Politics

Surveillance and privacy are more and more associated with the world of information and communication technologies (ICTs). As political and governance issues, privacy and surveillance are complex and multidimensional, with regard [Page 770]to both their regulation and their normative understanding. Before the explosion of the ICT that has been taking place since the mid-1990s, privacy violations were mainly considered twofold. On the one hand, the most discussed kind of privacy invasion was considered to be associated with the media reporting on the lives of public figures. On the other, state surveillance of citizens’ private lives, such as the U.S. Counterintelligence Program in the 1950s and 1960s, took aim at left-wing activists and political elites. The dilemmas of privacy no longer affect only elites or highly ...