Abstract
The Snowden leaks, first published in June 2013, provided unprecedented insights into the operations of state-corporate surveillance, highlighting the extent to which everyday communication is integrated into an extensive regime of control that relies on the ‘datafication’ of social life. Whilst such data-driven forms of governance have significant implications for citizenship and society, resistance to surveillance in the wake of the Snowden leaks has predominantly centred on techno-legal responses relating to the development and use of encryption and policy advocacy around privacy and data protection. Based on in-depth interviews with a range of social justice activists, we argue that there is a significant level of ambiguity around this kind of anti-surveillance resistance in relation to broader activist practices, and critical responses to the Snowden leaks have been confined within particular expert communities. Introducing the notion of ‘data justice’, we therefore go on to make the case that resistance to surveillance needs to be (re)conceptualized on terms that can address the implications of this data-driven form of governance in relation to broader social justice agendas. Such an approach is needed, we suggest, in light of a shift to surveillance capitalism in which the collection, use and analysis of our data increasingly comes to shape the opportunities and possibilities available to us and the kind of society we live in.
The publication of the documents first leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden in June 2013 revealing the extent of data-driven surveillance has had significant implications for our understanding of political activism and dissent. The leaks provided unprecedented insights into the operations of state-corporate surveillance and highlighted the indiscriminate nature of large-scale data collection across communication networks and platforms in Western democracies, most notably the US National Security Agency (NSA) and the British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). The documents provided evidence for the intricate ways in which everyday communication is integrated into an extensive regime of surveillance that relies considerably on the ‘datafication’ of many aspects of social life. Ordinary users’ social activities are ‘sucked up as data, quantified and classified, making possible real-time tracking and monitoring’ (Lyon, 2014: 4). This information infrastructure characterizes a particular mode of governance, one that is rooted in a political economy in which the prevailing logic is to predict and modify human behaviour as a means to produce revenue and market control; what Zuboff (2015) has described as ‘surveillance capitalism.’ Such data-driven forms of social organization have significant implications for citizenship (cf., Ruppert and Isin, 2015).
In the multiple flows of watching within this ‘veillant panoptic assemblage’ (Bakir, 2015), resistance to surveillance by citizens and political activists can take several forms. Much onus has been placed on the use of counter-surveillance technologies such as encryption or anonymisation tools, and digital rights groups have been active in advocacy work pertaining to privacy and data protection. This has provided windows of opportunity for technological developments and legislative changes that speak particularly to concerns with the implications of surveillance programmes for secure communication infrastructures and individual privacy (Hintz and Brown, forthcoming; Rogers and Eden, forthcoming). However, the degree to which such strategies and concerns have expanded towards the broader range of politically active and interested publics is less clear, and a common agenda towards addressing issues of data collection and use is difficult to identify.
In this article we explore the relationship between these broader forms of activism and digital surveillance by analysing responses to the Snowden leaks amongst political activists in the UK. The article is based on research carried out for the collaborative research project ‘Digital Citizenship and Surveillance Society: UK State–Media–Citizen relations after the Snowden leaks’ at Cardiff University, 1 the first comprehensive review of the implications of the Snowden revelations from a UK perspective. It draws from a series of in-depth interviews with UK-based activists engaged in a range of social justice concerns. In particular, we explore the attitudes and practices of counter-surveillance tactics and investigate the extent to which resistance to data-driven surveillance is prominent amongst political activists.
The article starts by outlining the implications of the Snowden leaks for political activists before discussing the most prominent forms of resistance to digital surveillance that have emerged in their aftermath. We argue that anti-surveillance resistance post-Snowden has predominantly centred on techno-legal responses relating to the development and use of encryption and policy advocacy around privacy and data protection. In light of this, we examine how these types of practices are negotiated amongst political activists and outline the extent to which the activists we interviewed view anti-surveillance resistance as part of their social justice agendas. We observe a significant level of ambiguity around technological resistance strategies, while critical responses to the Snowden leaks have largely been confined within particular expert communities. In the final part of the article, we therefore propose a (re)conceptualization of resistance to surveillance on terms that can address the implications of this data-driven form of governance in relation to broader social justice agendas. To that end, we introduce the notion of ‘data justice’ which, we argue, would help contextualize data-driven surveillance, connect it to social and economic justice concerns, and thereby contribute to transforming the role of surveillance concerns in current civil society practice and, potentially, public debate. This is particularly significant in light of the central role of data-driven processes in contemporary capitalism.
