Surveillance

We all need structure; rules that define how far we can go, how loud we can yell before we break the rules of society. Rules are necessary for us to find our feet as citizens in the society. You have to know where the boundaries are to avoid overstepping them.
This conviction unfortunately has not been prevailing among politicians in Denmark during the Cold War. PET (police intelligence service) was given a carte blanche to monitor people that according to PET were “interesting”. Apart from it being a problem to define what interesting implies, nowhere in the law it says that “interesting” people automatically run the risk of surveillance.
The Constitution should secure the inviolability of your private life, but in this case some of the highest ranking people in the country, elected on the basis of their credibility, have disregarded the constitution and decided which boundaries and rules people should know about. They even appointed a committee, the Wamberg-committee, that, with the benefit of hindsight, only served the purpose of creating false security.
As a young person, who has never experienced war or been threatened on my existence, I can still relate to the decision to monitor and register certain people. The only problem was that these people weren’t doing anything illegal. Many of the people registered, acted in good faith and were moving on a thin line without knowing whether it was there.
If you wished to register people or political parties, that worked to overthrow society, you should have made a law. It would have been fully acceptable to submit a law protecting the country against revolution or coup d’etat. This has been done in many countries and it works.
Unfortunately this whole problem is not just something that belongs to the past. As a citizen in Denmark you can still be registered or monitored without actually having broken any laws except the unwritten ones. I don’t want to live in a society where I’m not sure if I’m going to be registered for a critical opinion.
A law is just as relevant now as it was during the Cold War, especially in these days where terrorist threats are part of the daily news. This report must have consequences besides: “Ja, but we knew already knew that.” The electors and politicians must learn from this new insight. It shouldn’t be possible to trick the citizens of the country at one’s pleasure. The politicians are here for our sake, not the other way around.

This post can also be found in danish on jp.dk