Poisoning the well

The last days have seen two important articles in Svenska Dagladet on Lex Orwell. The first one, written by lawyers at Center for Justice, lists a large number of points on which the new law violates the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). The second article, written by the senior weblogger and phd in informatics Nicklas Lundblad, shows how the technological imperative of Lex Orwell (it is possible!) has been allowed to completely overshadow the more important question: do we want it?

Reading the online version of these articles, I am disappointed to find that both the comments field and the blog links are overflowing with conspiracy theories, everything from “9/11 was planned by George W Bush” to those staple accusations against the Bilderberg-group.

As always, it is difficult to assess how representative such views actually are. But it is easy to see that they play very well in the hands of those who claim that anyone opposing Lex Orwell is either ignorant about its purpose or suffers from paranoia anyway.