It’s high time someone issued a Stay the Fuck Outta My Private Life Directive.
Living in a country unacquainted with terrorism, I’ve enjoyed a government whose approach to surveillance and privacy has been relatively conservative. But Norway can’t stand alone against the tidal wave of paranoia that’s crushing over Europe and North America. Especially after July 22.
The Data Retention Directive is a 2006 EU directive that mandates the storage of information pertaining to who’s calling, emailing, or texting whom, where and when this happens, for periods of 6 to 24 months. The directive is clearly a big erosion of privacy. The supreme courts of Germany and Romania have declared those countries’ implementations of the directive unconstitutional, but both countries are now under pressure from the EU to find a way to implement the directive anyway. Norway is not a member of the EU, but implements many EU directives through its membership in the European Economic Area. The DRD was adopted by a slim majority in parliament this spring, and is expected to become effective in Norway on July 1, 2012.
After July 22, the prime minister promised more democracy. Now we’re starting to see what that looks like. A recent proposal by PST, the national security service, suggests that owning innocent items like rubber gloves should be illegal if there’s reason to suspect that their intended use is for terrorism. Receiving training that might be applicable to terrorism, or simply being present at a site where such instruction is happening, could also be illegal. Anti-surveillance tactics are included under “instruction that pertains to terrorist intent.” If this legislation is implemented, it veers into thoughtcrime, and the potential for abuse is immense.
The PST is the same agency that used to maintain extensive files on left-wing intellectuals who dared to express commie sympathies. Now the pendulum has swung, and the extreme right-wing is the boogeyman. It’s ridiculous not to expect an institution with a history of illegal or questionable surveillance of political dissidents not to abuse a proposed extension of their right to jump into people’s private lives. And it’s obviously disingenous to hang this legislation on concerns about terrorism while maintaining that not even the Stasi’s surveillance could have caught Behring Breivik. (And also conveniently ignoring that they were informed—based on existing surveillance—about Breivik’s questionable purchases of chemicals before the attack, and failed to act on that information.)
This draconian new legislation may never be implemented. But it’s not a security agency’s fairy dream: it’s actually based on existing British legislation. This stuff is already the law in Britain! If you happen to be on British soil, you risk having your communications tapped because you went online and wrote some anti-immigrant opinions, and then purcashed some rubber gloves and maybe a gun manual.
The DRD, the British (and proposed Norwegian) legislation, and the American Patriot Act all depend on a corrupt moral calculus. It’s a perverted utilitarianism, where ends always justify means. Now, utilitarianism can lead to tolerable ethics if we choose to balance our values correctly. The basic idea is that we should always do the thing that brings about maximum moral utility. Utility is defined by our values: we might, for instance, value human life and human happiness, and decide that ten happy people are worth one dead one. This conflicts with the other major branch of ethics, deontology, which judges an act’s moral value based on its adherence to rules. We might, for instance, have a rule against sacrificing innocents, no matter what. Both deontology and utilitarianism can lead to absurdities when pushed to their limits. Utilitarian ethics may rule that an imperceptible increase in a million people’s happiness is worth the sacrifice of a hundred innocent people. Deontological ethics may rule that not even a billion people’s lives are worth saving if it means sacrificing even one innocent person. It seems obvious that a combination of deontology and utilitarianism is necessary to lead moral lives.
But even if I think a combination approach is best, I can grant that you can get a good approximation by relying on one or the other, if we choose our values or our rules wisely. In the case of utilitarianism, we need to assign the right negative and positive values to various outcomes we want and want to avoid, so that the total utility accurately reflect our actual values. If we assign “human life” a value of 1, and “material possesions” a value of 1000, we might be willing to kill a thousand people just to gain a capitalist trinket we don’t need. We must choose wisely.
As a response to terrorism, Western governments have applied a utilitarian moral calculus where prevention of terrorism has infinite value. The ends will always justify the means. It doesn’t matter if you torture innocents or deny them due process, it doesn’t matter if you invade everyone’s privacy, so long as there is some actual or imagined anti-terrorism silver lining. This is a complete distortion of ethics: all our values have been subjugated to the value of preventing terrorism. As if we value nothing else.
Those who want to separate morality from law are deluding themselves. Morality isn’t divorced from law now, and it never can or will be. Almost every law has moral consequences, and almost every proposal for a law has at least some basis in morality. This makes it very important that the ethics underpinning our laws is sound. And we have allowed a corrupt and unsound ethics to serve as the foundation of our laws.
Dec 8, 2011