(De)legitimating electronic surveillance: a critical discourse analysis of the Finnish news coverage of the Edward Snowden revelations

Abstract

In 2013, ex-National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden shocked the world by revealing the American NSA's (and its partners') extensive surveillance programs. The ensuing media discussion became a focal point for the justification and contestation of surveillance in the digital age. This article contributes to the growing body of literature on the discursive construction of surveillance, concentrating on how the practice is (de)legitimized. Methodologically, the paper draws on Critical Discourse Studies, applying the concept of discourse and utilizing insights from Van Leeuwen's categories of legitimation and social actor representation. The data come from the media coverage of the Snowden affair in Finland, whose hitherto very limited state surveillance is now being transformed into extensive digital monitoring. The study concludes that surveillance is (de)legitimized through two main discourses, one legitimizing it by constructing it as a tool for protection against terrorism, the other contesting it by depicting it as a threat to the basic building blocks of democracy. The study suggests that the latter understanding tends to be favored in the media, but the critique of surveillance is on a rather abstract level.

Untitled

“…The findings from this study show a noteworthy overlap with the results from earlier research on the topic of surveillance. Parallel frames and (de)legitimisation techniques were used across studies which scrutinised the reactions of the different countries to the NSA operations including Germany , Finland (Tiainen, 2017) and NZ (Kuehn, 2018). Similarly, these frames feature in the…”

Solving the Surveillance Problem

“…Barnard-Wills 2011;Lischka 2015). Much of the previous research has concentrated on Anglo-American public discourse, but there is reason to believe that the attitudes outlined above can also be found in cultures with a different relationship to surveillance (see above); in a previous paper examining discourses that (de)legitimise surveillance in the Finnish press, I found similar depictions of surveillance (Tiainen 2017). Critical voices do seem to be more dominant in the Finnish media than in the British media at least, but my article also had to conclude (paralleling Lischka's, ibid., insights on the British press) that overall the media criticism of surveillance has been constructed on a rather abstract and general level.…”

Legitimation strategies in discourse surrounding Sino-American trade friction: A case study of Chinese government white papers

“…Van Dijk (1998) defines legitimation as text or talk that provides 'good reasons, grounds or acceptable motivations for past or present action' (p. 255) -in short, legitimation is merely the justification of a certain behavior or position (Cap, 2006: 7;Reyes, 2011: 782). By contrast, de-legitimation constructs a certain act or viewpoint as negative, unreasonable, and unacceptable (Tiainen, 2017;Van Leeuwen, 2007), or in Cap's (2008) words, the strategies of pursuing 'delegitimization' include: negative other-presentation, blaming, scape-goating, marginalizing, excluding, attacking the moral character of the adversary, attacking the rationality of the adversary, etc. (p. 22).…”

“…Studies on legitimation are mainly carried out under the conceptual framework of CDA. Such studies often focus on social issues, including immigration ( Martín Rojo and Van Dijk;Van Leeuwen and Wodak, 1999), war (Lin and Miao, 2016;Mirhosseini, 2017;Oddo, 2011;Reyes, 2011), international surveillance (Tiainen, 2017), political campaigns (Chaidas, 2018), and children's sex education (Liang and Bowcher, 2018). However, there are almost no studies in the literature of legitimation in the context of trade friction discourse, let alone Sino-American trade tensions.…”