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By exploring the political strategies that seek to advance and implement a "culture of cybersecurity" in Austria, we argue that the regimes of digital safety and security (DS&S) that are emerging worldwide should not be merely understood as a political reaction to the risks brought about by digitalization. Rather, cybersecurity further constitutes an active site where the incipient digital society is collectively (re-)imagined, negotiated, and created. As such, cybersecurity policies present sites of political articulation and intervention where the very contours of an emerging digital society and the socio-technical relationships of power and control deemed necessary to govern its emergence are (re-)assembled. Our research prompts a rethinking of the relationships between cybersecurity and the digital society to the extent that cybersecurity represents a new globalizing form and rationality of security that encodes and enables new forms of control and intervention, but also new responsibilities at the interface between the state, society, and individuals.

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This paper follows the question if newly introduced surveillance laws and programmes have led to an authoritarian mode of governmentality in Austria in the light of a higher threat perception. As in other countries, terrorism and crime have undergone a process of securitization in Austria, leading to a higher desire for control in order to tackle those threats. However, while other countries have faced serious attacks on their soil, Austria remains free of substantial threats, still the government has introduced strict surveillance laws. Based on Foucault's concept of governmentality and Dean's assumption that governmentality can contain illiberal techniques and practices in liberal regimes, this paper gives an insight in the rationales behind Austrian surveillance governance.

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