(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
With Snowden and the premiere movie CITIZEN FOUR this week we have all become aware of the extensive monitoring we are subjected to. From a Freudian point of view, this is that the Big Brother sees you, that itself superego sitting there and recording everything you do, a reality we all have to deal with. The ubiquitous surveillance carried out by the US NSA, British GBHQ and others using new technological devices is an attack on our freedom and our deeply rooted liberal tradition in which the intimate sphere is to be protected from the public sphere. A foreign intervention in our world of life – a colonization of our lives, carried out by a world of control that robs itself of the power of knowledge. One day when I looked at a website for wood stoves, in a Google search later in the day, I suddenly experienced an offer from Maxbo. Well – I can live with that. It is worse if I, as a "radical" newspaper editor, are mapped for internet activity to get a profile – my folder – about what kind of value preferences and interests I should be able to have. And when will a paid New Time fee to a critical international newspaper columnist be "accidentally" punished for being "support for a terrorist organization"? Another example: Since I was hired as an editor for the newspaper you are now reading, my mobile phone has taken longer to connect. My "hello?" is not heard; associated click and silence, and I began to answer twice. Now I habitually wait three seconds before I speak. The fact that we have now received NOK 200 from Fritt Ord for conducting investigative journalism about the control society's intelligence and terrorist propaganda probably does not make the surveillance body less curious. But do we in the editorial office – which is common at meetings at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs – have to leave our mobile phones in metal cabinets outside the meeting room? Freedom is such a fundamental value for many of us that we choose to fight for it. In the United States, 34 percent of the population now (according to a survey, see front page) are actively trying to limit their digital surveillance. Is this a race against time, or the technological development? Is the collection and collection of big data now so established by the authorities' intelligence services, in cooperation between states and the media, that one no longer sees the possibility of a David's fight against Goliath? Has the supremacy of today's new control society managed to establish a sufficient fear mentality among us for "terrorists" to accept all surveillance? Has the mass media, politicians and business – with great benefit from the new control society – tricked the majority of the population into believing that the danger of terrorism is so great that we must forever see normal socialism and hospitality replaced by the security industry and armed police? Or will Snowden's revelations about surveillance wake us all up and hit the new, ubiquitous Goliath? It is a completely new mentality that is currently spreading. At Rutgers University in the USA, the program Proctortrack (= supervision + tracking) is now used to video monitor students' computers during exams. While the webcam continuously films them, the program selects unusual movements, so that the teacher / examiner gets a video list where they can check if the student has cheated. A head movement that gives the suspicion that you have asked your sidekick is enough for the program to respond. According to the publication The Intercept, Proctortrack was originally developed to monitor people at airports – if people were suspiciously often to look down or yawn too much. A student with Proctortrack walking during exam time should thus take care not to sink too much together, show too many grimaces, and by all means not bend down if he or she should lose his or her pen. Then you can end up at the crossroads as a person with "low integrity". Another so-called early warning system, Stoplight, analyzes academic and demographic data to map students' ability to implement – coded as green, yellow or red. Should searchable profiles be created for all of us – which are stored for life, or longer? On Facebook today, it is estimated that registered user data on each of us corresponds to 80 pages of hidden information. Interestingly, there are lawyers who see an opportunity to make millions – and therefore take up the fight against Goliath greats such as Facebook, Google, Netflix and others: For example, Jay Edelson's law firm is hated by the industry, according to the International New York Times. Edelson claims that they have sued and won cases worth around seven billion kroner since they started just over a decade ago. 20 lawyers in Chicago are suing the giant companies on behalf of us regular computer users for huge sums – a so-called American "privacy class action", where they represent large customer groups. Last week, they sued Facebook because, according to Edelson, they "secretly acquired the world's largest privately owned database of biometric customer data." A number of users responded that Facebook via face recognition itself suggests names taken from your contact list in photos you post. This is forbidden, according to an old law called the Biometric Information Privacy Act. They recently won a case against Netflix when they turned out to store information about what users had seen even after they had canceled their subscription. With a law that previously prohibited video stores from storing lists, Edelson's customers received compensation of around NOK 60 million. Lawyers have also sued Google for scanning their users' gmail accounts. And opposite the search engine Spokeo – where uncorrectable data about people remain – is now the debate about a possible compensation of several billion kroner. It is just that more and more such online programs have now been given "accept" buttons, where users must accept perhaps a hundred pages of legal entrenches, before they can open their new version of Facebook and similar programs. CITIZEN FOUR. May we all, like Snowden in the future, hide under red carpets when using encrypted passwords? Finally, a piece of advice from us here in Ny Tid: Do not accept Facebook as a login method for all other possible websites (Twitter etc) on your PC / Mac, then you also accept that everything you do is mapped in their database.
