In this part of the study we explore stakeholders’ views on law enforcement and intelligence agencies’ online surveillance capabilities to monitor online communications and behavior. The stakeholder groups we interview for this study are for example public authorities, politicians, private companies, non-governmental organisations, media representatives and researchers. Participants are selected based on their opinion on online surveillance: we try to cover as many different views as possible. About 30 interviews will be made in Finland, Norway and the UK between the summer and autumn 2018.

The interview style used in this study is called Q-Sort interview. In short, Q-Sort interview is a card-sorting exercise, which is designed to help participants to construct and reflect on their views regarding one topic. For example, in our study, we have 45 statement cards, each including a statement drawn from online surveillance policy debate on Finland, Norway or the UK. The statements represent the topic broadly from various perspectives. The method suits well for investigating complex policy problems, because participants rank the statements in relation to the other statements and in the end, explain what they think about the statements and whythey ranked them as they did. In other words, the completed sort is not only about what our research participants think about individual statements, but also how those individual statements are interpreted as pieces forming the big picture of online surveillance. The collected data will be analysed by using a special analysis technique, Q-factor analysis, designed for Q-Sort interview data.

What we aim to detect through stakeholder analysis, is a better understanding of the national policy debates in three countries and to compare the opinions on online surveillance across the countries. We are interested in, for example, how the stakeholders’ justify their views and how they see the powers as legitimate. A shared sense of legitimacy of online surveillance powers among the influential stakeholders is crucial for public authorities. We aim to recognise the potential areas of strong and weak legitimacy in a manner that respects all debaters. Our results will help the debaters and the public to understand each other’s reasoning and conditions behind legitimate and accountable online surveillance capabilities. For one, our project aims to contribute to openness and transparency of the public debate on online surveillance.

If you are interested in the methodology we use, you can find a more detailed description on the data collection from Information for WP2 Participants page or watch Leeds Metropolitan Quick-Q Animation here.