Annual Societal Security Report 2014

SOURCE Project-Deliverable (3.4): Annual Societal Security Report 1

Published: 2014
Authors (VICESSE): Reinhard Kreissl, Norbert Leonhardmair, Matthäus Vobruba

Full Text: Available Here

Executive Summary:

The idea to capture the state of (perceptions of) societal security for Europe, on the basis of empirical evidence is ambitious. The toolkit of empirical social science research offers a wide array of opportunities to collect data covering different dimensions of security. A large number of surveys, ad- dressing questions of security, surveillance, privacy, perceived and objective security threats has been conducted over the last decades in Western societies, some globally, some European, some at national level. There is also a growing body of open-data sources available that can be harvested for an analysis of societal security, compiling information on economic and social indicators from crime statistics to unemployment rates and epidemiological health data.

These data comprise information about perceived security threats, security measures and emerging societal security threats in the broadest sense. A number of European research projects such as PACT and PRISMS have recently conducted European-wide representative surveys collecting citizens’ attitudes towards surveillance, privacy and security in a more focussed way. The PRISMS project also conducted a meta-analysis of surveys, identifying for the last 30 years 260 surveys “at the intersection of privacy and security/trust/surveillance, of professional and/or political importance. The date span of the inventory ranges from 1985 to early 2012.“ (PRISMS D7-1, p.21).

Taking a look at the 260 surveys, analysed by the PRIMS consortium, reveals a number of interesting results. The number of surveys has increased constantly and rapidly over the last 30 years. This mir- rors the overall growth of data sources made available on the Internet. But it also points to an inter- esting theoretical problem of information inflation or information overload, to use a term popular- ized by A. Toffler in his seminal book from 1970.3 With the increase of information available for cog- nitive processing, the problem of theoretically motivated selectivity arises: how to choose, select and decide among the available, and often incompatible, nonetheless in and for themselves individually relevant data sets?