uni'wissen 02-2015_ENG

Dr. Elisa Orrù studied philosophy at the University of Milan, Italy. In 2008 she earned her PhD from the University of Pisa, Italy, with a dissertation on legitimation issues in international criminal law. She has conducted research in Princeton, USA, at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg, and several times at the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law in Freiburg. Since 2013 Elisa Orrù has been writing her habilitation thesis at the University of Freiburg’s Faculty of Humanities. She is a research assistant at the Centre for Security and Society and at the Husserl Archive. Photo: Thomas Goebel Further Reading Foucault, M. (1977): Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison. New York. Orrù, E. (2013): Report on methodology and criteria for incorporating perception issues in the design phase of new surveillance systems. SURVEILLE Deliverable 3.6, published online at http://surveille.eui.eu/research/publications. Nissenbaum, H. F. (2009): Privacy in context: Technology, policy, and the integrity of social life. Stanford. in the European Union. The concept of privacy is also a focus of her analysis in this project: “My thesis is that we should not give up the concept but extend it to include citizens’ perceptions.” Classical definitions of privacy are primarily about excluding others or controlling access to the private space. That is too static and too narrow for Orrù. She prefers the definition of the cultural and media studies scholar Helen Nissenbaum, who understands privacy as “contextual integrity”: “Every communication situation involves legal norms, but even more important are social norms that are often not explicitly stated,” explains Orrù. “According to this understanding, there is privacy when we can be sure that these norms are being respected.” In other words, we must be certain that doctors won’t publish the results of diagnoses with our name on the Internet and that friends won’t pass on secrets that we have entrusted to them. Means of Power In politics, this concept can help us to grasp violations of privacy that would otherwise be concealed, says Orrù – and it leads us to the question of who makes and has control over which rules. “Surveillance is always also a means of power.” She aims to study three European surveillance initiatives: the EURODAC database, which contains the fingerprints of asylum-seekers, the “Schengen Information System” (SIS II), which was introduced to compensate for the dis- continuation of border controls, and the plans for data retention laws. “In the realm of freedom, security, and law, the distribution of powers between the national states and the EU is still unstable,” she says. The political decision-making processes in this context have not yet been com- pleted, and it is therefore easy to observe how power is distributed. The historian and social philosopher Michel Foucault has also studied the interplay between surveillance and power. He invokes the idea of the panopticon, a type of prison building with a watchtower in the center allowing all of the inmates to be watched at all times. “They know that they can always be watched,” says Orrù. That alone is a form of discipline – regardless of whether they are actually being watched or not. Totalitarian states in the Eastern bloc influenced the behavior of their citizens in a similar way, leading them to always expect that the authorities were keeping a file on them, even when this was not actually the case. This brings Elisa Orrù back to the starting point of her considerations. She stresses again the importance of taking into account the per- ceptions of the people who are, or at least think they are, being kept under surveillance. In the case of a public building in which cameras were placed for a time, for example, it only came out under the pressure of protests that they were fake. “If all we are doing is making sure that no private data is violated, we will come to the con- clusion that there is no problem here because nothing was collected and kept on file,” says Orrù, “but we should indeed have a problem with it.” www.surveille.eu for Orrù. She prefers the definition of the cultural and media studies scholar Helen Nissenbaum, who understands privacy as “contextual integrity”: “Every communication situation involves legal norms, but even more important are social norms that that they can always be watched,” says Orrù. That alone is a form of discipline – regardless of whether they are actually being watched or not. Totalitarian states in the Eastern bloc influenced the behavior of their citizens in a similar way, leading them to always expect that the authorities were keeping a file on them, even when this was not actually the case. point of her considerations. She stresses again the importance of taking into account the per- ceptions of the people who are, or at least think they are, being kept under surveillance. In the case of a public building in which cameras were placed for a time, for example, it only came out under the pressure of protests that they were fake. “If all we are doing is making sure that no Photo: stockphoto-graf/Fotolia uni wissen 02 201538 uni wissen 02201538

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