Government and corporate surveillance: moral discourse on privacy in the civil sphere

ABSTRACT

Government-based and corporate-based surveillance have regularly been accused of violating personal privacy, an elemental right in a democratic society. In this comparative study, we examine how the institutional actor behind the privacy violation affects discourse surrounding the violations. Looking at newspaper and blog coverage surrounding two similar invasions of privacy – the NSA espionage programs that Edward Snowden brought to light alongside Verizon and other corporations’ use of a tracking code called a supercookie – we show key differences in the how media reactions to the topic are discursively constructed. Our findings show more moral polarization surrounding the characterization of the NSA and the perceived threat of their actions compared to media coverage on supercookies. These findings contribute to a deeper understanding of how neoliberal techniques of governance shift social perceptions of institutional actors and the potential harm they might produce in society.

KEYWORDS:

• Privacy
• civil society
• culture
• Snowden
• supercookie
• institutional actor

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Brian Connor is a Lecturer of Sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park. Current research interests and publications have centered on cultural discourse of politics, neoliberal governmentality, and theoretical explorations of culture and equality. His work has appeared in Social Currents, Cultural Sociology, Sociology Compass, and Thesis Eleven. Email: [email protected].

Long Doan is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland, College Park. He received his PhD in sociology from Indiana University. His research focuses on social psychological processes underpinning patterns of inequality. Current projects examine the emotional consequences of time use, responses to identity threats, and attitudes toward gender and sexuality. Email: [email protected].

Notes

1 There are, of course, also differences between the cases beyond the actors. First is the scope of the intrusion: PRISM has an international reach and affects all Americans, whereas Verizon only tracked their own users. Second is the potential consequences of the privacy intrusion, with the state having more abilities to sanction online behaviors. Third is the underlying motivation behind the spying, profit for Verizon and security for PRISM. We argue that these differences are inherently linked to the type of actor and, as we show in the results, are many of the reasons for different reactions toward these cases.

2 See Fuchs (2011) for a detailed discussion of some of these differences.

3 Verizon bought Engadget in 2015. Although Engadget claims that Verizon has no editorial control (Gorman, 2015), we de-emphasize Engadget articles after 2015 as a result. Conclusions are similar if we exclude Engadget entirely from the analysis.