The Snowden leaks and political activism
The revelations of programmes designed to ‘bulk’ collect data on citizen engagement with digital infrastructures 2 indicate the extent to which contemporary forms of governance are increasingly based on the ability to monitor, track and potentially predict the behaviour of entire populations. This is part of a broader emphasis on the role of ‘Big Data’ in current societies (Kitchin, 2014) that highlights the surveillance implications of the ‘Big Data’ discourse. As Lyon (2015) has argued, surveillance culture came prominently into view with the intensified security-surveillance following 11 September 2001 and the so-called war on terror. In particular, the uncertainty of the form and nature of potential threats in such a political climate provides an apparent necessity and justification for limitless measures to be taken to ward off any possible dangers. The focus, therefore, moves to the operationalization of how to perceive of these potential threats, in which the apparatuses of surveillance play an integral role (Massumi, 2015). In such circumstance, the rise of ‘surveillance society’ marks a social context characterized by an increasing amount of surveillance taking place alongside an explosion in the possible methods and means for observing and monitoring people's behaviour (Lyon, 2001).
A central concern for Snowden and others has been the extent to which extensive forms of monitoring lead to a ‘chilling effect’ in society that stifles the possibilities for challenging institutions of power and advocating for social change. Although the theory of ‘chilling effects’ has historically been difficult to empirically prove and remains controversial, the debate on it following the Snowden leaks concerned the extent to which government surveillance may deter people from engaging in certain legal (or even desirable) online activities because they fear punishment or criminal sanction, and do not trust the legal system to protect their innocence (Penney, 2016). Such surveillance ‘effects’ were documented in a survey carried out by the PEN American Center in the immediate aftermath of the Snowden leaks in which they found that writers are engaging in self-censorship as a result (PEN, 2013). Further studies have shown a reluctance amongst citizens to engage with politically sensitive topics online, such as a decline in ‘privacy-sensitive’ search terms on Google (Marthews and Tucker, 2015), a decline in page views of Wikipedia articles relating to terrorism (Penney, 2016), and a ‘spiral of silence’ in surveillance debates on social media (Hampton et al., 2014). As Greenwald claims: ‘Merely organizing movements of dissent becomes difficult when the government is watching everything people are doing. But mass surveillance kills dissent in a deeper and more important place as well: in the mind, where the individual trains him- or herself to think only in line with what is expected and demanded.’ (2014: 177–178).
Furthermore, the Snowden leaks revealed the expansive notion of ‘targets’ that has come to be operationalized in such a mode of governance, going far beyond what may be obvious misconduct or wrong-doing. Greenwald points out: The perception that invasive surveillance is confined only to a marginalized and deserving group of those ‘doing wrong’ – the bad people – ensures that the majority acquiesces to the abuse of power or even cheers it on. But that view radically misunderstands what goals drive all institutions of authority. “Doing something wrong” in the eyes of such institutions encompasses far more than illegal acts, violent behavior and terrorist plots. It typically extends to meaningful dissent and any genuine challenge. It is the nature of authority to equate dissent with wrongdoing, or at least with a threat. (Greenwald, 2014: 183)
These disclosures build on previous and continued practices of surveillance of activist groups and dissenting voices. In the UK, recent revelations of undercover police officers infiltrating a range of activist groups over a longer period of time, including environmental and animal rights activists, have illustrated the invasive tactics used to monitor and suppress protest and dissent (Lubbers, 2015). This is alongside other documented forms of managing and containing resistance, tracking activities and intercepting planned actions, whether by corporate agencies or state bodies (cf. Lubbers, 2012; Smith and Chamberlain, 2015; Uldam, 2016). The navigation and circumvention of surveillance society is therefore a fully integrated and long-standing tradition in some activist circles (della Porta, 1996; Earl, 2003; Leistert, 2013). However, with the emergence of Big Data-driven surveillance programmes, regimes of governance and control have increasingly been based on digital infrastructures that facilitate ‘dataveillance’ – a form of continuous surveillance through the use of (meta)data (Raley, 2013). These regimes are rooted in the economic logic of ‘surveillance capitalism’ in which accumulation is pursued through the ability to extract, monitor, personalize, and experiment based on the pervasive and continuous recording of digital transactions (Varian, 2014; Zuboff, 2015). Not only does the entrenchment of this logic within everyday communication technologies cement a fundamentally asymmetrical power relation between activists and those wishing to carry out surveillance on them (Leistert, 2012), but the nature of these, often invisible, infrastructures also carries with it central pertinence and significance for activists seeking to challenge existing power relations and mobilize social change. As Lovink and Rossiter (2015) have argued, a politics of the ‘postdigital’ in which the digital has become so omnipresent that it has been pushed to the background and become naturalized, demands of activism to focus on the network architectures at the centre of power in order to pursue genuine social justice and emancipatory ideals.
