In a not particularly impressive documentary about Pope John Paul II, which television stations are using to fill their summer schedules, one statement struck me. His personal secretary, Cardinal Stanisław Dziwisz, recounted how, before the fall of the Berlin Wall, which symbolically marked the end of communism in Europe, officials from the American CIA regularly visited the Pope, bringing precise satellite images of all military and politically relevant sites in the then USSR, from which it was evident that the state was on the brink of collapse.
Even then, enough could be seen. This was 37 years ago, when the internet was still in its infancy in American military ‘laboratories’. Just six years later, in August 1995, when U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright brought satellite images of freshly dug mass graves around Srebrenica to a UN Security Council meeting, the internet was already in use even in Croatia. And it seemed that since then, nothing in this world could really be hidden anymore and that every further intrusion was a potential attack on our privacy.
European, and even Croatian awakening
From today’s perspective, when I greet my mobile phone with ‘Hello, Donald!’, my fridge with ‘Ni hao, Xi!’, and impersonal algorithms not only recognize how my brain works but increasingly manage it, the events, stories, and doubts from the beginning of this column seem like tales from the Stone Age. The internet, the communication revolution, and artificial intelligence are our unavoidable reality, brilliant tools, and unstoppable future.
But have we really become such managed idiots that we apathetically watch as European and our (corrupt) political elites hand over our personal internet communications, as the last refuge of privacy or at least the semblance of privacy, to the impersonal Big Brother for scrutiny and oversight? All this under the guise of fighting against child sexual abuse (CSAM)? Because that is precisely what the document being pushed during the Danish presidency of the EU Council aims to turn into a binding directive for member states.
I would not want to be an unfounded optimist, but it seems that there is good news these days for the protection of the last pockets of privacy and freedom. And this is true on both sides of the ocean. And on both sides of the extremely divided political spectrum. The good news is that the CSAM regulation is becoming a topic in all EU countries, including Croatia. The good news is that the review of this proposed European regulation has more or less the support of all political groups in the European Parliament, and even better is that the left-wing parties are highly critical of the draft regulation, even though this initiative was largely birthed by (former) officials of the European Commission (Margrethe Vestager and Ylva Johansson) who belong to that very political spectrum.
