Theresia Reinhold

Data retention, state-sponsored attacks on Twitter, journalists being blocked from doing their work, Big Data and still “Nothing to Hide”? Despite the many threats faced by a growing number of people and with more and more people fighting against surveillance, data retention and the misuse of Big Data, we still do not reach the mainstream. This talk tries to understand why we “lost the people” on these topics.

Popular Culture picks up on a vast amount of political issues. We want to analyze how the re:presentation of Secret Services has changed in films and TV Shows after the leaks of Edward Snowden.

Popular Culture or “Mainstream”-Media is a means of transporting information to a lot of people in relatively little time and with low barriers concerning education, knowledge, class etc. Hence, Popular Culture usually has quite a big impact on collective memory and imagination of events and situations.

In this context we want to shed light upon the re:presentation of Secret Services since the Snowden Revelations focusing on films and TV Shows. For this research we also looked upon media published before June 2013 and try to understand how the re:presentation has, if so, changed afterwards and in which contexts Secret Services are pictured as “the good” or “the bad” side of a story.

Google's "thought experiment" is as unsurprising as its megalomania. But it entirely ignores the dangers that would inevitably follow.

Google's "thought experiment" video "The Selfish Ledger" was leaked in May 2018. In it, the company toys with the idea of What if your data does not belong to you, but to everyone in your lineage, maybe even to the society. And this data, this big book about you, can be accessed anytime. We have been talking about surveillance and privacy for years now, but what Google proposes in this video is bigger than this, more nuanced. Any comparisons to 1984 are obsolete because the proposition made is that behaviour of humans can be shaped - controlled to a point where they will be enforced - to help a greater good - which would be determined by Google and a set of artificial intelligence. My talk investigates the individual and societal implications that would follow such a powerful technology and describes how dangerous it would be for our future.

Information. What are they looking at? is a documentary film. It aims at inclusively sharing knowledge on privacy violations caused by measures of mass surveillance. The film will be easily accessible to as many people as possible. On the one hand, we will shoot and edit the film in a specific audio-visual language. On the other hand, we will realise the accessibility through the development of a supporting Open Source video playback application. Filmmakers can use this app to bridge barriers of exclusion that exist due to disability or missing language skills.

We aim at reaching an audience outside of digital enthusiasm, the mainstream media or highly privileged classes. Moreover, we focus on people who are excluded from the discourse due to language barriers and restricted access.

Our film will be available to a broad audience. What does this mean? First of all, it needs to be translated into at least 15 of the most-spoken languages in the world. Each language shall be translated into subtitles, closed captions, audio-description, sign-language, easy-to-read language, voice-over, and transcripts into braille. Thereby we offer a broad audience the opportunity to learn precisely what is at stake since mass surveillance became the norm.