September 11th 2001: terrorists flew into the World Trade Center in New York. The whole Western world quaked in fear of new terrorist attacks. Stricter security controls, including new passports, more wiretapping, the tracing of mobile phones and the monitoring of Internet traffic were introduced to prevent new attacks and other criminal activities.
Use and abuse
The increased fear of terrorism and other serious crime has meant that the boundary for what we are willing to accept in terms
of monitoring and surveillance is shifting. Developments in technology mean that this is actually possible. Most people consider
using someone’s electronic tracks to fight crime as a positive
thing, but is it right that we are all more or less treated as suspects in the event that we do something wrong sometime in
the future?
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Never before has it been possible to gather so much information about each and every one of us. It can also be tempting to
use this information for purposes other than what it was collected for. Electronic tracks can be used for purposes we don’t
like, such as commercial entities that use electronic tracks for marketing
and sales.
Good intentions
There are a lot of people, who collect information about you in order to be able to offer good services. For example, you
are registered on the public health and school databases so that you can be offered good public services. The police and the
judicial system need to be able to collect information and check electronic tracks to help investigate crimes and convict
criminals, saving lives and maintaining law and
order in society.
It is important to establish clear rules on who has the right to collect information about others, how this information is to be used, what it can be used for and how long it can be stored. Information that is collected for one purpose should not automatically be used in other contexts.
More and more of what we do is recorded. Surveillance cameras follow us in an ever increasing number of different places.
Someone is watching us and collecting information about us even when we’re not doing
anything wrong. Some people don’t like this idea, even if they know their hands are clean.
Can surveillance always be justified?
