The Living in Surveillance Societies (LiSS) COST Action was a European research programme in the area of Surveillance Studies and related disciplines, designed to increase and deepen knowledge about living and working in the surveillance age. About 160 researchers from 26 countries participated in LiSS; the overwhelming majority of the EU Members States were represented, together with researchers from Australia, Israel and New Zealand. Dr. Ivan Szekely – as individual researcher – represented EKINT in this four-year international multidisciplinary academic programme, which was the first of its kind in this area. An outstanding event of LiSS was the three-day Budapest programme in October 2012. [See Iván Székely, "The Role of Remembering and Forgetting in a World of Increasing Surveillance, in the Context of Post-Communist Societies", In William C. Webster, Doina Balahur, Nils Zurawski, Kees Boersma, Bence Ságvári and Christel Backman (eds.), Living in Surveillance Societies: The Ghosts of Surveillance. Proceedings of LiSS Conference 2, Editura Universităţii "Alexandru Ioan Cuza", Iasi, 2011, pp. 32–36.]
Research results of the LiSS project in 2013
The year 2013 was the final period of the four-year COST Action, LiSS (Living in Surveillance Societies) in which individual researchers had been participating on behalf of their respective institutions. The Eötvös Károly Policy Institute was represented by Ivan Szekely in this research project involving about 160 researchers from 26 countries.
In the final year of the project, in April 2013 a workshop was organized in Warsaw for the members of Work Package 4 (Public Policy and the Regulation of Surveillance) where Ivan Szekely delivered a presentation about research results.
The final event of the project was an international conference organized in Brussels in May 2013 where participants presented the overall results of the four-year project. At the conference Ivan Szekely, representing EKINT, presented a paper titled "Surveillance, archiving and the right to be forgotten" and, in collaboration with two fellow researchers, designed and conducted a full survey among all LiSS participants in the month preceding the conference, and presented the analysis of the survey at the conference. It was he again who created a presentation with the title "Film in LiSS, LiSS in Film" within which he screened the film created about the 2012 October event series in Budapest, and built the representation of the Budapest interactive installation at the venue of the conference.
According to the judgement of the competent body of the European Commission, LiSS was one of the highest quality COST Action conducted so far. Several papers have been published from the research carried out within LiSS, including ones authored by EKINT’s representative, and the Budapest LiSS film had been presented at the 2013 Computers, Privacy and Data Protection (CPDP) conference in Brussels.