Anti-surveillance and techno-legal resistance
Efforts to resist these technologies of surveillance have taken several forms. As Mann and Ferenbok (2013) have argued, multiple types of ‘veillance’ intersect, undermine and challenge each other in the monitoring of modern societies. Surveillance – veillance in which the viewer is in a position of power over the subject – is often met with efforts to revert or ‘equalize’ such power. Mann has placed much emphasis on the advent of ‘sousveillance’ in this regard, where the subject is gazing back at power ‘from below’, exemplified by technologies such as wearable cameras and other efforts to capture, process, store, recall and transmit human-centred sensory information (Mann, 2005: 636). However, as Bakir (2015) points out, modes of resistance to surveillance also include counterveillance and univeillance that speak more to the sabotaging and blocking of surveillance as well as ways of making intelligence services more accountable.
Much resistance to surveillance following the Snowden leaks has centred on these latter strategies – particularly on developing and ‘mainstreaming’ alternative technologies alongside campaigns for tighter policies on the protection of personal data. To start with, forums to provide secure digital infrastructures to activists have proliferated, with ‘numerous digital rights and internet freedom initiatives seizing the moment to propose new communication methods for activists (and everyday citizens) that are strengthened through encryption.’ (Aouragh et al., 2015: 213). These have included renewed focus on privacy-enhancing tools such as the TOR browser, the GPG email encryption system and the encrypted phone and text messaging software Signal. An increasing number of websites now support the more secure https protocol rather than the standard http, and a growing number of internet users have downloaded tools such as ‘https everywhere’ that connect to those more secure websites. Privacy guides such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation's ‘Surveillance Self-Defense’ (https://ssd.eff.org/en) and the Tactical Tech Collective's ‘Security in a Box’ (https://tacticaltech.org/projects/security-box) explain the use of privacy-enhancing tools and offer advice on secure online communication. ‘Crypto-parties’ have brought necessary training in such tools to towns and cities worldwide (O’Neill, 2015).
Technical solutions to surveillance have included, furthermore, the development of self-organised communications infrastructures as alternatives to corporate services such as Google and Facebook. Groups such as Riseup.net, Autistici and Sindomino have offered mailing lists, blog platforms and collaborative online workspaces that protect user privacy and are hosted on the groups' own secure servers. Indymedia, arguably the first social media platform, was run by activists in the same manner, and attempts to create other non-commercial and privacy-enhancing social networks have continued. The development of technological alternatives that reinforce autonomous and civil society-based media infrastructure has been a key part of anti-surveillance activism (Hintz and Milan, 2013). Their adoption by activist communities may have grown since the Snowden leaks began but remains limited, so far, as the vast resources available to large corporate providers and the ease of use of their products – from Gmail to Youtube to Facebook – have meant a far more widespread uptake (Askanius and Uldam, 2011; Terranova and Donovan, 2013).
However, following the Snowden leaks internet companies have had to address customer concerns regarding data security, too. While they mostly enjoyed friendly relations with, in particular, the US government in pre-Snowden times, divisions between the industry sector and the state emerged after Snowden as criticism of these companies’ data practices grew (Wizner, 2015). The confrontation between the FBI and Apple in early 2016 crystallized this new and troubled relation, in which Apple managed to appear as protector of user interests against state intrusions. The introduction of end-to-end encryption by services such as WhatsApp demonstrated a new trend which aligned, to a degree, with the efforts of non-commercial tech activists. Campaign projects such as ‘Ranking Digital Rights’ (https://rankingdigitalrights.org/) have advanced the focus on corporate policies by, for example, creating an ‘Accountability Index’ that measures company commitment to user privacy and freedom of expression.
