The ‘Traube Affair’: Transparency as a Legitimation and Action Strategy Between Security, Surveillance and Privacy

Abstract

The chapter examines the multifaceted interrelations and interactions between the secret, public and private sphere in the field of domestic security within the framework of a particular case study—the ‘Traube Affair’ in 1977. The authors consider transparency as a specifically applied legitimation and action strategy in the conflict-ridden debates about secret state surveillance practices, media information demands and the protection of privacy in West Germany. Assuming entwined processes and different dynamics in this case, Kirchberg and Schmeer focus on three analytic levels related to different transparency strategies—practical and epistemological basis of governmental security production, the implementation of intelligence knowledge in the political process as well as the strategies of ‘self-transparencization’.