Norwegian fear culture

Maybe it is time to finish this blog? The terror act caused by one single person in Norway, 22nd of July, at Utöya, gave new insight in something that annoyed me for a long time and that have been given attention in this blog - motifs. The motives needed to convince me that it would be necessary to monitor communication among ordinary citizens. Communication that may be e-mails, comments in chat fora or other discussion groups on Internet. We have now seen an "ordinary" citizen, a young man in Norway, planning and using Internet to thrive and to gain input to his twisted thoughts and fear. The biggest fear according to him was the invasion of muslims into Western Europe.

We cannot know whether surveillance on digital communication would have been sufficient to give rise to any alerts regarding his terror plans. There are motifs enough that individuals like him cannot prosper around in Internet without getting any attention. We have police forces and security police in IRL, trying to identify threats to society and public. I wouldn't argue for a "free space" like Internet where it would be allowed to become absolutely anonymous.

Fear and Security - Two faces

I’ve just finished two books of the Swedish author, David Eberhard who is a psychiatrist, entitled: ”In the land of security addicts” and ”The land of the easily offended”. David is in large parts touching the symptoms of fear culture but points out a straight responsibility to regulatory and governmental officials and in the end our politicians. He concludes that the state wants to protect us by using many forms of restrictions upon our way of life. Protect us from what? Anxiety, mostly regarding death, would be one of the more dominant drives for more security. This is similar to the previous discussions in this blog regarding terrorism acts and preparations for terrorism that would bring up a need for more restrictions and surveillance of communication. This is not dealt with in David’s books, but I regard that fear in any form always drives a security process.

It is interesting that fear culture has two faces, security and fear. What we need to clear out though, is who’s fear and who’s security? We also need to keep in mind that there are large commercial interests in technical products and other services in security business. It is not so far-fetched to assume that those commercial interests do not want to pose the fear argument but in some way getting other doing that. That could be media, government or researchers, bodies that would gain as well on pushing fear arguments. Media wants publicity, government wants justification and the researcher wants more funding. It may also be that all of these three work together in a hidden or open pact. I will comment the books mentioned earlier in my next post.

Social fear - social control

In the Swedish media last weeks there's been a debate about the pro's and con's regarding a decision taken by a child care center. There was this guy that in a youth-way of doing things published his picture on Facebook showing him with a tattoo on his forearm and a headwear carrying the brand "Porn Star". He was discovered by some of the parents of kids belonging to the child care, they informed the manager and then the guy's position was made redundant.

This story tells us a lot about the people's fear. Moral power might be one thing, but I think this is more linked to pedophils that are attracted to work places such as child care centers. It also tells us a lot of the power of control through social media. A few generations back, the social control in the country life was very apparent. Noone could escape gossip or real situations, the word was passed from village to village. But will social media really protect us? The other big media story has been about a police officer (now retired but very famous for his former great actions regarding treatment of females in the police force) who has been accused for rape against under-aged females. Who will benefit from social fear? Misdirected. Very shallow grounds leading people to useless actions.

What are we waiting for?

I was given a birthday gift from my daughter - the book "Welcome to the monitoring society" written by Kristoffer Gunnartz in 2006 - and it gave me some more intriguing thoughts about a future (or already present) society. The book is composed of different chronicles with specific subjects, ranging from the loss of confidentiality given by anxious parents that want to take insurance for their children (they did not know that they signed a life-time access for the insurance company to get ALL information available in patient journals) to DNA national information databanks once destined to be confidential (the Swedish PKU register) that by politicians later became available to the police. What's new to me, is that the author thinks that technology itself is the clue to why monitoring becomes attractive to politicians and other interested parties (police, military, insurance companies, private care, schools and much more).

The logic is - if we have that technology now? why not use it? They make comparisons to other technology shifts in communication like trains, air planes. The debate could be resembled to another non-existing debate in the early 20's: " if we start using those fossile fuel based transport machines (trucks, cars etc.) we will encounter huge emission problems in the future. Will it take us 50 yrs from now before we realise that is wasn´t such a good idea to start collecting all information about citizens in large computer databases?

Last night before voting on FRA law

Will Swedish parliament members take an important step towards a less civilized society tomorrow? Some of their party colleagues are blogging frequently today to try to set their minds. That they can take on a personal decision, just as Camilla Lindberg did last autumn. I read the blog of Henrik Oscarsson and he made a historical comparison. In the post WW2, the "cold war", our Swedish politicians became amazed of the possibility to tap ordinary people's telephone conversations. There were some new frenzy technology that made this easier and there were this threat (real or not) from the Soviet Union those days. The politicians couldn't keep their fingers off and the whole systematic, random tapping went off. Large integrity interference were being made. They were not able to control the security police force or the prosecutors at that time.

What is different of today is that we now do not have any threat being so direct and well established, No politician can formulate this in a clear and sensual way! I haven't seen one, nor have other political bloggers. In an debate article on Swedish Television home page, Mathias Sundin is making some enlightening comparisons. Imagine that the Swedish government want to document your letters sent to others, making matrices of your letter friends including frequency. They will then open the letter and scan it and hold a copy if they will detect some irregularities in your mailing patterns. That may happen today in North Corea, but Sweden? This is exactly what will happen with your e-mailing, telephone conversation, chatting, SMS and other electronic communication. How scared can one become?

Ignorance or what?

In media the coming voting (FRA, 14 Oct.) is of a no news character. But there is some activity in the blog world, at least. In general, the citizens do not bother. I've asked a number of people but they think that if it works out in a way that it will lead to stop or catch some more criminals, then it is OK. But that is not the real issue, is it? If you want to stop robbery or economic crime - do you then scan all citizen´s accounts like a normal thing? It is scanned, I know, but only by the bank in order to protect me from theft. I was lucky a couple of weeks ago when my bank called and said that they wondered about a withdrawal of approx 300 SEK from a vending machine in US. I had done a payment in my local food store about one hour earlier.

But I think that the police and others also liked to have that scan function in action all the time. In fact, if you could detect severe economic crime in real time - maybe we wouldn't have any more financial crises? Bonus payment in + billion USD! That's not very healthy for the world? What still is annoying me is the lack of motive that is driving this development. Is it still terrorism? Isn't that a brain ghost? A night mare? I can find up some more - even worse night mares. Will we sleep better at night with this? Will our government become even more suspicious? More data - more artifacts. Haven't we learned about the scares from the GWB administration and mass destruction weapons?

Wire-tapping - is this 2009?

I need to pinch my skin every now and then during this process where we are moving into a less civilized community. Why do we need wire-tapping in Sweden? Who has created the threat scenario? Where are the evidence? Top secret issue of course...

Reading last night (http://klamberg.blogspot.com/) about the details of how FRA wire-tapping will function I am even more confused. Can it be reasonable to spend 100´s of millions on hardware and computer analysts to tap people´s chat/mail/other communication routes on the traffic that is crossing the Swedish borders?

Why is this less civilized? I think that any society that has a need to check what ordinary people are doing or discussing has lost something essential. This essence is created of freedom of speech and a free will, to be able live your way of life. But now there is an overwhelming care from our government to protect us? From what? When we sentence criminals, then it is the free will and ability to communicate with others that is restricted and reduced. You can get the witness from those who get released from long sentences that the worst thing with it is getting your life restricted. Our overprotective government will now introduce this by starting to analyse our communications. Civilization must depend on people´s trust on each other and that our ordinary legislation and enforcement authorities will be enough as protection.

We have gone a long way to get where we are. Our grand parents and their parents have built our society of today and we should be proud of it. Why make it to a dead end?