*music*
Let's start. Be welcome!
More than two years ago, Edward Snowden's files have become public.
They went public
and the media went crazy.
And the public maybe not so much,
as you may have noticed amongst your friends and family,
as well I did.
A lot remains the same after Snowden's revelations,
even if people are concerned about surveillance.
The following talk by Arne Hintz and Lina Dencik from University of Cardiff explores
just that.
They analyzed how actually the media reacted to the relations made by Edward Snowden
and they also looked at how the public,
such as journalists and other people and activists, reacted to Edward Snowden's disclosures.
So please give a warm round of applause to Arne Hintz and Lina Dencik. Thank you!
*applause*
Arne: Thank you very much, there are still a few free seats over there.
Hello everybody, my name is Arne Hintz, this is Lina Denzik.
We are both from Cardiff University, from the school of journalism, media and cultural studies,
so not from the tech department.
We want to talk about some of the results of a research project
that we've been working on this year and for the past...
for a bit more than a year
and it's called "Digital Citizenship and Surveillance Society: UK State-Media-Citizen Relations
after the Snowden Leaks",
and it's about the implications of the Snowden leaks in four areas:
News media, civil society, policy and technology
and here what we want to do is present just a few findings from that project
and focus on two areas, the news media part and the civil society part.
It's all focused on the UK, the country where Cardiff University is located
so there won't be a lot of international comparisons, not a lot about Germany and so on,
but I think maybe at the end we can maybe draw some comparisons ourselves here in this room.
So this has been the project basically, the title as you see it over there.
The news media part has basically asked how the british media represented the Snowden
leaks and digital surveillance.
The society part is about questions such as: What is the nature of public knowledge with
regards to digital surveillance?
Are everyday communication practices changing?
And how are activists affected by the revelations of mass surveillance?
The policies part is still ongoing, it's still being developed
and it's about the current policy and regulatory framework of digital surveillance
and reform proposals and current reforms that are taking place.
And the technology part is about the technological infrastructure of surveillance
and techonological possibilities of counter-surveillance and resistance.
And then we want to bring all this together and ask: How does that re-define what we may
understand as digital citizenship?
The research team includes a number of people from Cardiff University
including us, including other lecturers, professors, staff members of Cardiff University
and a few research assistants and research associates that we employed for this,
plus a couple of guys from Oxford and one from Briar from a tech development project.
We also have an advisory board with some colleagues from academia
but also representatives of digital rights organisations, such as Open Rights Group,
Privacy International and others.
We have a project website, where you can learn more about the project, about the background
and also some preliminary findings.
We also had a conference earlier this year, in June, maybe some of you were there.
It was in Cardiff with some interesting speakers to the conference
and also combined the academic and the practical part a little bit.
So. A few glimpses of the results in these two areas that I mentioned.
So for the media research part we were interested in studying how the British news media have
represented the Snowden leaks and also digital surveillance more broadly.
And so we asked: How are debates over surveillance constructed? What are the angles and opinions?
What are usual sources? And so on.
We need to start on an anecdotal basis.
Some examples of media coverage that emerged very quickly after the Snowden revelations,
again in the UK press, which show different types of the coverage.
So we probably all know that the Guardian was very instrumental in the revelations
and provided a lot of information, really took this role of the fourth estate and of
investigative journalism quite seriously.
On the other hand, other newspapers like this one were very critical about the Snowden revelations
and also about the Guardian for informing people about these and running with these revelations.
And then there were others like this one, that was a famous example.
The former editor of the Independent, actually another liberal, middle ground, not really
left but at least not ultra conservative newspaper.
Who says "Edward Snowden's secrets may be dangerous, I would not have published them".
Okay, can debate that, but then he says "if MI5 warns that this is not in the public interest,
who am I to disbelieve them?".
*laughing*
That's an interesting understanding of journalism
and it was later retracted, it was debated quite a lot.
But we see that also this caution towards publishing something like this has been quite
wide-spread.
