I was there

Why was I there?

The intrusion into my privacy, which privacy is dear to me, is one thing, though I suspect that I personally for the most part am insignificant, blond and paleskinned enough not to arouse the curiosity of data analysts, but at some point it is even more important to me that the proposed communications interception law is yet another step in a culture of fear. One can make—and certainly they are made—elaborate conspiracy theories about how this fear is nourished by shady characters in order to further their nefarious goals, but I do not think such conspiracies are necessary, Hanlon's razor applies here as elsewhere. Peter Englund has written about the internal logics of the situation, where the ability and possibility to eavesdrop on all communication necessitates that one does so. The reasons for this can then be made up afterwards. The reason currently in fashion is terrorism. In the previous century it would have been Bolshevism.

Lately I have been reading up on the origins of the Western European dictatorships of the 20th Century. It has struck me how the threat of Communism was used to get the influential people: the industrial magnates, the clergy, the army, to go along with the numerically very small movements of Phalangism, Fascism, Nazism, … One could perhaps argue that this external anti-Communism even abetted the totalitarian dictatorship of the Soviet Union by justifying the oppression as defence against infiltration by external enemies—but yet again, by the logic of the situation, an enemy would have been found if none had naturally presented itself. And thus these attempts to stem the awful plans of the enemy have caused the violent (or indirect) deaths of tens of millions of people throughout the 20th Century. The fending off of fear seems to be worse than the actual object of fear.

This is already happening again—or perhaps still, but now with a different label for the phenomenon to be feared. Certainly international terrorism has not yet managed to kill as many as the at least hundred thousand that are now dead in the War on Terror, and almost the same number of people have been imprisoned without trial, in many cases subject to torture even according to the rather lax standards of the US President.

This is why I oppose the eavesdropping law, as I see it as yet another attempt to play on fear, in such a way that the costs in all likelihood will greatly exceed the costs of any attack that may be perpetrated.

And finally, the law does of course nothing in the way of actually protecting Sweden against electronic threats. Should we be subject to a concerted cyber-attack, such as the one recently waged against Estonia, we will be caught with our trousers at just as inconvenient a height as before the enactment of the disputed law. So just whose security are we concerned with?

(Apparently I am very angry—my readability index is lower than ever.)