COMMENTARY: A Serb nationalist with a thing about blondes?
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By Jaakko Kangasluoma
OK. Humour me for a moment and permit a rather daft train of thought.
Imagine that it would be possible and that some intelligence operative staked out in the virtual undergrowth - CIA, FSB, Mossad, or our own SUPO, it really doesn't matter - is going through my Google searches with the intention of discovering what sort of bloke I am.
How do I shape up?
In recent days, among other things, I have typed in the words "clunking noise when going round corners" and pressed "Google Search".
Wassat? WTF? I hear you ask. Nothing special, really, only that the car - as Google reliably informed me - probably has a front drive shaft bearing that is completely shot.
Not long ago, I keyed in a search on Google Images for "Maja Ivarsson". I wanted to refresh my memory as to why it was that I paid around a dozen euros to go to a concert by Swedish band The Sounds, even though I do not own any of their albums and have not actively listened to their music for over a year. Thanks to Google, seeing Ms. Ivarsson, I remembered immediately.
There should not be anything particularly interest-worthy in either of the above searches. Who wouldn't appreciate a decently working drive shaft on their set of wheels or pictures of cute rocker blondes?
But then there are some of the other searches...
I have also used Google to acquaint myself for instance with the process behind the construction of a nuclear device or cheap means of acquiring missile technology. And then, not above a few days ago, inspired by the prison sentence handed down in Austria to pseudohistorian David Irving, I looked on the Net for arguments that have tried to call in question the genocide of the Jews under the Nazis.
Again, very recently, I tried to determine why it was that the Serb general Ratko Mladic, wanted for war crimes, is still at large and remains a hero to many of his countrymen: mladic hero, I enquired of Google.
So, what could one conclude on a brief perusal of my search-engine footprints?
That I am a Serb nationalist with a limited grasp of the workings of front-wheel drive cars, with a leaning towards platinum blondes, who uses what time he has left over from building his own dirty bomb and missile silo in the pursuit of holocaust denial?
Only items two and three on this list are true, of course - the rest would require the most extraordinarily skewed interpretation.
In their war on terrorism, the United States authorities have been guilty of repeated examples of overkill and some complete judicial and public relations disasters. People have been arrested and held in custody on flimsy or at worst completely trumped-up charges. The pressure to dig out the terrorists has been intense - too intense.
From among the roiling mass of information on the Net it is probably possible to pinpoint an al-Qaeda cell in sleepy rural Karelia, if that is what you happen to be searching for. Nevertheless, the hit is in all probability, likely to be a completely virtual one based more on the combination of words than the real context.
For this reason I would wish that the American authorities would tighten their nets elsewhere than on the Net itself.
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 26.2.2006
Note: This commentary piece was printed in conjunction with an article on the current argument between the Bush Administration, which would still like to find out what people are looking up on Google (for example to roll up child porn networks), and the Internet search company's refusal to comply with a request for that information. The dispute has spurred a broader debate on the protection of personal privacy on the Net, and has led to concerned statements about the surrender of search information being a step towards a Big Brother-style of control of the Internet.
JAAKKO KANGASLUOMA / Helsingin Sanomat
jaakko.kangasluoma@hs.fi
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| 28.2.2006 - THIS WEEK |
 COMMENTARY: A Serb nationalist with a thing about blondes? |
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