the world is a much safer now than in previous years. In the 1980s, the threat was total annihilation of the world, and today he is a terrorist blowing vehicle. Yet politicians deceptively and dishonestly justify mass surveillance of endemic worldwide is "more dangerous".
In my last column on privacy News, I asked myself the question of how we got to the point where I can 't discuss the political work with my colleagues on the phone
politicians are pushing this relentless hunt for our privacy repeating a lie again and again :. that the world has become "more dangerous". This is obscenely false.
Today, the worst "threat" to society of this type is that some nutjob can jump a bus to the other side of the continent. Although such an event would be nowhere, he has to be put in context. In the 1980s, we lived with a pervasive awareness that both superpowers stood under the nuclear threat of 24 by 7 and can press the red button at any time. When they did, there would be no tomorrow.
Every night when we went to sleep, we were aware that tomorrow might not come if the button was pushed.
There is probably a difference in level between the world disintegrating, as in the 1980s, and a bus jump somewhere, like today. And it is absolutely not in the sense "more dangerous".
It is difficult to communicate how this still much fear of nuclear annihilation was, so I will quote the first verse of the ballad Forever Young by Alphaville, a track happened to be released in 1984:
dance in style, let's dance for a while
heaven can wait we're only watching the sky -
hoping for the best but expect the worst:
you gonna drop the bomb or not
for people increasingly today, it will come across as weird - unpleasant, same - to be slow dancing cheek to cheek to such a message. But that's how pervasive the threat of total annihilation was. We were quite literally fall in love with each other for ballads on nuclear war.
I survived the 1980 Do not try to scare me with terrorism
It is very disturbing to see how buy this outrageous lie -. The world would become "more dangerous". For the ordinary citizen, he certainly did not: it has become remarkably safer on several orders of magnitude. But terrorism is useful because it allows any kind of restrictions on the freedom to go unchallenged.
Looking at the numbers, it simply has no basis in measurable facts. In Europe, on average, 40 people die each year of terrorism. This is in an area with 500 million people. To put this in perspective, five times more die from drowning in bathtubs, and more than a hundred times as many die from falling down stairs.
we spending billions preventing bathtub drownings? No? Then there is obviously something else at work here.
Terrorism has become the modern version of what communism was in the 1950s, the comic in the 1940s, and jazz music in the 1930s is an alert that can motivate any measure, no matter how ridiculous, and more importantly, no matter how the erosion of civil liberties.
There was not a big surprise when Edward Snowden revealed that the mass surveillance was never meant to target terrorism, but his goal was always economic, political, diplomatic and social domination. The ability to discredit an opponent.
It is to all of us to call politicians on lies.
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