Terrorising who? Terrorism Countermeasures and the Threats to Democratic Privacy.

• The tightened security restrictions after the “911” terrorist attacks must clearly have repercussions for privacy, almost regardless of how this term is conceptualised. The notably fluid essentials of the privacy-term makes it hard to evaluate the actual impact of new regulation as a shared point of reference is in fact lacking (its definition has been a popular topic for vicious debate and acute dissention for more than a century). The nexus between security/terrorism and privacy now lodged at the very heart of “high-politics” life, is at the present plagued by a slanted and simplistic discourse between focused security “proponents” and more or less disarrayed privacy “proponents”. This is hardly ideal, as proper estimation of the potentially seismic privacy consequences of se-curity politics will be severely hampered. Building on earlier work, and using democratic theory as the foundation for a coherent privacy conceptuali¬sation, this paper will present a com-pre¬hensive and dispassionate framework capable of a dispassionate “cost-benefit privacy analysis” of security-related regulation. In it, de-mo¬¬cratic privacy will be operationalised as a set of communicative norms/ideals to be compared with the empirical data at hand. To demon¬strate the framework’s utility (which is aimed to be generic), the U.S. Patriot Act, and its democratic privacy impact, will be analysed and discussed.

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Statsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Political Science (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Democracy

Patriot Act

Terrorism

Privacy

Democratic Privacy

Publikations- och innehållstyp

kon (ämneskategori)

vet (ämneskategori)