Privacy as Digital Sovereignty: Rethinking Privacy for International Intelligence

This chapter analyses the concept of privacy. I argue that privacy needs to be understood in at least three different ways. First, a traditional ethical and philosophical account of privacy understands it in reference to two people and the ways that they ought to treat information about each other. I then show that privacy also needs to be understood in a political sense by reference to the relations between individuals and institutions. Of primary importance here are the relations between citizens and their state. However, with the rise of informational institutions spurred by the penetration of the internet into almost every part of our daily lives, we must also recognise the particular relations between consumers and private companies. I then argue that modern national security intelligence practices, in which states are able to gather and direct information against the citizens of other states, require that we think of privacy in a third way, by reference to digital sovereignty.