Nothing to worry about

Mar 2026

Gina Muuss

He just woke up. He always wakes up before his alarm. He stares at it, waiting for it to do its job.
The alarm starts beeping. He immediately silences it and gets up. Breakfast time, today his choice
lands on his usual: Toast with eggs, a nutritious choice, approved by the department of health. A less
approved choice is his coffee. He knows at some point he will have to give it up, but not today.
Today, he still indulges in the warm bitterness and delights in the hit of the caffeine. 7:59 a.m. says
the kitchen clock, he gets up and goes to his front door. They are always on time. He checks his
watch: 8:00 a.m. the doorbell rings, he immediately opens the door. The man on the other side nods.
They don’t speak. They just observe. He gets out of the way, prompting the man to enter and go
straight to the office. In recent times, the officers of privacy always knew where to go. In the early
days, they would wait for you to take them to you connection port, but now the service level has
improved to allow minimal intrusion of security into your daily life.

The officers were introduced together with the department of privacy to ensure citizen privacy
while maintaining security of the land. Back then, security agencies wanted to outlaw encryption to
make it easier to detect unfortunate incidents, but people worried about their privacy; without
encryption anyone could just read all of their communication. So a compromise was struck: All
messages on the internet are to be end-to-end-encrypted, nobody can read them on the wire, but all
connection points are monitored by an officer of privacy when in use. The officer takes notes of
‘unfortunate activity’ and reports to the department of privacy. This connection point scanning is
fully private, it happens in your home directly at the connection point after all. Only in case of
‘unfortunate incidents’ do the officers report to their superiors. So if you have nothing to hide, then
you don’t have to worry.

He had gone to the kitchen to fetch his coffee and now reached the office. The officer was already
sitting in his chair, notebook ready, eyes fixated on the screen. He starts the computer, the officer
swipes his key card on the connection port and the computer’s connection indicator blinks on. He’s
online. First, he checks his messages: spam, spam, a newsletter he doesn’t read, more spam. His
direct messages rarely contained anything interesting. Most people decided to just communicated
publicly now, after all: They had nothing to hide. He switches to the timeline: an acquaintance of his
got married, an ad for new shoes, a politician praising the recent successes of the department of
privacy: They had caught someone trying to spread misinformation about the department. The
politician highlighted the incredible efficiency of the procedure and congratulated the prosecutor on
catching yet another unfortunate individual.

These types of news were the standard now. Almost all crime was detected via the department of
privacy and the unfortunate individuals were proven guilty immediately by the officers logs. In the
early days, the officers only looked for truly bad activity: terrorism, human trafficking and the likes.
The system celebrated many big successes and was integrated into every connection point,
becoming a normal fact of life. After a while, questions arose why only scanning for the worst
crimes was done. After all, the infrastructure existed, why not make more use of it. So they
introduced suspicion-dependent tracking. If you were suspected of a crime the officers were
instructed to also track other behavior. It quickly became apparent that this didn’t work. One could
tell if the officer suddenly started writing more into their notebook than in the past and rectify one’s
behavior. To combat this, all officers were told to fake writing constantly. You should not be able to
tell if they were actually watching you or not, but if you have nothing to hide, then you have
nothing to worry about.

He notices his officer for today is writing slightly slower than average, but maybe he is also
browsing slower than usual. He clicks away from his timeline and gets to work. Sometimes his job
was a drag, but today it went by quite fast. He has to prepare a presentation about the bi-quarterly
sales numbers. So his day is filled with pulling meaningless numbers from spreadsheets and putting
them into even more meaningless charts. Soon enough it is 17:00, he closes the spreadsheets and the
presentation and goes to the kitchen. The officer would stay as long as he wanted him to, but he
decides on only a quick snack before returning to his desk. He arrives back at his desk and settles in
to read some news. The national elections were coming up, so lots of articles feature politicians in
some form or another.

The department of privacy was also tasked with preventing the spread of misinformation by
stopping it at the source. Anyone sending misinformation would be prosecuted, so the citizens could
find comfort in the knowledge that everything they read was true. The department had a big chapter
dedicated to fact-checking everything that officers flagged as potentially wrong. Especially lies
about how efficient and elegant the department was, were noted and prosecuted against, but he
never worried about that. After all, he has nothing to hide, so he doesn’t have to worry.