North American Studies)

A 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 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.

Seminar 2 Position Statement: Dr Ross W Bellaby (Politics)

The Ethics of State Secrets: Snowden, Wikileaks, and the Need for Secrets?

Intelligence is an inherently secretive affair. The intelligence community often argues that in order to successfully maintain security they need their tactics, targets and personnel to be kept out of the public eye. However, the WikiLeaks affair in 2010 and then the NSA leaks by Edward Snowden in 2013 revealed surveillance programs of such unprecedented size and scope that they raised important questions regarding the type of activities people are happy to have carried out in their name. Importantly, however, they also highlight the tension that has developed between democratic principles such as transparency and accountability and the need to keep secrets in order to maintain security. It is unclear is how secretive the intelligence community should be and what ethical position whistle-blowers should hold in society. I argue that first we must understand the affect keeping secrets can have on society with the potential for eroding social cohesion and the fear of secret human rights violations. This can then be set against the good that the intelligence community can bring in terms of detecting, preventing and even predicting threats against the political community. By balancing these two concerns this paper will develop an ethical framework designed to guide if, when and by what means states can keep secrets.

Seminar 2 Position Statement: Dr Vian Bakir (Journalism & Media)

Too much secrecy and lies … again.

In 1972, Hannah Arendt observed that the danger with over-classification is that not only are the people and their elected representatives denied access to what they must know to form an opinion and make decisions, so are the key actors themselves. She made this observation in relation to the Pentagon papers – approximately seven thousand pages of classified documents prepared by US Secretary of Defence, Robert McNamara, detailing the slippery slope of US engagement in SE Asia. The Pentagon Papers showed that in order to generate support for its war aims, the US government had lied to Congress and the public about its reasons for invading Vietnam. Rather than its publicly proclaimed goals of securing self-determination for the people of S.Vietnam, helping them defeat Communism, containing China, avoiding the ‘domino’ effect, and preventing WWIII, the USA had deeper imperial ambitions.

This debate about secrecy and lying in politics resurfaces in the contemporary era, regarding the Bush administration’s torture-intelligence policy (2001-08). Since ‘9/11’, the Bush administration continuously proclaimed and publicized that Enhanced Interrogation Techniques (EITs) of al-Qa’eda suspects legally did not constitute torture while providing life-saving intelligence.  To bolster their claim regarding torture, the Bush administration created secret legal memos that redefined what constituted torture, so that EITs would fall outside this definition. While these secret, legal memos have since been made public and rescinded, and EITs recognized as constituting torture after all, the claim about EITs effectiveness was left hanging, as the intelligence agencies and politicians kept secret the evidence on which their claims were based.

Only in 2014 was this claim regarding effectiveness refuted, by the long-awaited, partial declassification of a US Senate Intelligence Committee study, concluding the CIA lied to the White House, Congress and media about EITs' efficacy and brutality. The CIA refutes these conclusions. We thus have two scenarios regarding EITs effectiveness, each involving deception. (a) Politicians and watchdog media are inept and the CIA are effective liars; or (b) the CIA is being blamed to protect politicians from being held accountable for their torture policy. Given that politicians secretly changed the legal reality to accommodate their desire for EITs not to constitute torture, scenario (b) is the more probable.

These twin forces of secrecy and continuous manipulation of what enters the public sphere make it difficult to achieve a properly informed citizenry that is aware of what is done in their name, and for their protection. Wouldn’t achieving a properly informed citizenry constitute the first step towards a more progressive conception of security? Wouldn’t this allowing meaningful public reflection on what we would like and expect our own intelligence agencies to do in our own name, and for our own protection? Herein lies a stumbling block to the much vaunted debate on privacy versus security.

Seminar 2 Debating Technical and Ethical Limits of Secrecy & Privacy - WELCOME

Welcome – by Vian Bakir

Welcome to the second of six seminars in the ESRC-funded seminar series, DATA-PSST! On 24^th March 2015 we continue the series with a full day seminar at the University of Sheffield, hosted by Dr. Emma Briant and Dr. Ross Bellaby. We’ll briefly reflect on key themes emerging from Seminar 1 at Bangor University, Transparency Today: Exploring the Adequacy of Sur/Sous/Veillance Theory and Practice – this ably captured by our participating PhD students, and our Bangor hosts, Dr. Martina Feilzer and Dr. Yvonne McDermott Rees.

Most of the day will be given over to exploring technical possibilities and debating what is desirable regarding secrecy and privacy in the digital age. We’re bringing together cultural, philosophical, social, political and technological experts in digital and social media, privacy, secrecy and intelligence, and we’re opening up the debate to people in the real world 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 to ask whether it is politically, socially and ethically desirable. Post-Snowden, it’s a debate that’s been raging in some countries (like the USA, where the fourth amendment to the US constitution prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures against US citizens), but has been much more quiescent in the UK – a country well-known for tight state secrecy in national security matters. Robert Hannigan, Director of Britain’s signals intelligence agency, GCHQ, wrote an opinion piece in the Financial Times on 3 November 2014, where he stated ‘GCHQ is happy to be part of a mature debate on privacy in the digital age.’ However, GCHQ did not respond to my invite to come and debate with us. Maybe we are not mature enough? Also unresponsive to my invite were the big technology companies that Snowden revealed were complicit in what the British state calls ‘bulk data collection’ (and what most people would call ‘surveillance’ of suspicionless citizens).

Never mind! Our participants are coming together from different fields of expertise to assess the value of secrecy and privacy and how these concepts interact with a digitising society. We’ll be posting Position Statements from participants on this blog. Comments are enabled - so please do join in the debate – even if you can’t make it to Sheffield. 

Key questions are:

• What are the main commercial, political, legal and social features of secrecy?
• What is the relationship between technology, state surveillance and secret- keeping, 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?