Security, Democracy and Transparency. NADIS, HYDRA and the Rise of Electronic Data Sharing Systems in the Federal Republic and the USA

自20世纪60年代末以来，美国和联邦共和国的秘密情报机构一直在建立复杂的电子数据共享系统。中情局创建了一个名为Hydra和Nadis的项目，由德国内部情报机构联邦通信委员会(Bundesamt für VerfassungsSchutz)运营，目标是据称可疑的个人和组织。这引发了两国的社会和政治运动，由于担心个人自由受到威胁，这些运动呼吁废除这种系统，或者至少披露收集了什么数据以及这些数据是如何使用的。拟议的研究项目将这些数据收集系统的演变分析为建立在以观察为基础的能见度概念中的透明度的两个相对维度之间的冲突。它将以北美和西德两个紧密相连的案例研究为例，研究这种二分法，认为这是20世纪70年代和80年代自由民主国家的冲突组成部分，在这些冲突中，情报机构收集个人数据与公众保护私人信息和追究这些活动的责任的要求相冲突。这种互惠显性化的冲突是如何、为什么以及以何种方式发生变化的？该研究项目使用政治史、技术史以及文化社会学所发展的理论方法，旨在解释20世纪70年代和80年代西方民主国家社会自由化与同时扩大的“内部安全”制度之间的矛盾关系，以更好地理解这一时期的整体情况，同时阐明“大数据”的前史。

Since the late 1960s, secret intelligence agencies in the United States and the Federal Republic have been establishing complex electronic data-sharing systems. The creation of a CIA program named HYDRA as well as NADIS, operated by Germany’s internal intelligence agency, the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, was aimed at supposedly suspicious individuals and organizations. This brought about social and political movements in both nations that, fearing a threat to individual liberties, called for an abolition of such systems or at least the disclosure of what data were collected and how it was used. The proposed research project analyzes the evolution of these data-collection systems as a conflict of two opposing dimensions of transparency founded in an observation-based concept of visibility. It will examine this dichotomy, using as examples two closely interlinked North American and West German case studies, as a conflict constitutive for liberal democracies in the 1970s and 1980s in which gathering of personal data by intelligence agencies clashed with the publics’ demands for protection of private information as well as for accountability for these activities. How, why, and in which way did this conflict of reciprocal visibilization change? Using theoretical approaches used in political history, history of technology, as well as those developed by cultural sociology, the research project aims at contributing to an explanation of the paradoxical relationship of social liberalization and the contemporaneous expansion of “internal security” systems in Western democracies in the 1970s and 1980s, to a better understanding of this period as a whole, while illuminating the pre-history of "big data".