Abstract
This research revolves around the civil liberties issue of attainment of insight into digital surveillance. Thanks to recurring news headlines featuring Wikileaks, GCHQ, Edward Snowden, Russian hacking, Cambridge Analytica, and fake news, public discourse around privacy, surveillance, and trust has been nurtured. Experts in this discourse argue that digital-surveillance by both business and state should be a concern to individuals and that they should have an insight into what is happening to the data they generate.
This research is grounded in work as an I.T. professional working in the higher education domain. The thesis describes activities that provide an insight into data analysis practices and documents the journey of understanding how these activities can become an intervention that makes technology politically 'real'. Using a critical realist perspective, the researcher is able to identify phenomena and aspects of the problem domain, recontextualising them to produce new models of understanding.
Among the outputs of this research are repeatable strategies for running activities to develop the understanding of digital surveillance. During the development of these strategies, it was found that an approach of merely teaching how openly available statistical methods work does not appear to engage the vast majority of learners. The thesis puts forward a type of intervention where freely available statistical methods are applied to community-created data from the digital-commons.
The new models of understanding and intervention strategies can form the basis of an effective model for active engagement in issues facing society.