When the American government is revealed to have gathered personal information about basically everyone on the planet, it's obvious that there's going to be no shortage of comments.

Swedish journalist Andreas Ekström at Sydsvenskan proposes that everyone's personal data och private information should be made open for all, not just to the American security services. A naive proposal.

Data is not so valuable in itself, but structured and analysed data (information) can be. The only consequence of making everyone's personal information open to everyone else all the time is that those who are most adept at structuring and analysing data get the most power over everyone else.

So we'd have to ask ourselves if this is a relative distribution of power we find desirable, and when we likely conclude that this isn't the case, we have to write laws that make the companies and services we use on a daily basis get a strong incentive not to make us vulnerable to that kind of uneven distribution of power.

Another Swedish journalist, Sam Sundberg, writes at Svenska dagbladet that surveillance is and appears to be a given fact. [This is also reflected in another article at Sveriges Radio interviewing security expert Mikko Hyppönen]. But really nothing could be more wrong: we've outsourced and privatised a large part of our public tasks, and so we have a very simple solution available for the protection of privacy. In technology, we really don't need to face any bigger problems with systematic respect for privacy. Accidents or negligence set aside, we could decide to make an infrastructure that as much as possible strives towards giving individuals the right to self-determination and their own identities. We just need to make it more expensive for companies to not build that kind of infrastructure than it is to build that kind of infrastructure. But mostly we've done it the other way around - we've made it more expensive to be a company which provides privacy-friendly solutions, and we're encouraging the development of surveillance tools.

That's not a market problem and it's not a technical problem. It's a political problem.

Emanuel Karlsten, journalist at Swedish daily paper Dagens nyheter, writes that this is a problem for the American democracy and the American state - he concludes he had more confidence in them. This is very strange - our problem is currently that our own legislators aren't caring about us when they are writing our laws. That's the problem. American legislators have no obligations towards me nor towards Emanuel Karlsten, but reasonably we can expect Swedish defence minister Karin Enström or the prime minister Fredrik Reinfeldt to feel somewhat responsible for what happens to us. When will Fredrik Reinfeldt make clear to the American government and American IT companies that it's not ok that they are lobbying away our fundamental rights in the discussions on the data protection regulation?

Another comment from Dagens nyheter written by Axel Björklund has also avoided the problematisation of the role of European politicians in what happens with the personal information of European citizens, outside of any political control that we seem willing to exert. He proposes that we, as European citizens and Swedish citizens the politicians of whom have just sold out their human rights to an American industry, should ponder instead the differences between Turkey and the US.

Swedish politicians in the European Parliament, for instance Anna Maria Corazza Bildt, Cecilia Wikström and Olle Schmidt, choose to defend the American industry and the American government above the interests of European citizens' fundamental right to privacy.

At the end, knowledge and information is about power. They who know more about me than I know myself have more power over me than I do. So the only relevant question to be asking ourselves in op-eds in Swedish newspapers is if and if so why it's acceptable that European politicians in the discussions on the data protection regulation seem very close to give that kind of power to somebody other than their citizens.