Security, Democracy and Transparency. NADIS, HYDRA and the Rise of Electronic Data Sharing Systems in the Federal Republic and the USA

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Constantin Goschler; Professor Dr. Michael Wala
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: from 2018 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 403498936

Since the late 1960s, secret intelligence agencies in the United States and the Federal Republic have been establishing complex electronic data-sharing systems. The creation of a CIA program named HYDRA as well as NADIS, operated by Germany’s internal intelligence agency, the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz, was aimed at supposedly suspicious individuals and organizations. This brought about social and political movements in both nations that, fearing a threat to individual liberties, called for an abolition of such systems or at least the disclosure of what data were collected and how it was used. The proposed research project analyzes the evolution of these data-collection systems as a conflict of two opposing dimensions of transparency founded in an observation-based concept of visibility. It will examine this dichotomy, using as examples two closely interlinked North American and West German case studies, as a conflict constitutive for liberal democracies in the 1970s and 1980s in which gathering of personal data by intelligence agencies clashed with the publics’ demands for protection of private information as well as for accountability for these activities. How, why, and in which way did this conflict of reciprocal visibilization change? Using theoretical approaches used in political history, history of technology, as well as those developed by cultural sociology, the research project aims at contributing to an explanation of the paradoxical relationship of social liberalization and the contemporaneous expansion of “internal security” systems in Western democracies in the 1970s and 1980s, to a better understanding of this period as a whole, while illuminating the pre-history of "big data".

• DFG Programme: Research Grants