Til glede for _Merc_ over her, som gjerne vil lese på engelsk.
As somebody like me who thinks that justice in Sweden is dubious at best, given the harrassment of Julian Assange for many years now, and for me worrying that police state is already here (in norway that is), and who hold my own govenment in such low regard so as to consider them as being a terrorist organization which thinks they can bomb Libya and otherwise be on good terms with states that are directly involved with torture, war, regime change, sponsoring of terrorism, I am spontaneously skeptical to schemes for implementing surveilance, despite it all on the surface being seemingly something that is well meant (as if 'well meant' basically was this idea of "fighting crime").
I believe that a form of secret investigation, which is meant to be completely secret, has to be considered to be something controversial, when it can be thought that:
1) The intention of the authorities, or the methods, preumably would come to mean the monitoring of people in an opportunistic way (to see if they have done something wrong, or to get to learn if they can prove that an individual has or had something to do with others that have, or had done wrong). Such type of work would be indistinguishable from the cases where the authorities would come to persecute somebody, to criminalize them, and then any stated intent for investigations (or whatever you would call it) would then become something unbelievable when the result is something opportunistic, and where the authortities obviously can be thought to be dishonest and thus speak untruthful and thus speak lies about what their intention was in the first place, like when norwegian authorities expressly pointed out how the war was not intended to pursue a regime change as such.
2) The authotiries seek to find information and clues in an opportunistic way. One other way of understanding such a problem, would be to regard the work of the police with computer intrusion and surveilance/monitoring as being a fishing or a trawling for information wherever they think they can find such type of information.
3) The least interesting would be about securing evidence after the fact, something which probably could be done today already, unless one wanted to secure evidence in an opportunistic way (before the fact), which would lead to an impossible role for the police, who probably would would not say "no" to doing this, because of a pragmatic need for abuse of power (as if the authorities were to say that "we must do all we can to fight crime").
4) I think that such a secret monitoring and surveillance of somebody, opens up for a type of corrupt police work, wherein the authorities can work with parallell construction (persecuting suspected criminals, or others, finding evidence of wrong doing maybe fairly quickly), something I think will be synonymous with 'persecution', something which in turn is not what people in general would find to be 'just', or for being a type of police work that is worth of the idea of a society structure loosely undertood to be 'a democracy' (because you would then live in a police state with secret investigations being a common practice). I find it disturbing that commentators might call this the 'surveillance state', as if labeing it that way could make things any better.
I think the most effective argument against mass surveillance and secret monitoring, is the sentiment that such type of scheme bascially turns everybody into 'suspects', and such is likely to be thought to be offending peoples understanding of 'justice', and then there is surely something deeply disturbing with it all. It is bad enough for me using a Microsoft Windows produt, making my very own computer something I feel I don't control, nor own myself.