While the focus on infrastructure providers and technological development has been prominent, many digital rights campaigns have addressed the state and sought policy reform. In the UK, organisations such as Privacy International, the Open Rights Group, Big Brother Watch, Article 19 and Liberty have regularly issued statements regarding their concerns about surveillance, have organized public debates and have lobbied legislators. As an immediate response to the Snowden leaks, these groups and others formed a coalition – Don't Spy On Us – which has combined some of this advocacy work towards a common campaign. Their voice has been significant in the specialized discourses around, for example, the draft Investigatory Powers Bill – the main post-Snowden piece of UK legislative reform. They have formulated fundamental critiques of surveillance practices, but they have also, increasingly, been recognized as a legitimate participant in policy debates that holds relevant expertise. As one anti-surveillance campaigner noted: “Previously NGOs would have fought just to kill a new law and probably been unsuccessful in doing so; now they can say: here's how we can genuinely improve it and have a proper conversation with the Home Office” (quoted in Hintz and Brown, forthcoming).
Litigation has emerged as a key strategy of policy advocacy. Campaign organisations such as Privacy International, Liberty and Amnesty International challenged GCHQ's surveillance practices at the Investigatory Powers Tribunal (IPT) which decided that some of the agency's activities were unlawful. Others, such as the Open Rights Group, Big Brother Watch and Human Rights Watch brought cases against the British government before the European Court of Human Rights and the European Court of Justice. While the results of legal challenges have been mixed, they have forced governments to admit to previously secret practices and have thereby opened up avenues for policy reform (Hintz and Brown, forthcoming).
At the intersection between policy and technology, civil society activists have also contributed to the work of institutions that define and regulate the standards and protocols of online communication. In some of these bodies, such as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), they participate in individual capacity and based on their personal expertise, next to experts from industry and government. In others, such as the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), they form specific caucuses, for example the Non-commercial User Constituency (NCUC). As technical standards and protocols typically allow some actions and disallow others, and enable some uses and restrict others, their development constitutes a latent and invisible form of policymaking and therefore places standards organisations in both a highly influential and slightly obscure position (cf., DeNardis, 2009; Lessig, 1999). In response to the Snowden leaks, several of these bodies have started to address the vulnerabilities exposed in the revelations by setting up working groups, developing proposals on how to incorporate privacy in standards, and, in some cases, agreeing that these concerns should become a priority of standards development (Rogers and Eden, forthcoming).
Digital rights activists and civil society-based technological developers have been influential in all these venues. Yet their efforts have largely remained within a specialized discourse and a constituency of experts. Our goal with this research was to explore to what extent activists concerned with other social justice issues have engaged with these agendas, and whether there is scope for linking these (possibly) divergent concerns.
Resistance to surveillance amongst political activists
Sample of interviews.
In the context of the above discussion, this article is particularly concerned with the extent to which resistance to digital surveillance features in activist practices and agendas and how it is understood. We extracted prominent themes from our interviews around these issues, based on a thematic analysis that focused on understandings of surveillance, uses of encryption software, changes in communication practices following the Snowden leaks, and attitudes towards digital rights advocacy. Below we outline key themes emerging from our interviews in relation to how anti-surveillance is situated in activist practices. In the first part we discuss general understandings of surveillance and responses to the Snowden leaks. In the second part we move on to discuss how resistance to surveillance in terms of encryption and advocacy around digital rights is understood and practiced amongst the activists we interviewed.
