The irony is that we only get stuck in semantic arguments because the authorities refuse to treat this as the kind of act it actually is. If prosecutors applied their own standards consistently, we wouldn’t be debating vocabulary on a message board.
Germany’s criminal code already recognises coercion of a population for political ends as a serious offence. If a private organisation tried to impose a system that eliminated private communication, criminalised encryption defaults, and created a permanent climate of fear around ordinary speech, they wouldn’t get a policy debate. They’d get an arrest warrant.
The only thing making this “controversial” is institutional hesitation. Everyone knows issuing warrants against EU-level actors would cause political embarrassment, so we pretend the behaviour is something milder, something safer to acknowledge. That gap between what the law says and what the state is willing to enforce is exactly where tragedies start.
This isn’t about inflating the meaning of terrorism. It’s about refusing to downgrade coercion just because it comes from people in respectable offices. Words shouldn’t shrink to protect those in power. They should describe what is happening.
edit: and whilst we are at the semantics - the word “terrorism” comes from the French Reign of Terror, where the state used fear as an instrument of governance. The original meaning was quite literally state-driven intimidation of an entire population to enforce ideological conformity.
Germany’s criminal code already recognises coercion of a population for political ends as a serious offence. If a private organisation tried to impose a system that eliminated private communication, criminalised encryption defaults, and created a permanent climate of fear around ordinary speech, they wouldn’t get a policy debate. They’d get an arrest warrant.
The only thing making this “controversial” is institutional hesitation. Everyone knows issuing warrants against EU-level actors would cause political embarrassment, so we pretend the behaviour is something milder, something safer to acknowledge. That gap between what the law says and what the state is willing to enforce is exactly where tragedies start.
This isn’t about inflating the meaning of terrorism. It’s about refusing to downgrade coercion just because it comes from people in respectable offices. Words shouldn’t shrink to protect those in power. They should describe what is happening.
edit: and whilst we are at the semantics - the word “terrorism” comes from the French Reign of Terror, where the state used fear as an instrument of governance. The original meaning was quite literally state-driven intimidation of an entire population to enforce ideological conformity.