Future Freedom: The Fight Against Digital Mass Surveillance After Snowden

In 2013, leaked documents revealed that the National Security Agency (NSA) secretly collected, stored, and analyzed people's digital information on a massive scale. Moreover, they showed that intelligence services in other Western liberal democracies like France, Germany, and the United Kingdom were also engaging in these activities. Outrage over the revelations sparked a worldwide debate about the surveillance practices of the intelligence services and ignited a fierce legal and political fight to contest and limit these practices.

As this fight developed over the years, a paradoxical pattern emerged. At first, opponents of the revealed surveillance practices were able to use the secret information about the activities of the intelligence services to catapult the right to privacy and other civil liberties to the top of the political agenda. As their position gained more and more momentum, opponents achieved important legal and legislative successes. Court cases were won. Legislative reform was in the air. It seemed that a perfect storm for limiting digital mass surveillance was about to hit the intelligence community. Then, in a period of only a few years, these hard-won achievements were reversed. Across Europe and in the United States, new legislation was passed that expanded the powers of the intelligence services again. Even worse, it put these powers on firmer legal foundations - which they lacked before - making it harder to challenge them again.

How was it possible that governments could expand the surveillance activities of the intelligence services despite successful efforts contest and limit them? How could this happen at a time when protecting the right to privacy was one of the most important political issues?

This study seeks to contribute to the ongoing fight against digital mass surveillance by giving an explanation for the expansion of the powers of the intelligence services despite earlier successes at limiting them after the Snowden revelations. I argue that the particular politicization of digital mass surveillance - how the issue has been translated into a politically relevant matter in need of a policy solution - simultaneously created an opening for opponents to successfully challenge the activities of the intelligence services and provided an opportunity for governments to legalise and further expand digital mass surveillance later on. More specifically, I argue that opponents were compelled to articulate their concerns in a way that had a bias towards the status quo in order to have them recognized as politically relevant. This meant that the successful politicization of claims against digital mass surveillance had two results. On the one hand, the recognition of these claims as urgently in need of a policy solution was an essential precondition for opponents to secure their wins. On the other hand, this also inadvertently created favourable conditions for proponents of digital mass surveillance to expand it again. In other words, Western governments were not only able to expand the powers of the intelligence services despite successful contestation to limit them, but actually through these very efforts.

More specifically, I contend that the politicization of this issue in relation to the core values of liberty and security compelled opponents of digital mass surveillance to articulate their claims and grievances in a way that had a bias towards the status quo, actually favouring the eventual expansion of the surveillance powers of the intelligence services. Crucially then, Western governments were not only able to expand the powers of the intelligence services despite successful contestations of digital mass surveillance, but actually through these very efforts.