{"id":25815,"date":"2016-03-17T07:43:01","date_gmt":"2016-03-17T07:43:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.marianagurza.ro\/blog\/?p=25815"},"modified":"2016-03-17T07:43:01","modified_gmt":"2016-03-17T07:43:01","slug":"prof-marianne-h-skanland-warns-about-extensive-government-surveillance-in-norway","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.marianagurza.ro\/blog\/2016\/03\/17\/prof-marianne-h-skanland-warns-about-extensive-government-surveillance-in-norway\/","title":{"rendered":"Prof. Marianne H. Skanland Warns About Extensive Government Surveillance in Norway"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Total surveillance of Norwegian homes to prevent\u00a0crime?<\/h4>\n

March 11th\u00a02016 brought the news that our government intends\u00a0to increase secret surveillance in Norway. The Minister of Justice will have\u00a0the police carry out new types of surveillance, without having to obtain a\u00a0court order beforehand, including\u00a0secret searches of homes, placing of secret microphones and cameras,\u00a0hacking into private computers to obtain mail correspondence but also to\u00a0monitor running activities such as drafts of mails which are never sent. (Links here<\/a>, here <\/a>and here<\/a>).<\/p>\n

The motivation behind this is to prevent terrorism. But the proposals will\u00a0cover all \u201cserious crime\u201d.<\/p>\n

The effect on family life with children<\/h4>\n

Having paid some attention to the public debate about children in Norway\u00a0over the last twenty years, I have seen groups of people, such as\u00a0politicians and lawyers \/ jurists concerned with \u2018child rights\u2019, develop a\u00a0way of thinking of nearly anything negative in children\u2019s lives as very\u00a0serious offences against them.<\/p>\n

It is as if they truly believe that children\u00a0should grow up in padded cells and never get acquainted with sorrow as\u00a0well as joy, setbacks as well as success, uncertainty and danger being\u00a0part of life that one needs some experience of.<\/p>\n

The Minister of Justice proposes here<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\u201cTyper saker dette skal gjelde for er blant annet kriminalitet som drap,\u00a0terror, menneskesmugling, frihetsber\u00f8velse, overgrep mot barn og\u00a0masse\u00f8deleggelsesv\u00e5pen, hovedsakelig med med strafferamme over ti \u00e5r\u00a0i fengsel.\u201d<\/p>\n

(Types of cases where this will be applied are e.g. crimes such as killing,\u00a0terror, human trafficking, deprivation of liberty, abuse of children, and\u00a0mass destruction weapons, mainly carrying a sentence of 10 years or\u00a0more or imprisonment.)<\/p>\n

10 years may sound reassuring, but we are on a slippery slope, very\u00a0likely. This is seen from the debate: Serious politicians mention the\u00a0possession of child pornography as a reasonable target for such\u00a0surveillance\u00a0Dagsnytt 18 (the daily news at 6 pm<\/a>).\u00a0This topic starts at 00:56<\/p>\n

Children are clearly in people\u2019s minds and no doubt anything called\u00a0\u2018violence\u2019 against children is covered by \u2018abuse\u2019.<\/p>\n

What will happen?<\/h4>\n

So I think it very likely that such surveillance as they now plan will be\u00a0snapped up as a possibility by the child expert professions, and carried\u00a0out in any home with children if Barnevernet (the CPS) sees fit to do so,\u00a0nobody in Norwegian public life protesting very much.<\/p>\n

There are already CPS cases in which the CPS has planted people in the\u00a0home to sit there and write down whatever the family members do (or\u00a0their \u2018interpretation\u2019 of it). In addition to driving the family out of their\u00a0minds, it is of course used by the CPS as proof that the family is an unfit\u00a0place for children.<\/p>\n

There is already a mental climate in Norway that does not greatly object\u00a0to total nanny-state monitoring of everything. An example is that\u00a0psychology expert Einar C. Salvesen, who holds the abduction of the children to be a tragedy\u00a0and wants to help them, had no reservations to suggesting an alternative\u00a0method which he thinks the CPS might have done well to use: put a CPS\u00a0worker or a psychologist in the Bodnariu home, to be there 24\/7, to\u00a0observe what they did and advise them on their treatment of the children.\u00a0He also recommends that not one psychologist but a whole team of\u00a0psychologists should evaluate any single CPS case. But actually, that is\u00a0what they do already, just in a slightly different way: They often evaluate\u00a0other psychologists who have been engaged in the case at an earlier\u00a0stage. It is very rare that this helps the family, and it has certainly not led\u00a0to any revolt among psychologists against the way most of them conduct\u00a0their work in CPS cases.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Marianne Skanland is a Professor Emeritus of linguistics at University of Bergen, and has spent many years researching and criticizing the Norwegian CPS.<\/p>\n

Marianne\u2019s website is\u00a0http:\/\/www.mhskanland.net\/index.html<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Total surveillance of Norwegian homes to prevent\u00a0crime? March 11th\u00a02016 brought the news that our government intends\u00a0to increase secret surveillance in [&hellip<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25815","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articole","category-linkuri-externe"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marianagurza.ro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25815","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marianagurza.ro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marianagurza.ro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marianagurza.ro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marianagurza.ro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25815"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.marianagurza.ro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25815\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25818,"href":"https:\/\/www.marianagurza.ro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25815\/revisions\/25818"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.marianagurza.ro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25815"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marianagurza.ro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25815"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.marianagurza.ro\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25815"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}