Big Brother at right wing’s service | Opinion
haaretz.com
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student Lara Alqasem sits for a hearing at the Tel Aviv district Court on October 11, 2018.Jack Guez / AFP
Thursday’s court hearing on the appeal of Lara Alqasem, the young American imprisoned in a Ben-Gurion Airport facility over the past 10 days
for allegedly supporting BDS, even while she holds a student visa,
touched on a fundamental issue that threatens every man and woman who
voice their opinion on political issues.
The hearing exposed the extent to which states monitor simple acts
on the social networks and the frightening fact that they could be used
against users in formal procedures. Every social network user’s digital
fingerprints – every “like” or click to show attendance at an event,
even if done in haste, long ago or with no intention of expressing
support – is used by enforcement authorities worldwide to determine
people’s fates.
For example, the state claimed yesterday that its main evidence for Alqasem’s alleged support for BDS
even in recent months – despite her insistence that she stopped being a
member of the organization, which she belonged to while studying for
her bachelor’s degree – is that she confirmed on Facebook that she would
attend certain events.
As though the idea that basic Facebook
activity that people sometimes carry out offhandedly could serve as
evidence against them isn’t scary enough, this alleged “evidence” wasn’t
even submitted in Alqasem’s case. The reason for this, according to the
state, is that they had been deleted (a strange argument in the era of
screenshots).
This
is one of several assertions against Alqasem that appear in the
original report of the Ministry for Strategic Affairs on her political
activity, most of which is based on Facebook information about the
campus chapter to which she used to belong.
>> Read more: Israel’s ‘1984’ Moment in the War Against BDS | Opinion
Alqasem is not alone,
of course. Palestinians and Israeli Arab citizens have known for years
that every digital move they made could haunt them even if it’s
supposedly protected under freedom of expression. Now foreign left-wing
activists are in the surveillance crosshairs, and similar testimony has
been used against left-wing Israeli citizens.
This is the
realization of the Big Brother vision: Ideological positions are gleaned
from the web by governments, or worse: their envoys in civilian
espionage organizations, who “snitch” on their political rivals. Cooking
up criminal cases based on internet searches must be forbidden.
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