So what did we do?
Here's a timeline of Snowden and surveillance related coverage in the press in this case
in the UK.
And we looked at five case studies, five moments of coverage.
The first were the initial revelations of Snowden.
The second the interception of communications in foreign embassies and European Union offices
and spying on world leaders' phone communications, such as Angela Merkel's for example.
The third was the detention of Glenn Greenwald's partner David Miranda at Heathrow Airport
under anti-terror legislation.
Which raised debates around freedom of the press and national security.
Then we looked at the parliamentary report into the death of Lee Rigby.
Which was a case that was described as a terrorist attack on a British soldier on the streets
of London.
And it led to debates around social media companies' role in tackling terrorism.
And then finally the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris,
which prompted debates around digital encryption, freedom of speech and the resurrection of
the so-called Snooper's Charter in the UK,
the legislation around surveillance.
So a few results:
Snowden was clearly prominent in the media coverage, and generally was covered using
mostly neutral or even positive language,
described as a whistleblower as we see here at the bottom.
But if we look at the focus on issues around surveillance taken in the stories
and so at the context of coverage of surveillance, the most important one here has to do
as we can see there, probably it's a little bit small to read.
But the most important has to do with themes of terrorism,
with themes of the role of security agencies and government response.
So that's been very much the context of discussing in
most media coverage of discussing the context of discussing Snowden revelations
and surveillance more broadly.
And that is in stark contrast to discussing surveillance in terms of human rights, personal
privacy and freedom of the press.
In other words: rights and digital... and citizen-based perspectives on surveillance.
If we look at who was used as the sources in these stories, we see a pattern that is
actually quite typical in media sourcing generally.
Politicians are by far the most prominent source.
And that is not unusual at all.
But in this case it means that elite concerns around surveillance are most prominent, not
citizen concerns.
Political sources are framing the debate and how it is interpreted.
And so unsurprisingly then the oppinions raised by these sources are for example, as we see
there, that surveillance should be increased
or at least is necessary, at least has to be maintained.
That the Snowden leaks have compromised the work of intelligence services
and that social media companies should do more to fight terror and to increase their
own surveillance.
And so this dominant framework understands surveillance as a valuable activity,
and one for which both intelligence services and business actors have a responsibility.
Rather than it being primarily problematic for citizens.
And where it is presented as problematic, in the snooping on world leaders case study,
surveillance was seen as damaging to international relations and therefore problematic.
And that's something that is primarily of relevance to big players rather than ordinary
citizens.
So from these short glimpses, what we can see, just a few preliminary conclusions,
is that yes, there was extensive and often positive reporting on Snowden himself, in
some media at least.
But debates around surveillance are framed by elites, rather than citizens
and this elite-centered structure of news coverage means that the consequences and the
extent particularly of mass surveillance of citizens
are largely invisible in media coverage.
There's a strong framing on national security and so on,
but there is quite insufficient information on the practices and implications of surveillance
for normal citizens.
And so the issues of mass surveillance that were actually so central in Snowden's revelations,
remain relatively invisible in these debates,
apart from perhaps the Guardian coverage.
And so we could say that media justify and normalize current surveillance practices,
and that discussions about individual rights and human security are structurally discouraged.
That is the media part
Lina: so i'll just go briefly through some of our key findings for what we call the civil
society work stream on this.
Which looks at two aspects, so there is the public knowledge and attitudes on the Snowden
leaks and digital surveillance.
And then there's the second part which is particularly to do with responses amongst
political activists.
And for the first part, the public opinion research, we did a number of focus groups across
different demographics in the UK,
in order to get us a diverse range of opinions and views.
So that ranges from sort of high income people working the financial centre to local young
Muslim groups within Cardiff itself.
So a different range and different groups of people.
And then for the research on the activist responses we did a number of interviews with
different groups and organisations,
from large NGOs to smaller community groups.
