Representations of Mass Surveillance in Data Protection Policy

This paper presents the results of a discourse analysis of data protection policy discussion and debate from the 1950s to the present day, focussing on "problem representations" (Bacchi 2012; Bacchi and Goodwin 2016) of mass surveillance. The paper traces the ways in which both potential ‘harms’ and ‘benefits’ of mass surveillance practices have been articulated and the underlying tensions between ‘free flow’ and rights-based discourses. Particular attention is paid to the emergence of these two discourses in the 1970s, in the discussions leading up to the publication of the Guidelines on the Protection of Privacy and Transborder Flows of Personal Data by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in 1980. These Guidelines formalised a set of ‘data protection principles’ which remain as a key feature of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). The paper illuminates key moments in data protection discourse in order to better understand how mass surveillance practices, once broadly considered verboten, are now commonplace in this current moment of legal, political, and social uncertainty.