Global Strategy - blog

The arguments presented against "Lex Nokia" become increasingly odd (see also my earlier blog entry).

One of the weirdest arguments against the law so far is that it would give corporations greater rights to inspect their employees' emails than what the police has. (Again, remember that the law does not give firms any rights to read any emails of their employees - just the right to inspect the destination addresses and sizes of the mails).

Why the argument is rather weird and irrelevant is because "the rights of the police" (or "greater rights than those of police" ) should really not be any standard against which one assesses the legitimacy of anything!

Think about it. If your family owns a house, you have a legitimate (and lawful) right to enter it, but the police doesn't. If your kid's tooth is hurting, you have the legitimate (and lawful) right to demand him/her to open his/her mouth and let you see what's wrong with the tooth -- the police doesn't. If you use a car owned  by your employer, your employer has a legitimate (and lawful) right to oversee how much you're driving around with the car -- the police doesn't.

So, it seems that with the argument in question -- "Lex Nokia gives employers greater rights to oversee their employees mail traffic" -- some people only want to create further hysteria against the law, in a rather populistic way. I'm aware that there might be some problems with the law, but I would hope for a bit higher-quality argumentation -- whether for or against..