The privacy paradox: how market privacy facilitates government surveillance

ABSTRACT

Although most surveillance studies scholars assume privacy is antithetical to surveillance, critics have recently warned that privacy-based criticisms may facilitate surveillance. That being said, we do not yet have data that show whether privacy claims were used in the past to legitimate government surveillance. This paper addresses that gap by analyzing claims made over one of the U.S.’s most controversial surveillance issues: government control over encryption technologies. A review of Congressional hearings and statements on the Congressional Record (n = 112) reveals that from 1993 to 1999, public debates were dominated by a market liberalization discourse in which participants supported loosening encryption controls as a way to protect privacy from criminal intrusions in market transactions. Also playing a role was a strong skepticism toward government power and a preference for markets as managers of crime prevention. Challenged by these critiques, lawmakers withdrew regulatory proposals and spent the following decade working quietly with private firms to ensure law enforcement surveillance capability. These findings show the expansion of privacy for consumers and entrepreneurs has in fact been used to achieve the contraction of privacy from law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

KEYWORDS:

• Economics
• iCTs
• politics
• regulation
• surveillance/privacy
• sociology

Acknowledgements

I am greatly appreciative of Dr. Sarah Quinn for her extensive comments and feedback on earlier drafts of this paper, and to the Center for Studies in Demography and Ecology at University of Washington for providing access to Atlas.ti.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributor

Karina Rider completed her MA in Sociology from University of Washington in 2016. She is currently beginning a sociology Ph.D. program at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. Her research interests include the formation of surveillance systems and the relationships between governments and markets [email: [email protected]].

Notes

1 Tandem Computers was a US-based computer manufacturing company.