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New article: Civilizing drones: Military discourses going civil

Braun, Sven, Michael Friedewald, and Govert Valkenburg, “Civilizing drones: Military discourses going civil“, Science & Technology Studies, Vol. 28, No. 2, 2015, pp. 73-87.

This article presents an account of how a technology being transferred from one area of deployment to another entails that specific discourses travel along. In particular, we show that the development of Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS, often referred to as drones) is importantly determined by its military progeny, as the civilian context inherits specific discourses from the military context. Contemporary ideas of privacy and security in drone use can be largely traced back to this original context. We show that concepts and their relative importance primarily depend on the discourses that travel together with the technologies on which the concepts aim to act. There is no technological reason for privacy and security to be implemented the way they are, nor can their implementation be explained merely from socio-political or moral discourses. Instead, material and discursive mechanisms successfully enact and reproduce the dominant military viewpoint.

Workshop: Smart Technologies – Workshop on challenges and trends for privacy in a hyper-connected world (20/8/2015)

At the IFIP Summer School on Privacy and Identity Management in Edinburgh the Forum Privacy and Self Determined Life in the Digital Work has organised a workshop on “Smart Technologies – Workshop on challenges and trends for privacy in a hyper-connected world”

Speaker include:

* Andreas Baur, Tübingen University
* Michael Friedewald/Murat Karaboga, Fraunhofer ISI
* Christian Geminn, Kassel University
* Hannah Obersteller/Felix Bieker/Marit Hansen, ULD