The seed of surveillance is ripening and we are about to get a surveillance society. For instance, the Federal Government is now again supposed to pay a third of a billion EURO. For the BND, so they can better screen the “social media” world (Facebook, Twitter …). Here are some current news about it: ZDF, Spiegel and Netzpolitik.org.
There are quite a few things I have to say about this.
Several years ago, I already stood in Berlin with my bike, looking at the construction site of the biggest German administration building ever. It was the new home for the “persons from Pullach” in the new Capitol City. And even at the time, this gigantic building looked to me like the gigantic metaphor for surveillance of us humans. And I noticed that something is under way that is not at all good news.
Why does nobody fight back?
Just to clarify: initially there was the language – humans communicated with each other. Even in those days, listening in was considered extremely bad manners. Later in the history of humans, they invented script and Papyrus. Now communication also took place if you did not actually talk to each other; written language made it possible.
Letters and postcards were a wonderful means to exchange information independent of place and time. The post realized it.
Later, the telephone was added. Social Media are just the next step in all these forms of communication based on new technology.
Let us go back in time to postcards and letters. The two media had identical rights. Except that the postcard was much less expensive. To make up for it, you had far less space for the content of your communication.
Since in those days people were very thrifty, they used the less expensive postcard whenever possible. There was a small disadvantage to postcards: everybody who got hold of it could read what was written on it. But we trusted the system “post” and our postal delivery persons. After all, there was the privacy of correspondence. And if you were sceptical, you just had to accept the inevitable and pay the higher price both for the service and the envelope (those, too, were more expensive than today’s cheap throw-away articles).
Now I imagine the administration of the FRG in the 1950ies or 1960ies coming up with the idea of employing people in order to found an organization that reads all the postcards. And, of course, consequently – because people would have switched to the more expensive letters – all the letters. Said letters would then have been opened by a central office (like it often happened at the borders between the FRG and the GDR), read, photocopied and then again sent on their way!
(My parents always assured me that what happened at the interface with the GDR as a matter of routine could never happen in our country. In fact, this was exactly the difference between living in the GDR and living in the FRG!)
Let me tell you:
Germany would have gone up in flames. In the 1950ies because the memory of and the horror of the Nazi regime was still so present in the minds of all Germans and in the 1960ies because we wanted freedom.
And today:
How is this possible? We live in a democracy and should be thankful for it every single day! But the majority elects politicians who permit the administrative powers to screen us. This is something that can easily cause the demolition of democracy!
Once in a while things happening around me give me pause!
RMD
(Translated by EG)
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