“…individuals are at risk of being targeted for being suspected ‘extremists’ or for being suspected of being ‘opposed to our constitutional legal order’, even if they have not (yet) committed any criminal (let alone terrorist) offence… Freedom is being given up without gaining security.'”
Immediately when I read this quote by Thomas Hammarberg within the Rouvroy essay on “Governmentality in an Age of Autonomic Computing”, I thought off the certain piece of information Glenn Greenwald revealed in the film we watched, “CitizenFour”. He claimed the US government had 1.2 million people on their “watch list”. That is a rather large number and I am confident that many of those, who are on the watch list, have yet to commit a crime (false positives). Still, they are constantly monitored, unbeknownst to them, and their freedom is essentially stripped from them. To make matters worse, that “watch list” certainly does not contain all of the real terrorists (false negatives) out there. Therefore, our freedom is being taken away as security still does not improve.