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。中央情报局创建了名为HYDRA和NADIS的项目，由德国内部情报机构Bundesamt fr Verfassungsschutz运营，目标是可疑的个人和组织。这在两国引发了社会和政治运动，由于担心个人自由受到威胁，要求废除这种系统，或者至少公开收集的数据及其使用方式。拟议的研究项目分析了这些数据收集系统的演变，作为基于观察的可见性概念中建立的两个相反的透明度维度的冲突。它将以两个密切相关的北美和西德案例研究为例，研究这种二分法，作为20世纪70年代和80年代自由民主的冲突构成部分，在这种冲突中，情报机构收集个人数据与公众对保护私人信息以及对这些活动负责的要求发生冲突。这种相互可见性的冲突是如何、为什么以及以何种方式发生变化的？本研究项目采用政治史、技术史以及文化社会学的理论方法，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期“内部安全”体系扩张之间的矛盾关系，更好地理解整个时期，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".