Wild Eavesdropping: Observations on Surveillance, Conspiracy, and Truth in East Central Europe

Abstract A debate on how to use surveillance technology to maintain public security while still respecting civil liberties has seized the Euro‐American public sphere. These deliberations are not new. Their current form has been shaped by a global “war on terrorism,” Edward Snowden's 2013 revelations on the National Security Administration's surveillance, and repeated terrorist attacks in Western Europe. The dominant frame of current discourse has been shaped along axes of public security versus civil liberties, and global terror versus democracy. Other vectors bisect this field. Webcams, security cameras, Internet search history, and records of the patterns to online social networks facilitate the increased monitoring of behavior in the developed world. While much of this surveillance—the array of means for monitoring someone else's behavior—has earned grudging acceptance as inherent to the infrastructure of a modern life, reception of its forms can vary.