ABSTRACT
Trust and transparency have become key themes in debates on surveillance, but the relationship of these three concepts to one another is not straightforward or self-evident. This chapter critically reconsiders the conventional narrative that greater transparency can be a remedy against the dangers and risks of surveillance, that transparency can restore public trust, and that high levels of public trust are desirable for upholding democratic principles in an age of pervasive surveillance. The implications of the contributions collected in this volume are that transparency cannot be blindly relied upon to reduce the harms of surveillance or to restore trust, and under certain circumstances, distrust rather than trust is called for to bolster democratic accountability and resist domination. We do not suggest that trust and transparency need to be rejected altogether, but rather that their ambivalent and sometimes contradictory relationship requires us to better understand how they are constructed in specific social, historical, economic, and political contexts and how their effects are shaped by specific constellations of power.
