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​During the Workshop “Privacy and Data Protection in Europe”, authors from all over Europe presented eleven papers on the topic, divided into four panels. Each presentation was followed by a discussion of the work by the participants under the chairmanship of Wolf J. Schünemann and Max-Otto Baumann.

Presentations by Bernhard Gross, Barbara Büttner and Fabian Pittroff started the workshop off in the panel “fundamental questions and challenges of privacy and data protection”, giving an insight into current research and challenges in the field.

In his presentation on “Editorial codes and the ethics of harvesting social media for journalistic purposes”, Bernhard Gross highlighted the nuances of the current discussion on the intersection of public interest and data protection. Before the backdrop of changing patterns of information gathering by media actors in times of social networks, he emphasized the question whether society and media actors need to differ between “public” and “published” information.

Consecutively, Barbara Büttner and Fabian Pittroff presented their paper on “The Strategy of Reterritorialization and its Democratic Alternatives: Traditions and Possibilities of the Privacy Discourse in Germany”. Therein, the authors, together with co-authors Jörn Lamla and Carsten Ochs, explore the German discourse on Schengen National Routing (SNR). The discourse clearly shows, according to the authors, that the so-called “democratic protectionism”, that was the mode of politics on which the try for the re-nationalization of the internet in Germany hinged, failed in the end. Economic as well as societal actors, such as the net community, quickly seized the debate and pushed ideas of reterritorialization, as a mode of spatial regulation of privacy, out of the discourse.

The second panel focused on “discourses on privacy, security, and surveillance”. Linda Monsees elaborated regarding “Privacy and Security in the German Public Discourse” how the focus on the individual in the debate on encryption hinders societal solutions to the global surveillance problem.

Minna Tiainen showed in her presentation of her paper “justifying the question of electronic surveillance: the discursive construction of Edward Snowden's NSA revelations in the Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat” the strong parallels between the “discourse of threat” and the “discourse of security” in the Finnish media discourse. These parallels are insofar surprising, as the discourses’ aims are diametral: “for” and, respectively, “against” global surveillance.

Verena Weiland’s presentation titled “Analysing the French discourse about ‘surveillance and data protection’: Methodological reflections and results in terms of content” reflected the aforementioned differentiation between the two kinds of discourses and was able to show that a similar structure of discourses exists in the French debate.

Concluding the second panel, Stefan Steiger showed, using a role-theoretical model, that regarding “the unshaken role of British intelligence services” (subtitle: “The British cyber security discourse after the Snowden revelations”) the legitimacy of the GCHQ is mostly dependent on the construction of its role as a loyal provider of services by “significant others” in the British government.

The presentations in the second panel accentuated, once again, the plurality of methods used by the participants, as well as the spatial-comparative element: the fruitfulness of comparing mechanisms of (de-)legitimization of global surveillance in European discourses.

The second day of the workshop focused on data protection as a prerequisite to privacy. The third panel, thus, addressed “The legal dynamics of privacy and data protection in Europe”, starting off with a paper by Ana Azuermendi. In “The Spanish Origins of the European ‘Right to be Forgotten: the Mario Costeja and Les Alfacs Cases’”, she explained that the Spanish discourse on privacy produced a new and genuine concept in national law that is now spreading on the European level.

Another juridical perspective was provided by Milan Tahraoui, whose presentation on “Technical-legal and conceptual challenges with regard to the role delegated to private search in the ECJ Google Spain case on the so-called ‘right to be forgotten’” focused on the difficulties regarding privacy that stem from the position of powerful private actors (e.g. search engine operators). Their actions can barely be limited by legal frameworks, as the latter turn out to be, in case of the EU, too weak.

Concordant to this focus on the European level, Ariadna Ripoll Servent analysed in “Protecting or Processing? Recasting EU Data Protection Norm“ the discursive framing of the EU data protection reform negotiations and, basing on this, laid out the dynamics within the supranational negotiations. In doing so, the contrast between security as data protection and security as protection from crime and terrorism became apparent once again in the workshop, in this case, as partially competing logics from the pillars I & III of the now obsolete EU-contract architecture. Here, Ripoll-Servent was able to show, that (so far), especially the European Parliament is willing to give priority to data protection, if only on the supranational level. Likewise, she shows how the supranational level produces another framing, one of “encroachment” of the supranational on the national level.

The last panel of the Workshop changed the geographic focus, and took Eastern Europe into view - “Privacy and data protection in Eastern European countries”. Valentina Jasmontaite and Lina Pavel Burloiu argued in their comparative paper on “Eastern European Countries Introduce Cybersecurity Laws: Societies’ attitudes to the loss of privacy“ that the Romanian Cybersecurity Law did not comply with neither the Romanian national constitution nor with EU regulations. Thereby, they showed that it stood in stark contrast to its Lithuanian pendant, which, albeit allowing for deep interventions on behalf of national security, adheres more closely to the Network and Information Security (NIS) Directive of the EU.

Nadjeda Mironov added to the preceding East European case study with her detailed account of the “Europeanization of data protection in the Republic of Moldova“, in which she identified the “Two Moldovas”, one open for data sharing and one rooting for privacy. Thereby, she was able to highlight how Moldova, as a member of the EU Eastern Partnership, has been taken in by the dynamic of Europeanization in the field of data protection and is now partaking in the dynamic development process of EU internet policies.

The participants agreed to publish their works in the near future in order to incorporate the rich insights from the issue-specific as well as from the geographic comparisons into the current academic debate. The editing process of the compendium is set to commence in the first half of 2016.

The workshop concluded with a visit to the exhibition “Global Control and Censorship” at the ZKM - Zentrum für Kunst und Medien Karlsruhe (Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe). The exhibition shows numerous artworks on the relation between privacy and surveillance and has been conceptualised by international artists and activists, as well as journalist and even scientists (not least by the Internet Governance Group at Heidelberg University). The exhibition will be shown in Karlsruhe until May 2016.

The organisers would like to thank the Thyssen Foundation and the Field of Focus 4 for the generous support, without which the workshop could not have taken place. They would like to extend their thanks to the co-hosting John-Stuart-Mill-Institute and ZKM-Medienmuseum Karlsruhe as well.

 

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Dr. Wolf J. Schünemann

Institut für Politische Wissenschaft

Phone: +49 6221-54 3186

wolf.schuenemann@ipw.uni-heidelberg.de

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