Ranging from environmental groups, labour activists anti-war activists like "Stop the
War",
economic justice groups like "Global Justice Now", and community
and civil liberty groups such as also "CAGE", who spoke earlier today.
And talked with them.
So there's particularly groups that weren't digital rights activists or tech activists
specifically,
to try and get an understanding of how other political activists view this issue in particular
in response to the Snowden leaks.
So with the first bit on public opinion in our focus groups we had a range of themes.
Understanding and experiences of surveillance,
knowledge and opinions on Snowden leaks,
concerns with privacy and personal data,
questions around online behaviour and practices
and attitudes towards intelligence services.
So just a couple of key points from these focus groups:
First of all there was particularly low knowledge of who Edward Snowden was,
and even less knowledge of what the content of the leaks were.
And there was a lot of confusion in discussions with Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning and Wikileaks
really,
in terms of how people had come about this story.
And there were a lot of mix-up between those different stories.
In terms of actually understandings of surveillance all of this state surveillance isn't really
isolated in how people speak about it.
It overlaps also with questions of corporate surveillance and also peer surveillance or
employer surveillance and so forth.
So a lot of concerns are not necessarily about state surveillance per se and it's difficult
to isolate this as a particular issue.
And also when it comes to what constitutes surveillance,
the initial responses would be things like CCTV and sort of these types of things were
seen as more kind of real forms of surveillance.
But on the other hand it was very clear that people felt that the collection of data
and also including the collection of meta data, so distinguishing also from it being
not about content, constitutes surveillance.
So that was generally how people felt about what surveillance actually means.
In terms then of concerns around this, people's worries about state surveillance in particular
but dominantly concerns lack of transparency around it.
So a lack of transparency around what is being collected, but also how it's being used and
what it's being used for,
and also what the regulatory framework is that's in place surrounding it.
And also concerns over the lack of knowledge or understanding of how to actually opt out,
or resist or circumvent collection of data.
And in terms of sort of changes in online behaviour then,
these concerns do manifest themselves in some changes, but it's mainly in terms of sort
of self-regulating behaviour,
not saying things that are too controversial online and so forth,
rather than actually changes in using different tools or different communication platforms,
which wasn't prominent at all in our focus groups.
And what we also saw as sort of implications of this is that there was sort of an internalising
of some of these justifications
that have been very prominent also in the media, particularly this phrase: "nothing
to hide, nothing to fear".
Although in this case there was clear differences between the different demographic
groups that we spoke with.
Meaning that some people were more comfortable saying this phrase "nothing to hide, nothing
to fear",
whereas for example when we spoke to local Muslim groups they problematised this position
much more.
So there is definitely variation here in terms of that,
but there is a sense in which some of these justifications have been internalized.
And actually what we've seen is what we phrase this as a kind of surveillance realism,
is that surveillance has become normalized to such an extent,
it is difficult for people to really understand or imagine a society in which surveillance
doesn't take place.
Which might also relate to some of these questions around a lack of understanding of how to actually
resist this or opt out from this.
So i think a key point that we wanted to make with our research with these focus groups,
is
that we need to re-distinguish here between public consent versus public resignation, when
we talk about attitudes towards surveillance,
meaning that it isn't necessary that people consent to this going on
but actually have resigned to the fact that this is how society is being organised.
To then move on to interviews with activists.
We also had similar questions here,
so understanding and experiences of surveillance,
and knowledge and opinions of Snowden leaks and attitudes towards state surveillance.
And then we also wanted to explore this question around current online behaviour and practices
and whether there had been any changes and responses to the Snowden leaks.
And again just some key findings here on these questions:
So basically the activists that we spoke with were generally very aware of surveillance,
but again it was visible and physical forms of surveillance that were more prominent in
how activists spoke about it.
And this is particularly and perhaps particularly in the UK a context,
because there is a very troublesome history in the UK with police infiltration into activist
groups,
which has really impacted the activist scene quite a lot within the UK.