Responses to Snowden
To start with, the interviews demonstrated that the issue of state surveillance is very familiar amongst political activists in the UK, particularly due to a troublesome history of police infiltration into activist groups. Many of the activists we spoke with had either direct experiences of police infiltrating groups they were part of or they knew someone who had experienced infiltration. Digital surveillance and Big Data surveillance of the kind revealed in the Snowden leaks was less prominent and salient in initial descriptions of surveillance. However, many of the activists we interviewed expressed a general awareness and expectation that these activities are going on, from either corporations or state, or a combination of both. Several activists pointed to specific experiences that might demonstrate the monitoring of online activities: I think there's been instances where the police have turned up to our meetings or rung ahead of venues we've been using and warned the venues not to allow us to have a meeting (…) they're obviously keeping tabs on our Facebook activities but then that's public so you totally expect that. Similarly with Twitter … we're pretty sure that there's a police presence on something called Basecamp which is where we organize online. (anti-fracking activist) I think, kind of like most people my impression is there has been a hell of a lot more going on than anyone has known about. The capabilities of the security services are much greater than anyone suspected but there is much less political and judicial oversight of this, and indeed some of this is done on a dubious legal basis. (TUC activist) I think it's about being always aware of the general threat. I don't think in fact that Snowden in particular has had an impact on a single aspect of how we work … In a sense he confirmed what was the sort of thing people suspected was happening anyway, but I don't think that revelation has changed anything we do. (CAAT activist) [NationBuilder] is a programme which is designed for campaign organisations. Obama used it in his campaign. Labour are using it. It basically integrates your website with a database and social media as well so sucks in social media profiles out of Facebook and Twitter and things like that. (ACORN activist) You start off by setting up a Facebook event and then the activists learn tools like the invite all app where you don't have to keep on inviting individual friends, it invites 500 at a time. So we will then spread that all around people so then you can drive the invites up to 5 or 6 thousand very quickly. (PAAA activist) My advice to our people, our community, is just be careful before saying anything, before making a statement … and think about it, what the repercussions would be and how it could be misconstrued. So prevention is better. (MCoW activist) It can get picked up and used in a court or, partly in a court case or possibly liable. I think people are worried about liable. (STWC activist)
Resisting surveillance
Despite such concerns being expressed, the active circumvention of surveillance such as widespread uptake of encryption or anonymisation tools remained limited to just a few of the groups we interviewed, with Greenpeace expressing the most extensive and comprehensive secure communication infrastructure. Predominantly, the activists we interviewed did not use encryption or anonymisation tools as an integrated part of their communication practices. In reasoning this, we can see a number of themes emerge. Firstly, several interviewees spoke of a perceived ‘lack of knowledge’, insufficient technical ability and not being able to ‘afford’ to implement alternative communication practices. These kinds of perceptions are often combined with notions of convenience in which mainstream platforms are favoured for their familiarity and ease of use: We just want ease of access to be honest. Actually, I can send an email to a few thousand people and do a few other things and I don't need to spend days or weeks actually learning how to do it because I'm not very technically minded. (ACORN activist) We've got nothing to hide, we're not doing anything illegal and we're not doing anything that's not defendable. So you know … if the security services want to challenge what we're doing then we'll have that debate out in public. And anyway I suppose at the back of our minds is that it probably wouldn't work anyway is my guess. Without spending huge amounts of time or resources. (STWC activist) We're having to campaign all of the time, we're not secret organisations, or organisations of tight-knit groups of people campaigning together. We are mass movements, and we are open. For us social media is great because it makes communication easy and of course we know people look at social media but our messages are not hard to get. (TUC activist)
Such perceptions also extend to activists' engagement with advocacy on legislation relating to privacy or digital rights issues more broadly. Although solidarity and support of the cause was expressed across the board, most activists we interviewed did not see themselves or the organisations and groups they are part of as being actively engaged with issues relating to digital rights, such as privacy or data protection. Rather, despite mentions of some informal links with organizations such as Privacy International and Statewatch,
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most of the activists we interviewed made a distinction between their own activist work and that of tech activists and digital rights groups: Some people focus on things like surveillance and some people focus on the workplace, some people do community things. (ACORN activist) I think there are organisations that are doing that work already and it's for us to be knowledgeable and a bit of a step ahead of the game, but I don't think it's for us to campaign on surveillance. (Anti-fracking activist)
‘Data justice’ and the bridging of activism(s)
Our interviews with activists illustrate that a general awareness and expectation of surveillance is prevalent amongst activist communities in the UK, but concerns with data-driven surveillance of the kind revealed in the Snowden leaks remain somewhat marginalized in activist perceptions and practices. Rather, the entrenched dependency on mainstream communication platforms that are predominantly insecure provide an environment for activist practices in which it is seen as difficult and problematic to engage in resistance to surveillance either through technological means or in terms of protest and advocacy for greater privacy and data protection. This illustrates some of the limitations of the often-technological focus of ‘veillance’ debates. More generally, we can identify a ‘disconnect’ between concerns with data-driven surveillance and other (broader) social justice concerns.
How, then, might we address this disconnect? Aouragh et al. (2015) argue that the ‘division of labour’ between what they label ‘tech justice’ and ‘social justice’ activists emerges partly from the socio-technical practices that have been advanced in secure communication campaigns in which there is a distinct user-developer dichotomy that places the onus on the (individual) ‘user’ to protect themselves (identifying risks using ‘threat modelling’) with tools provided by the ‘developer’. Similarly, Kazansky (2016) found, based on her experience with providing information security training for human rights activists, that training is often designed towards the individual user rather than as a collective project that considers the enabling social structures needed for secure communication to become an integrated activist practice. Policy reform advocacy, meanwhile, does not address individual users but, nevertheless, the specific audience of policymakers and thereby erects different boundaries, based on issue-specific expertise and discourse (Hintz and Brown, forthcoming).
