For several days now, Armenia’s society has been roiled by the government’s proposal to introduce state registration and monitoring of mobile phones. Surprisingly, however, there is something rather striking about the public reaction.
During the parliamentary election campaign, law enforcement agencies began, one after another, publishing recordings of intercepted phone conversations involving citizens who were part of the opposition’s organizational network, without presenting convincing evidence that the wiretaps themselves had been lawfully authorized. Then, immediately after the election, the Prime Minister asserted that any security service employee could freely make public whatever information they possess about citizens. The overwhelming majority of the public remained silent. At the very least, nothing resembling today’s level of outrage accompanied those developments.
Yet the phenomena described above are no less telling signs of totalitarianism or authoritarianism. In fact, they are arguably even more aggressive in nature because they operate in ways that are far less visible—and therefore far more difficult to monitor or restrain. And then, suddenly, an uproar erupts over the proposed state registration of mobile phones.
The point, however, is not that this public outcry is misplaced. On the contrary, it is both justified and necessary. Society must possess at least a minimal capacity to resist tendencies toward total surveillance—a basic instinct for self-preservation.
But a society that rises up against total state control should have reacted just as forcefully to the earlier developments as well. When both the public and the so-called progressive expert community respond to those incidents with systematic silence, yet erupt over the issue of mobile phone registration, what we are witnessing is not evidence of civic resilience, a commitment to freedom, or a healthy instinct for self-defense. Rather—if you will forgive the bluntness—it points to the near-total numbing of those very faculties and to a society that has become deeply susceptible to manipulation.
In effect, the public reacts only when something is so obvious that it cannot be ignored, while its other “senses” appear to have been switched off. And that is a serious problem. Sometimes the public’s attention is deliberately drawn to something obvious, while the real practice unfolds quietly elsewhere
Hakob BADALYAN
