Most of us have seen the battle among those who think the internet should be one free playground, those who see it as a source of income, and those who see it as a tool to track criminals and terrorists. Many of us are just plain confused by what is really going on.
This little bit started with my intent to buy a couple of Swedish CDs as gifts. I have bought CDs from MegaStore.se before and tried to login to my account. I was told my username or password were wrong. I double checked my cheat sheet of passwords. I carefully watched my fingers. Still wrong. After several attempts I asked for my username and password to be sent to me.
Within minutes I received an email giving exactly what I had been typing. I tried again. Wrong. I cut and paste from the email. Wrong. I gave up and sent email (or is it emejl in Swedish) asking for help. Since it was after hours, I wouldn't get a reply until late Sunday, early morning in Sweden.
Meanwhile, I looked at all the help files and other interesting detours on the site. One was megablogg.se. It had a few interesting thoughts, but one that struck me was "2009 - året då internet dog?" or "2009 - the year when the internet died?"
It had a link to an article in Aftonbladet "138 - Mitt desperata fem-i-tre ragg, Lisa Magnusson om EU:s telekompakt och framtidens internet"
I'm already in linguistic trouble, I never heard of "fem-i-tre ragg". I looked it up yesterday, but didn't make much sense of it. Anyhow, 138 refers to a proposed European Union law about the internet, and Lisa Magnusson sees it as affecting the future's internet.
My rough translation gathers that she complains about the internet not being as free as it once was (that is, no cost access) and the internet being too regulated. I never knew the internet was free unless you were getting somebody else to pay for it, like at a university. Regulated? Yes and no. But hang on.
She writes that her MSN account was suspended because she used the words "Hitler" and "pedophile" in a chat room.
Now I'm getting in over my head in Swedish and look for some similar stuff in English. Even in English, it is very confusing. Yes, there are police and security authorities who want all data traffic to be retained for at least 30 days. But it is very hard to understand how much is actually being put into law or has even been put into law.
Even if it will not be put into law, think about how the more complicated laws become, the less the average person, or even legislature can understand the full implications of these laws. Just think about the original PATRIOT Act and how few legislators even read it.
And this is how freedom will be lost to security. When we become so afraid of something that we want the authorities to do anything to protect us, some authorities will do anything, even if it really winds up making us less secure.
