Internet and Surveillance

Preface

Thomas Mathiesen

I am 77 years old. I remember very well indeed a world without the Internet. I remember the late 1930s in Norway, a humble close-knit society (with some wealthy shipowners on top), where people in fishing villages, rural areas, and towns lived as they always had lived. I remember how the world changed when Norway was occupied by German forces during World War II, I remember vividly our meeting with American soldiers who had come to Northern Europe in 1945 via the disastrous struggles and terrible man-slaughter during the Italian campaign, “the soft belly” of German Europe, which turned out not to be soft at all, but which changed my life throughout. I remember how I went to the US with my mother, an American, by steamship ...