Diskurseffekte des NSA-Skandals : Korpusanalyse zu Verschlüsseln als kommunikativer Praktik in deutschen Computerzeitschriften 2010–2014

This article explores the repercussions – if any – that the broad reception of the 2013 leaks on NSA’s surveillance programs in mass media had on German computer magazines. Such discourse effects are verified by means of a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the way encryption is handled as a subject, by employing techniques from discourse linguistics. The corpus consists of the editorial content of COMPUTER BILD and CHIP between 2010 and 2014. Looking at the coverage of TrueCrypt, De-Mail and PGP, there can indeed be diagnosed a discourse effect concurrent with the NSA leaks that culminates in instructions on encryption as a communicative practice