Michigan Technological University Digital Commons @ Michigan Tech Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports - Open Reports 2013 The Problematic of Privacy in the Namespace Randal Sean Harrison Michigan Technological University Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.mtu.edu/etds Part of the Communication Commons Copyright 2013 Randal Sean Harrison Recommended Citation Harrison, Randal Sean, "The Problematic of Privacy in the Namespace", Dissertation, Michigan Technological University, 2013. https://doi.org/10.37099/mtu.dc.etds/666 Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.mtu.edu/etds Part of the Communication Commons THE PROBLEMATIC OF PRIVACY IN THE NAMESPACE By Randal Sean Harrison A DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY In Rhetoric and Technical Communication MICHIGAN TECHNOLOGICAL UNIVERSITY 2013 © 2013 Randal Sean Harrison This dissertation has been approved in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY in Rhetoric and Technical Communication. Department of Humanities Dissertation Advisor: Dr. Jennifer Daryl Slack Committee Member: Dr. Patty Sotirin Committee Member: Dr. Diane Shoos Committee Member: Dr. Charles Wallace Department Chair: Dr. Ronald Strickland I dedicate this work to my family for loving and supporting me, and for patiently bearing with a course of study that has kept me away from home far longer than I’d wished. I dedicate this also to my wife Shreya, without whose love and support I would have never completed this work. 4 Table of Contents Chapter 1. The Problematic of Privacy ........................................................................ 7 1.1 Privacy in Crisis ................................................................................................. 7 1.2 The Emerging Surveillance Society ................................................................. 11 1.3 Conjunctural Analysis and the Problematic of Privacy .................................... 16 1.4 The Namespace ................................................................................................ 19 1.5 Radical Contextualism and Articulation .......................................................... 21 Chapter 2. A New Public Narrative of Privacy .......................................................... 26 2.1 Privacy in the Popular Media ........................................................................... 26 2.2 Ideology and Common Sense .......................................................................... 27 2.3 Privacy in the News .......................................................................................... 31 2.4 Big Brother as Common Sense State ............................................................... 33 2.5 Privacy in Film ................................................................................................. 46 2.6 Privacy in Video Games ................................................................................... 50 Chapter 3. Privacy and Security in the Surveillance State .......................................... 55 3.1 Societies of Control .......................................................................................... 55 3.2 The Snowden Revelations ................................................................................ 59 3.3 Total Information Awareness .......................................................................... 64 3.4 The Nascent Privacy Problematic .................................................................... 69 3.5 Twenty-first Century Statecraft ....................................................................... 74 Chapter 4. Privacy and Convenience in the Information Economy .......................... 84 4.1 Ambient Findability ......................................................................................... 84 4.2 The Information Economy .............................................................................. 88 4.3 Data Brokerages ............................................................................................... 91 4.4 Social Networking ............................................................................................ 93 4.5 The Californian Ideology ................................................................................. 95 Chapter 5. Rearticulating the Namespace .................................................................. 97 5.1 Hegemonic Crisis ............................................................................................ 97 5.2 Individual Praxis ............................................................................................ 100 5.3 Collective Praxis ............................................................................................. 103 5.4 Expert Praxis .................................................................................................. 104 5.5 War of Position .............................................................................................. 106 5.6 Cultural Studies ............................................................................................. 111 References ................................................................................................................ 114 Appendix A .............................................................................................................. 138 5 Acknowledgments I have been blessed by a community of friends and colleagues at Michigan Technological University. There are too many to name individually, but I count myself blessed to have collaborated with them and shared in their lives. Most important to my success in graduate school has been my excellent committee, Dr. Jennifer Slack, Dr. Patricia Sotirin, Dr. Diane Shoos, and Dr. Charles Wallace. I can’t begin to describe my debt to these four scholars. I am exceedingly grateful for the opportunity to work with them. 6 Abstract In the twenty-first century, the issue of privacy—particularly the privacy of individuals with regard to their personal information and effects—has become highly contested terrain, producing a crisis that affects both national and global social formations. This crisis, or problematic, characterizes a particular historical conjuncture I term the namespace. Using cultural studies and the theory of articulation, I map the emergent ways that the namespace articulates economic, juridical, political, cultural, and technological forces, materials, practices and protocols. The cohesive articulation of the namespace requires that privacy be reframed in ways that make its diminution seem natural and inevitable. In the popular media, privacy is often depicted as the price we pay as citizens and consumers for security and convenience, respectively. This discursive ideological shift supports and underwrites the interests of state and corporate actors who leverage the ubiquitous network of digitally connected devices to engender a new regime of informational surveillance, or dataveillance. The widespread practice of dataveillance represents a strengthening of the hegemonic relations between these actors—each shares an interest in promoting an emerging surveillance society, a burgeoning security politics, and a growing information economy—that further empowers them to capture and store the personal information of citizens/consumers. In characterizing these shifts and the resulting crisis, I also identify points of articulation vulnerable to rearticulation and suggest strategies for transforming the namespace in ways that might empower stronger protections for privacy and related civil rights. 7 Chapter 1. The Problematic of Privacy 1.1 Privacy in Crisis In the 1999 episode “The Short List” of the Emmy Award-winning television show The West Wing, U.S. President Bartlet (Martin Sheen) and his advisors are rethinking their initial choice for a Supreme Court nominee based on their discovery that the nominee does not recognize privacy as a guarantee of the United States Constitution. Deputy Communications Director Sam Seaborn (Rob Lowe) argues the importance of nominating a different judge—one with a stronger belief in privacy rights for citizens, particularly in light of the shifting technological landscape: It’s not just about abortion, it’s about the next twenty to thirty years. The twenties and thirties it was about the role of government. The fifties and sixties it was civil rights. The next two decades are going to be privacy. I’m talking about the internet. I’m talking about cell phones. I’m talking about health records and who’s gay and who’s not. And moreover, in a country born on the will of being free, what could be more fundamental than this? What The West Wing so presciently foregrounded is the degree to which changes to privacy law and policy, economic and cultural structures and practices wrought in and through new technologies would become a central concern, for some the central concern, in an increasingly connected, information-dense, global space of networked computer media—in short, a privacy crisis. As Google’s privacy disclaimer, so unwittingly pregnant-with-meaning, recently put it: “We’re changing our privacy policy. This stuff matters.” Of course, if an anxious concern over the too-easy sacrifice of privacy remains a ubiquitous and familiar theme in our modern social imaginaries1, some concept of the importance of privacy has deep historical roots