The Individual Freedom and the very Big Brother

The basic objectives of modern liberal democracies are the respect for and safeguarding human rights, the protection of the citizen and his property against various forms of violence occurring in modern societies and of course ensuring individual freedom by applying the rule of law without exception for all citizens.

All the efforts of a modern liberal state should converge on defending all these fundamental rights of the citizen. In achieving its objectives, the state must find and implement ways of defending, preventing and suppressing all these risks and impacts that can lead to the suppression of the human rights and freedoms of the citizen.

by Thanos S. Chonthrogiannis

It is prohibited by intellectual property law or in any way illegal use of this article, with heavy civil and criminal penalties for the offender.

It is therefore commonplace in recent years to observe in modern societies a striking increase in the number of lawful surveillances of the citizen’s communication media. These media surveillances are called lawful because they take part after approval of a public service application and especially after approval by a judicial authority.

The causes of all these legitimate media intercepations lie in the various forms of modern violence occurring in western societies such as terrorism, cruel criminality, highly sophisticated economic crime, racist violence, cyber violence (extortion, bullying, etc.), national security reasons, etc.

But there is always a danger behind all these causes of legitimate watch houses to abuse power on the part of public services and their agents who are in this type of task.

Many times, the purpose of this abuse of power is taken by the governments themselves in order to illegally use the results of these legitimate intercepments against their political opponents and/or to “disappear” from the public sphere, through the use of blackmail and intimidation, any opposing government views.

But the main thing is that many times these legitimate media surveillances of citizens do not prove anything in retrospect against these citizens without these monitoring citizens ever being informed that their personal data have been recorded and stored.

The issue that is urgently posed to modern Western liberal societies is whether there is a framework of rules that should be used by organised state agencies and always in such a way as to ensure the main element of protection of private life, which is none other than the right of citizens to the confidentiality of their communications.

The rapid development of technology today, which enables not only the organized government services but also everyone who can penetrate networks and to intercept information without leaving “traces”, creates all those the insecurities about the violation of the citizen’s private life.

An insecure citizen who believes that his communications are being intercepted is that citizen who is self-censored and therefore ceases to be a free citizen. He is afraid to speak his mind and, in some ways, suffers at the same time not only the protection of his private life but also the possibility of being informed and to inform.

The EU, and the European Court of Human Rights, sets out a general framework without presenting any specific rules-directives that should be applied by state agencies in cases of monitoring of citizens’ communications.

What is stipulated by the European legislator is ‘that, in such cases, the competent services carrying out such tasks must intervene with the minimum force and their actions must reach that point, which is necessarily the highest necessary action for the protection of the other public good (protection of society), the protection of which is attempted.

Without the existence of a framework of detail rules-guidelines per case which rules government agencies should follow in order to safeguard the individual rights and freedoms of the citizen, while giving the state the ability to apply to the fullest extent its potential against any form of modern violence, there will always be a risk of abuse of power by governments, states and their services.

It is therefore time for the legislature in liberal societies, apart from the general framework to date, to define a specialised detail framework of rules and directives in every form of modern violence which has to be updated, and it should be followed by the mandated state services in order to achieve the best results both in the protection of citizen’s privacy and the suppression of all forms of crime.