Plots of Intelligence Surveillance - Dramas of Institutional Identification

Recent revelations of intelligence surveillance are an unprecedented breakdown of contemporary communication functioning, therefore offer novel insights about how it has worked normally. The contrastive description of the Wikileaks and Snowden’s events show unexpected paths to address responsibility and enact performativity globally. In both cases, hundreds of thousands of highly sensitive documents make their management significant in terms of how practices unfold on and beyond information infrastructures. The two cases engender two approaches to information management, one more closely derived from the original culture of the internet, the other sensitive to more broadly accepted social models. In this context, unearthing the usually invisible role that information infrastructures play in contemporary social praxes helps in recognizing how narratives can play a role in understanding online information and related action-nets, therefore broader social and political implications.