And often this was how the activists we spoke with would talk about surveillance first and
foremost,
rather than about these more virtual forms and visible forms of surveillance.
And also perhaps linked to that then despite this general awareness and wide-spread experiences
of surveillance,
the activists we spoke with didn't know a great deal of detail about the Snowden leaks
particularly.
And again there was this confusion with Chelsea Manning and Wikileaks.
And importantly also there was a sort of general expectation some of these quotes sort of highlight
that,
that state surveillance goes on, this is sort of expected.
And it's confirmed for activists when police are often there,
when they've organized events or protests and demonstrations,
or when activities have been intercepted.
And so the Snowden leaks in themselves and the realities of mass surveillance
came as little surprise to the political activists in the UK.
And perhaps also therefore or one other reason there hasn't been much response from the groups
we spoke with anyway,
in terms of changing online behaviour.
Particularly not directly because of Snowden.
And there are some exceptions here,
so for example Greenpeace did really change their communication behaviour
as a direct response to the Snowden leaks.
And CAGE i think as we heard earlier had recently also changed communication practices,
although at the time of our interview with them
they hadn't done as much as they're doing now.
Predominantly however there has been very little change in online behaviour,
and where it has taken place it's been part of a sort of longer term consciousness of
surveillance.
And the kind of changes we have seen more are things like face to face interaction.
So more face to face interaction, perhaps slightly more careful online communication.
But in terms of encryption:
We found little use of encryption again although with exceptions with some of the groups,
but partly this was due to questions of convenience,
and a perceived lack of technical ability.
Which I think are arguments that we're quite familiar with, when it comes to questions around
this.
But it was also related to a particular kind of rationale thas was expressed in some of
the interviews that we did,
that somehow using encrypted software is about being hidden or closed in some ways,
whereas activists strive for open and transparent organisations.
So that somehow contradicts this aim to be transparent and open and inclusive.
That somehow it also excludes people to start to use encrypted communication.
And linked to that also many of the activists we spoke with expressed the notion
that their activities and their role in society didn't constitute a need to really worry about
surveillance.
So despite being aware of surveillance and expecting it to go on,
there was a sense in which some of the organisations here
perceived themselves as fairly mainstream,
and therefore kind of safe.
And didn't really need to worry about surveillance.
And really that surveillance would only really need to be something to worry about,
if they moved into more radical forms of politics and action,
whatever that might be.
So in some ways we might think of this as kind of it acts to somewhat keep the mainstream
in check,
in that there would only surveillance becomes a variable only if you do certain kinds of
actions.
So and therefore also there wasn't really in terms of sort of questions around digital
rights and advocacy work around policies,
and policy around privacy and so forth,
wasn't something that the activists we spoke with, most of them anyway,
didn't see that as something that directly featured on their agenda.
So it wasn't really something that they were so concerned with themselves,
but rather that type of activism is kind of outsourced to other groups like digital rights
activists or tech activists.
That that's what they do, we are doing something else.
So I think what we sort of want to suggest with that is that our research seems anyway
to suggest,
that there are some limitations around resistance to surveillance,
in that this resistance seems to remain within the silos of only certain types of actors.
So we're sort of asking: How can we then move beyond that?
And start thinking of surveillance in terms of perhaps data justice,
or somehow thinking of how surveillance connects or resistance to surveillance connects
to broader social and economic justice agendas.
And of course some of this is already happening,
and some of it has been discussed here at this congress.
So for example how does data collection lead to discrimination?
Or how does it come to suppress dissent?
But also how does surveillance relate to working conditions and workers' rights for example,
or how does it link to inequality and poverty?
So I suppose our research suggests that we need to think about
that if encryption and technical solutions and discussions around digital rights such
as privacy
remain really within certain circles and perhaps events like this and so forth,
how can we get it to resonate with a broader public in some ways?
So — wow, we finished much faster than we thought we would.