Such approaches, Aouragh et al. contend, configure modes of delegation that come to negate possibilities for overlaps between different justice claims and reproduce ‘a perhaps unintended hierarchy based on traditional models of production’ (2015: 216). Based on their research with ‘tech justice’ activists, they therefore argue for connecting security engineers with the language of collective action within a political project and, more broadly, for dissolving the perceived divisions of justice claims that persist between these activist camps.
Building on this ambition, we want to further advance the debate based on our research with ‘social justice’ activists by suggesting a broader framework that may allow us to develop a more integrated understanding of data-driven surveillance in relation to social justice agendas. As outlined above, the terms upon which resistance to surveillance has predominantly been approached have placed data debates within the parameters of particular expert communities, namely technology activists and digital rights groups. This techno-legal framing of resistance, although partly dictated by the activist opportunity structures currently available, limits our understanding of the implications of these data-driven practices that underpin contemporary surveillance and dilutes their politicized nature. The consequences of this limitation include, for example, a relatively uncritical perspective among digital rights advocacy communities on ‘targeted’ surveillance which is often seen as a benign alternative to indiscriminate ‘mass’ surveillance but abstracts from the experiences of minority communities and political activists as typically targeted groups (Gürses et al., 2016). Further, this limited perspective may lead to a distinction of industry surveillance as largely politically benevolent and the turn to the tech companies of Silicon Valley as our ‘protectors’ in the counter-surveillance struggle, armed with PR-friendly encryption tools. As Gürses et al. (2016) suggest, these problematic positions point to the need for a political analysis as our starting point for countering the systems of digital surveillance that have been developed; one that simultaneously broadens the discussion beyond the narrow confines of techno-legal parameters and speaks to the concerns of activists across technology and social justice camps.
As part of such an analysis, we advance the notion of ‘data justice’ as a way to foreground and highlight the place of data-driven surveillance, and related Big Data decision-making and governance, in conceptions of social justice. Whilst recognizing the procedural inference in the term ‘justice’, by data justice we are referring to the implications that data-driven processes at the core of surveillance capitalism have for the pursuit of substantive social and economic justice claims. This, we suggest, encompasses both the targeting of surveillance against activists leading to repression, self-censorship and chilling-effects in the organization, mobilization, and pursuit of social justice as well as the role of surveillance in (new) forms of governance that shape society in line with particular political and economic agendas. As Andrejevic (2015) has outlined, the nature of the surveillance programmes revealed in the Snowden leaks are intimately linked to a system of economics and a state-corporate interest in detecting and predicting patterns, profiling and sorting groups rather than individual people. Big Data surveillance brings up issues not just of privacy, but also of social sorting and preemption (Lyon, 2014). Although much more difficult to ascertain in concrete terms, this has significant implications for people's lives and the society they will live in. Data justice as a framework is intended to guide a research trajectory and types of activity that bring out and underscore this politics of data-driven surveillance and the implications of these practices for substantive social justice claims. This is obviously a bigger task beyond our current scope, but here we can highlight some questions that have already planted the seeds for further illumination and advancement of our understanding of the veillance debate.
The term ‘data justice’ has already been used in projects such as the ‘Data Justice’ organization, founded in 2015, a ‘consumer group’ based in the United States which seeks to approach Big Data as an economic justice issue, focusing on how uses of Big Data leads to exploitation and economic inequality for consumers, workers, and the public (Baker, 2015). These sorts of initiatives speak partly to the framework we are proposing here by reframing data debates to consider how digital infrastructures and data-driven processes have implications for broader society beyond individual privacy. We want to further progress this agenda by suggesting that ‘data justice’ can provide a conceptual foundation for exploring how data-driven surveillance implicates different understandings of social justice as well as a potential action-building tool for addressing such implications. This would require us to further examine the ideological basis of data-driven processes, situating this form of governance within a political agenda that extends to particular conceptions of society and the demarcation of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ citizens. Furthermore, it would require us to scrutinise the interests and power relations at play in ‘datafied’ societies that enfranchise some and disenfranchise others, highlighting also forms of exclusion and discrimination. Moreover, it would require us to stipulate how society is and ought to be organized in relation to digital infrastructures – on social, political, economic, cultural and ecological terms – that can consider and develop the meaning of justice in this context. This would include questions of how to think about notions such as security, autonomy, dignity, fairness and sustainability in a data-driven society and make us ask what, for example, the implications are for workers’ rights, or for community cohesion and discrimination; for welfare and inequality; or for the environment, for poverty, and for conflict. Most importantly, advancing this agenda would transform surveillance from a special-interest “issue” into a core dimension of social, political, cultural, ecological and economic justice, and thus respond to the central position of data-driven processes in contemporary capitalism.
