BOUNDARIES BETWEEN ENSURING SECURITY AND UNNECESSARY SOCIAL SURVEILLANCE – CASE STUDY OF THE GERMAN DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC

1. Objective The objective of this article is to present the need to control society in order to ensure security both to the society itself and to the state, and to draw an extremely fluid boundary line between what is necessary and what is unnecessary, which may turn into unnecessary surveillance which sometimes becomes caricatural. The duty to ensure security to the society, particularly in the era of increasing religious terrorism in Europe (resulting from simple relationships in the society), is an obligation aimed at permanence of existence of a given social group (national, supranational) functioning within the state and as such should be connected with aptly chosen methods of supervision. 2. Introduction Security is the overriding need of humans and it determines their other needs and the motives for the actions they take. It manifests itself not only in the lack of hazards (which constitutes its basic principle related to the assurance of existence) but also in the need to take action to ensure appropriate conditions for development of individuals as well as smaller and larger social groups. Hence, today’s understanding of security is not exclusively linked with the existence of humans or social groups (lack of hazards); it must be analysed from the point of view of its development, which in turn determines the evolution of such categories of security as economic, scientific cultural security, or job security. However, such secondary categories of security, which ensure the development of individuals and various social groups, cannot be pursued without eliminating potential threats to the existence of humans, particularly those related to their life and health, and ensuring continuity of generations. In order to meet this objective, especially in the era of increasing terrorism, it is necessary to supervise the society, which is more and more culturally and religiously diverse, in the right way, and the supervision may not become caricatural as was the case with the German Democratic Republic. 3. Methodology The authors identify the need to exercise permanent supervision in the society, particularly in areas threatened with terrorism, and, at the same time, point out that it is possible to overstep the necessary surveillance in a manner leading to its caricatural forms, which occurred in the German Democratic Republic, non-existent today. The adopted comparative historical method allows for direct analysis of needs regarding security in comparison with the potential threat of adopting wrong methods to meet them. A glance at current threats to social security, including terrorism, confronted with the surveillance that was common in the German Democratic Republic, which ceased to exist over twenty-five years ago, throws doubt on the boundaries of the needed and acceptable social surveillance. 4. Conclusions The authors prove that it is difficult to draw a clear line between what is permissible and what is impermissible in social surveillance, especially in view of terrorism threats. Therefore, the actions of national authorities should be marked by far-reaching carefulness in the selection of surveillance methods so that a democratic state does not turn into a police state. They agree, however, that supervision in the form of well administered surveillance is one of the methods of ensuring security to individuals and society