Jenny’s Pennies

Today, Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter published a letter to the editor from Shahbaz Khan. He had gone to the bank to open a new account. He writes (my translation):

In the morning, a clerk calls me and asks what country I am from, where I am born and what citizenship I have. I have to give them all this information to open an account. Sweden, I answer to all the questions. ‘I’m sorry, but your name showed up on our list from the EU over terrorist names’, the woman says /…/ The bank does have my personal number*, isn’t that enough? ‘No we don’t use the personal number, we have a list of names that we check’ says the woman. So, if I change my name to Daniel Karlsson, it would be cool? The woman agrees. I can hardly believe it. And if it hadn’t happened to me personally, I would have doubted that it was true. A change of name, and you’re through the net.

So, what kind of “security” is that EU list of terrorist supposed to provide? A false one, it is. If you change your name to Daniel Karlsson, you’re off. Because we can’t start tracking all the Daniel Karlssons now, can we? A terrorist is called Shahbaz. Not Daniel.

Shabaz Khan writes:

Instead of efficient and necessary surveillance to protect the society, broad strokes are drawn all across Sweden and the EU. All of you with a certain name, consider yourself targeted. This is called contraproductivity.
What you are suspected of is not based on your actions, but on your name. You are a suspect, and there is nothing you can do about it. This is hard to swallow in a society that preaches that everyone is judged by their actions.

Indeed.
It should be noted that it is perfectly possible to track all changes of name that Swedish citizens do. The information is there, and we have the technology. But somehow the authorities chose not to. Because it would target, you know, normal people. People with names like Daniel Karlsson. So it is better limited to people like Shahbaz Khan. You know, the terrorists.

*Personal number = a number every Swedish citizen is given, consisting of your date of birth and then four unique digits, such as YYMMDD-XXXX.

/co-written with my husband Markus, who should have a blog of his own, but piggybacks here instead.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 8th, 2008 at 10:25 pm and is filed under Stupidity, Sweden, The "war on terrorism". You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.