How can civic agency contest digital surveillance? This question was raised during the Session “Civic Agency and Digital Surveillance” at this year’s Data Justice Conference 2021. In their presentation “How to measure and compare civic participation in digital surveillance oversight” Sarah Naima Roller and Kilian Vieth-Ditlmann presented the GUARDINT research perspective that considers civic engagement as a central dimension in the oversight of surveillance by intelligence agencies. Focusing on three aspects of civic engagement in intelligence oversight – media scrutiny, civil society organization’s scrutiny and individual rights and remedies – they outlined the main methods that we developed to measure and compare civic oversight over time and between countries.
The Data Justice Conference 2021 on 20-21 May was held online under the motto of “Civic Participation in the Datafied Society” and explored themes around new forms of civic participation in a datafied world and possibilities of civic control over datafication. More information and the conference program can be found here.