State Surveillance in Japan

Japanese Youngsters' Attitudes towards the Snowden Revelations

Abstract

The authors conducted questionnaire and interview surveys of university students on attitudes towards Edward Snowden's revelations of the NSA's indiscriminate mass surveillance programmes as part of their SIGINT activities, which were started in June 2013, in eight countries including Japan in October and November 2014. The survey results demonstrates that Japanese youngsters are the outliers amongst those studied internationally in terms of social attitudes towards state surveillance. In this research, the authors show the characteristics of those attitudes in Japan, where a highly networked information society has been built, based on the survey outcomes, and examine their meaning for privacy protection, individual freedom and autonomy and democracy in Japanese society taking the Japanese socio-cultural and political environment surrounding privacy and state surveillance into account.