By advancing the framework of ‘data justice’ our point is to illustrate how the relationship between political activism and surveillance is not one in which activists are only at risk for expressing dissent, but one in which the very infrastructures of surveillance (dataveillance) have direct consequences for the social justice claims they are seeking to make. That is, we can use this notion to argue that concerns with the collection, use and analysis of data need to be integrated into activists’ agendas, not just to protect themselves, but also to achieve the social change they want to make. As such, this may offer an opportunity to bridge the current disconnect we have found in anti-surveillance resistance and provide resources for a political and social movement that can engage with data debates beyond techno-legal solutionism. This, we would argue, is urgently needed in the shift towards data-driven forms of governance rooted in surveillance capitalism.
Conclusion
The Snowden leaks provided substantial evidence for the extensive nature of surveillance rooted in the mass collection of digitally enabled data (or Big Data) and illustrated the intricate relationship between the infrastructures of our everyday technologies and emerging forms of governance and control. Pertinent debate, activity and advocacy has flourished in response to the Snowden leaks, opening up opportunities for many existing technology- and digital rights-concerned communities to mobilise, expand and influence political processes and social attitudes. However, due to the dominant political culture and opportunity structures available to active participants in the resistance against surveillance, debates on data collection and use, and critical engagement with the veillant panoptic assemblage more broadly, have struggled to move beyond the participation of particular expert communities. A concern with digital surveillance, in this context, has come to be viewed as a ‘specialist’ issue in which achieving ‘tech justice’ is predominantly centred on technical and legal solutions relating to privacy and data protection. We have seen this in our research on attitudes and practices amongst political activists engaged in broader social justice issues, from environmentalism to labour justice to anti-discrimination, who have predominantly come to view digital surveillance as an issue that does not substantially feature on their agenda.
Rather, what emerges in the broader ecology of civil society pursuits of justice, is a kind of ‘disconnect’ between those concerned with technology issues and those concerned with social justice issues as two separate camps. Of course, we recognise that this comes partly from the necessity to set priorities and focus on particular topics when activist energies and resources are frequently limited. However, we argue that the nature of surveillance revealed in the Snowden leaks speaks to an urgent need to broaden the parameters for how digital surveillance has been understood and discussed that implicates activists across the tech and social justice camps, collectively. The ability to monitor, record and store digital transactions on a massive scale creates an environment that substantially limits the possibilities for dissent and protest, whether through self-censorship, chilling-effects or active repression. Moreover, it constitutes a form of governance that is rooted in and simultaneously advances particular social, economic and political agendas that enfranchise some whilst disenfranchising others, and prioritizes certain ways of organizing society at the expense of others.
By introducing the notion of ‘data justice’ in this article we want to contribute to the shift and broadening of our understanding of the role of data-driven surveillance in contemporary society. Although only introducing it here, by advancing data justice as a framework for debate and research, we want to set the parameters for a discussion on dataveillance that can illuminate the implications for social justice, both in terms of the conditions for communicating autonomously and practicing dissent as well as the social and economic (in)justices that are produced by this form of governance (and, therefore, what might be the possible alternatives). Referring to ‘data justice’ recognises the political economy of the system that underpins the possibilities for extensive surveillance, whilst drawing attention to the political agenda that is driving its implementation. This, we argue, comes to impact on political activists and their pursuits of social justice in significant ways and provides an impetus for a broad collective movement to engage in pertinent data-related debates. Such a collective approach is needed, we suggest, in light of a shift to surveillance capitalism in which the collection, use and analysis of our data increasingly comes to shape the opportunities and possibilities available to us and the kind of society we live in.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
Research for this article was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council of the UK (ESRC).
