In my recent blog-posts I heavily argued against key-escrow, an encryption mechanism that provides a government or law-enforcement agencies an additional key to encrypted user communication or data. This debate originally surfaced in 1993, known as the Clipper-Chip Debate, and quickly disappeared again when the Clinton-administration realized the protest they were facing. Today, the debate […]
Surfing like it’s 1997: Internet trends from a long-forgotten time
While researching for my Ph.D. I’am currently evaluating the origins of the Cyberwar and Information-war concepts. Thereby I stumble over many interesting books and articles from the early years of the Internet, in this case 1997. It is a book that describes „current“ trends in networking. Reading these trends 18 years later is quite interesting. […]
Snippets from research: Cryptowar of 1983?
My fellow readers might have noticed my occupation with British attempts to introduce legislation to allow law enforcement ‘exceptional access‘ to encrypted communication and data on British territory. Turns out that this debate is older than expected.
Staatliche Backdoors für Verschlüsselung: eine Gegenrede
David Cameron, der amerikanische FBI Direktor James Comey und natürlich auch der deutsche Innenminister verfolgten in den vergangenen Monaten eine Versicherheitlichungs-Kampagne die forderte, dass staatliche Sicherheitsbehörden einen Zugangsschlüssel zu Verschlüsselungstechnologien haben sollten (‘exceptional access‘). Mit anderen Worten soll eine Kopie der Schlüssel bei staatlichen Stellen gespeichert werden. Vorstellbar wäre, dass z.B. Zugangspasswörter, z.B. zu WhatsApp Chats, beim […]
New Publication: Schulze, M. 2015. Patterns of Surveillance Legitimization: The German Discourse on the NSA Scandal. Surveillance & Society 13(2): 197-217
This paper conceptualizes scandals as a special type of discourse in which the legitimacy of surveillance institutions and practices comes into question. Scandals force surveillance advocates to engage in legitimacy management practices (Suchmann 1995) and adopt legitimization strategies that can be observed. This paper presents a framework for the study of surveillance legitimizing strategies in […]