The bottom-line in today’s society is that security and safety are important, while liberty can be limited in order to make crime-fighting more effective.

The problem with this is that the arguments for it are rather rational – Yes, since all citizen have the right to privacy, criminals can hind behind these rights as well. Here is usually where the “if you’ve done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear”-argument comes in. Which is completely the opposite to reality. For if a society is turned into such a society where the state knows even the smallest of your mistakes and will punish you for it (since you have done “something” wrong, you will logically have to fear as well), that my friends, is a police state.

Ergo a society where the state wants to be able to see behind your wall of integrity, is a police state. If, however, they would not punish for smaller crimes, consciously, a fault in the system would appear, and I can assure you they would not hesitate to fix it.

The very idea of fighting crime is, in itself, dangerous. If everybody has to be checked, everybody is a potential thief, murderer or terrorist. Of course, it is always possible to claim that all this (and in a way it is true) is to improve safety, e.g. “this is for your protection”, but it is just that that we’ve come so distant from real fascism that the arguments for a police state has come to seem rational, even in a way justified.

However, there is no justification for a system which exploits the people’s fear of something in order to gain control over its own citizen.

I hate how arguing against more security for less privacy always ends up talking about the fascist police state and how everything will turn really bad. It’s a dystopian idea primarily used to do the exact thing it says the ones who advocate for security does; use fear. If we tell you that when you accept to give up your privacy to gain a little more safety, you accept the police state and everything with it, we imply that, unless you feel comfortable with the dystopia of a fascist state, you act ignorantly.

I very much dislike having to use rhetorical techniques when arguing, which is the reason for my explanation above.
However, as I still feel there is no justification for trading off privacy for security, there are certainly valid arguments.

First off, what is usually attempted to be achieved through certain laws to make crime-fighting easier, is usually not achieved. Because they cannot go full-out surveillance system on the society, so they have to go step-by-step, meaning the new legislations can be bypassed, making the actual targets innocent civilians (again, another rhetorical technique; innocent targets, at least I didn’t say “children” ), or rather, ordinary people, since these are the ones not protecting themselves from the surveillance, and thus, the only ones exposed to it.

This is to say that they aim, but miss. They put up cameras in metros so they can catch alcoholics, while eventual terrorists will not hang out in the Tube toying with their bombs. They monitor data traffic to prevent terrorists in Afghanistan from attacking Swedish soldiers, although the few eventual terrorists stupid enough to email each other through Sweden before ambushing a convoy with RPGs are a very minute group, the majority is everybody else.
They want to put up a filter, blocking websites with child pornography, leaving the content untouched, leaving the affected children untouched (perhaps the wrong word to use here), only putting a veil over what we do not want to see, in the fragile hope of it going away that way.

Of course, if the terrorist threat from Muslim fundamentalists was present and actually somewhat in connection to reality, a certain degree of exceptions could be made to prevent this threat. However, there are no such threats. In Finland, the only threat we have, which is remotely real, are depressed 18-year-olds going on school rampages with small-calibre pistols. And that is not going to be prevented by monitoring Internet activity or filling the schools with cameras. That, my friends, would only be a failed system preserving itself. The only thing it would create is even more desperate youngsters, when their lives get even more clogged up because their lives are clogged up. It’s a sort of “Oh, you feel bad? Hey, we won’t help you, but we’ll make damn sure you can’t show it!” which really pisses me off. (Emotions? Shit.)

I believe that behind every problem, threat and what not, lies a reason (sounds logical enough), a reason which is not incurable. People are depressed – Help them. Foreign people want to blow up our metro? Perhaps we shouldn’t be in their country with armed forces? Children are being sexually abused? Remove the actual websites, find the perpetrators, give them rehabilitation, make them not do it again? Don’t belong to a religion or  let your children be with the bishops unattended?

A lot of the problems we face can be solved through rational reasoning and action, rather than through the bullshit of covering everything we don’t want to see up and uncovering everything the state wants to see.
The state don’t want me to build a nuclear bomb and blow up the Capital? Well, I’ve certainly got a reason for wanting to do so, so perhaps they should prevent me from becoming so pissed off that I would resort to fission.

Time to stop running in the same tracks all the time. Time to stop using anything else but logical, rational reasoning for your arguments. Emotions fuel passion, not arguments.