Terror Defense: The Contempt of Privacy
Jens Meiert, June 18, 2007 / February 25, 2008.
This entry is filed under Politics.
I’m angry. At first, my anger was temporary: When I was in Italy during vacation I was asked to show my passport when I wanted to use an internet café. I immediately left that café. I left another internet café without having achieved anything, too, though my girlfriend decided to go online nonetheless.
Why? Because my life and privacy don’t concern anyone as long as I don’t harm anybody.
So let’s focus on Italy and their law again which hit me now that I read more about former incident’s background. According to Robin Good:
The new law states that those in charge of managing and providing public communications services, need to make photocopies of the passport of every customer coming to use them, be they Internet, phone or fax ones.
[…]Internet cafés owners must not only collect and verify a person first name and last name, but they need also to log the time they started using a computer, and which computer they specifically used. But that is not enough: computers in public places need also to keep track of which files and applications are used, which web pages are visited and for how long. In practice, anything you do today in an Italian Internet café is basically logged and referenced to your name on paper.
“Christian Science Monitor” (right, but even referenced by Bruce Schneier) adds two other interesting details that make me think (and sick):
But while Italy has a healthy protest culture, no major opposition to the law has emerged.
This is a waste of time,says Ms. Malesa in a telephone interview.Terrorists don’t come to Internet cafes.
Even though that is a very short post concerning terrorism impact on western countries, you’ll probably understand why I’m angry again – and really sorrowful: Terrorism already won. Surveillance and “total control” just don’t help, they instead destroy “freedom-loving” constitutional states from the inside, and they force us all to change, negatively.
Instead, trust and believe in people. It’s worth it, even when there are disappointments. If at all, it’s rather worth to live and die for a country, a continent, or a world that really loves and lives freedom, in any way.
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Comments
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On June 18, 15:26 CEST, Duluoz said:
As the great American Benjamin Franklin once said…
“Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”
Where is the Benjamin Franklin of our time?
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On June 18, 15:36 CEST, Bernhard said:
I agree with you.
I can’t stand that most of the people prefer these laws instead of freedom.
But I have no idea how we could change their opinion.Here’s an additional example:
In Germany, online providers that offer their services to everyone (will?) have to save all their clients’ e-mails.
As a result, everybody how knows about that and doesn’t want his emails to be read by the police or similar institutions will use something different, for example one of those cheap virtual servers.So this doesn’t make sense in any way.
And I can’t remember that at least one terrorist attack was prevented by one of those laws we’re talking about.
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On June 18, 17:11 CEST, Jens Meiert said:
David, Bernhard, you’re both so right …!
What we can do is certainly not keeping quiet, instead protesting against these “measures” … otherwise, nobody’s heard, and nobody listens at all.
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On June 18, 21:00 CEST, Duluoz said:
Where I live we are having an issue with stop light cameras. They are now going to implement speeding cameras on the highways as well. Just more examples of privacy violation. The knee jerk reaction is worldwide. For now, the socialist agenda is making some headway thanks to the media machines here and the crafty excuses. I have sent e-mail and letters to my congressman with nothing more than a ‘Thank You’ form letter. Great huh?
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On June 19, 14:00 CEST, Joern said:
I totally agree with you, Jens. I live in Italy since four years now and I’m really surprised how few people know about the law against terrorism. I, as a foreigner, had to tell my friends about it and even knowing about it many don’t care.
I think, the issue of nobody protesting is also a cultural issue. People (in Italy) don’t see non existent privacy as a big problem, because there is little privacy even in private life. Italians often live with their parents until they are 30 years old or even older, then they get married and often have their own homes close to the parents home, if not inside the same building (this is a generalization, of course, but life here is really very family-centric).
There are many other things that lead to little privacy like a tax number that you have to give out on many occasions (for example buying a SIM card for your mobile phone), an efficient way to track people. It is a slow process in which privacy is getting cut down bit by bit. Often you don’t really realize what’s going on. Maybe I’m totally wrong, but this could be one of the reasons why people don’t protest against privacy violations. -
On June 20, 12:29 CEST, Jens Meiert said:
David, right … it reminds me of our situation in Germany where there are rumors that toll stations and traffic cameras capture more than just trucks and traffic offenses …
And Jörn, well, that’s really interesting, I wasn’t aware of that … looks like their culture makes Italians more “prone” to privacy cuts anyway? Are there initiatives against surveillance at all?
Personally I find it challenging to develop a good sense of privacy violations … altogether, one can easily become quite paranoid; on the other hand, suspecting everything to be fine and legal and sunny appears to be quite dumb.