But anyway. So basically we've had a snapshot now of sort of recent public debate,
and sort of ones that suggest that we might need to think about how to connect concerns
with surveillance,
that are discussed in places like this to other issues in order to resonate with a broader
public.
And that's it, we have time for questions
*applause*
A: Ask questions or comments, or additional information about some other projects.
Angel: Please, line up at the microphones, so you can speak clearly your questions into the
microphone, please.
The microphone in the back, please.
Go ahead.
Question: Hey. So do you think this lack of technical understanding of the Snowden leaks
might be due to Snowden fatigue, that is people getting really tired of reading a Snowden
article?
And another one and another one: Did you know you might have contributed to it?
Angel: Can you maybe repeat the question?
And if you leave the room, please do so quietly,
because we can't understand his question.
Q: Sorry. So the question is: This lack of understanding of the content of the Snowden leaks, maybe
on a basic technical level,
could that something that contributed to that, could that be Snowden fatigue?
L: And you're referring to this sort of drip-feed way of releasing those documents...
Q: Not necessarily criticizing the way it was released, but there was a hell of a lot
of content and a lot of people got bored of it.
L: Right. okay. *mumbling*
A: There's a bit of that I think probably that we see
and The Guardian at some point stopped their coverage or releasing more information
and then we've saw more information coming out through other sources and Intercept and
so on.
But I think what we are focusing on or what we saw in media coverage particularly,
were some deficiencies I think in the media coverage,
and we would create this link mainly between the lack of knowledge
and the deficiencies in the media coverage per se.
Not necessarily in The Guardian, but probably most other media organizations and other newspapers.
L: I think there's different views on that because a lot of people feel like it's stayed
in the public debate
or in the public realm, because there was a continuation of revelations that came after
each other,
rather than just doing this data dump thing and you know just doing everything in one
go.
So I think we will probably have been able to say the same thing if it was done differently
as well.
Angel: There is a question from the internet.
Q: Yes. Ifup is asking as far as he or she understood the people were not informed pretty
well on what really was revealed.
Wouldn't it have been the task of the media to inform them?
And how could they have been done better?
L: This seems to be a rhetorical question in that they didn't... yes
A: Well yes, they should have.
Ideally we would think that it is the task of the media to inform,
we saw that some media did inform, others did do pretty much the opposite.
Then there's the question how to improve that.
And what is the role of different types of media and alternative media
and what does need to change structurally in forms of mainstream media?
But that is a big debate.
L: And we should also say that we've done interviews with journalists, asking questions
as to why they covered this the way that they did.
And hopefully those interviews will reveal something more,
but those are still ongoing.
But we've had for example James Ball from The Guardian who came to our conference in
June,
and talked about some of the structural problems with a couple of journalists who cover security
issues.
And there's quite a lot of obstacles and so for them to do that in a critical and investigatory
way.
So I think those are the issues that we want to explore when we find out more through these
those interviews.
Angel: We have time for one last question, please make it short
Q: Hello. That's better
I'm not surprised to be honest,
we have seen a similar thing by John Oliver, so Last Week Tonight, I can only recommend
that scene.
So the question is only about what do we talk about,
so can everybody relate to that?
I have just one question to the first slides you have shown
the numbers: What do they reveal?
A: Numbers?
Q: In your first slides there were all of those bar charts with kind of numbers and
I was interested in those numbers.
A: Okay.
Q: I guess occurences.
A: Yes, so at the beginning we showed the time line of...
L: Numbers of mumbling
A: Ah yes. These were the dates of the publication and that is the volume of publication
again: Looking at the press in this case,
looking at not just The Guardian, but all kinds of other newspapers.
That's one part of the research and there will be another part of the research that
you will find information about this on the website,
which is about broadcasting, which is about TV and radio coverage.
But so far what we saw is that there is a fairly similar picture
in terms of how these curves developed,
and also in terms of the content of the coverage.
Angel: I'd say time is up.
Thank you very much Lina Dencik and Arne Hintz for your talk!
*applause*
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