"It is foolishness for the party of law and order to imagine that these forces of public authority created to preserve order are always going to be content to preserve order that that party desires. Inevitably they will end by themselves defining and deciding on the order they are going to impose - which, naturally, will be that which suits them best."
José Ortega y Gasset
And it is even more foolish to imagine that some laws will be sufficient to provide us data privacy protection.
ReplyDeletePrivacy of correspondence doesn't exist anymore probably.
We don't own anymore the envelope of the letter.
Pardon me, but you may have privacy writing letters and memos and essays, by hand and on paper, and copying it hundred times and putting it into envelops bit by bit and spitting the stamps, all this in order to let your friends know your personal opinion about this and that. Obviously we are the ones who really enjoy public correspondence simultaneously being able to write letters with ink and paper.
ReplyDeleteApart from this, I would like a patient´s card showing all the electronic data of my physical and psychological diseases and handicaps to the emergency doctor. Even in case of big brother got the knowledge by spying out my private life.
José Ortega y Gasset once was chatting with Heidegger, and at once he said to Heidegger: "After all a spanish philosopher is a paradox." Heidegger was gauche enough to ask: "Why??" Ortega answered: "Can you imagine a german torero???"
ReplyDeleteThat was in a time when clichés were still respected as semiotic semplifications of truth which could work as an entrance to truth.
Now female toreros do exist not only in Almodòvar's films, but a florentine girl became really a torera. And since the longing for truth has born a new (anti)cliché and a new asymmetry is growing more important than the out dated symmetric parity, some people have started to dream of a female Pope instead of a german Pope. Let's play chess (with a strong king and a lame Queen which has to be checkmated).
@cs
ReplyDeleteThe paper envelopes are getting opened only in dramatic historical situations. Ernst Jünger during the war in France was a censor of Feldpost, and since he himself was interrogated two times by the Gestapo, he reflected on the stages of collapsing privacy when he closed his diary into the safe.
But information power is not so much interested in letters (only when things are examined with a "magnifying glass"). At first is much more interesting the electronic behaviour.
Dear cs, you are optimistic now because your country is or seems very far from being governed by political forces which you strongly disagree with. But we have to think in time on how the stability we enjoy can last. And the pool, where a minority of know how with restricted information, which can provide a minority with power,is growing, is the information tecnology. Who is the political force you detest most (or which might be detesting you)? Do not answer, just imagine, that this force earns the electronic infrastructure and the class of specialist which is able to use it.
It is not necessary that you renounce on the "carot" of the patient's card with all your private data. But we need strong unions whose only task is to defend (not the "working class" but) users, consumers, clients, citizens and to guard the class of specialists.
Don't forget that, even if you never in your life have acted illegally, there are things you do not want to know everyone, but only people who love you. Everyone is vulnerable. What today is legal, tomorrow can be illegal. And usually noone is perfectly innocent. Remember Tagore's wall!
"Big Brother" is only a clumsy fantasy without sociological imagination.