Surveillance, Privacy and the Politics of Personal Information in West Germany, 1960-1990

FAIN: FT-61520-14

Lawrence Frohman
SUNY Research Foundation, Stony Brook (Stony Brook, NY 11794-0001)

Surveillance and privacy are two of the primary concepts through which we seek to make sense of modernity and of a world in which virtually all forms of social interaction are now digitally mediated. They have already become--and are certain to remain--two of the most contentious policy issues of our age. From 1960 to 1990 West Germany pioneered both the use of new information technologies and computer privacy laws to regulate the processing of personal information. I argue that during these years the systematization of population surveillance gave rise to a new form of social politics, the politics of personal information, to new discourses on privacy, which became the primary means of theorizing the expansion of such surveillance, and to a corresponding privacy-based social movement. What can these precocious West German developments tell us about privacy, surveillance, and social power in modern information societies?

Associated Products

Datenschutz, the Defense of Law, and the Debate Over Precautionary Surveillance: The Reform of Police Law and the Changing Parameters of State Action in West Germany (Article)
Title: Datenschutz, the Defense of Law, and the Debate Over Precautionary Surveillance: The Reform of Police Law and the Changing Parameters of State Action in West Germany
Author: Larry Frohman
Abstract: This essay uses the development of police law in the 1970s and 1980s to assess the extent to which new forms of police surveillance were transforming a state based on the rule of law into a postliberal preventive or precautionary surveillance state. It argues that Datenschutz served as the primary means for theorizing the problems with new surveillance practices and defending both the idea of law and a liberal economy of informational restraint against the transgressive logic of precautionary surveillance. However, liberal principles were never abandoned completely, and at the turn of 1990s police law was shaped by the unresolved conflict between two competing conceptions of the role of the state.
Year: 2015
Format: Journal
Publisher: German Studies Review 38:2 (May 2015), 305-25

The Politics of Personal Information. Surveillance, Privacy, and Power in West Germany (Book)
Title: The Politics of Personal Information. Surveillance, Privacy, and Power in West Germany
Author: Larry Frohman
Abstract: In the 1970s and 1980s West Germany was a pioneer in both the use of the new information technologies for population surveillance and the adoption of privacy protection legislation. During this era of cultural change and political polarization, the expansion, bureaucratization, and computerization of population surveillance disrupted the norms that had governed the exchange and use of personal information in earlier decades and gave rise to a set of distinctly postindustrial social conflicts centered on the use of personal information as a means of social governance in the welfare state. Combining vast archival research with a groundbreaking theoretical analysis, this book gives a definitive account of the politics of personal information in West Germany at the dawn of the information society.
Year: 2021
Primary URL: https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/FrohmanPolitics
Publisher: Berghahn
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 978-1-78920-94
Copy sent to NEH?: No

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