In the first two months after the mass killings on Utøya and bombing of government buildings in Oslo the Police Security Service (PST) received 700 tips about other extremists who might sympathise with terrorists, or maybe do a similar thing themselves. It is difficult to say for certain if that number is high or low. Not just because unfounded tips are always received after terror and shocking crime, but also because it is so difficult to assess what is extremism, and whether it is dangerous or not.

To take the last one first: Anders Behring Breivik, the terrorist whose name many people in Norway will not utter, was one of many on the Internet. He is an opponent of immigration, believes in the Eurabia theory and wants to return to the time of the Knights Templar, but it is still not possible to separate the terrorist's network posts and opinion threads from a number of others, some of whom have even had their posts and chronicles published in major newspapers such as Aftenposten. What set him apart was the need to use violence and his ability to carry out his intention. This is untraceable in the public sphere.

Therefore the Police Security Service face a difficult job in the future to try to distinguish dangerous from harmless extremism, and to know when to separate politically acceptable utterances from potentially criminal extreme attitudes. After 22 July, the PST have been given an increase in funding so that emergency response and internet surveillance can be intensified, but there has been no real discussion about PST's tools.

Political Registration?

In the last decade before the millennium there was, in fact, a tightening of the practices of the security police. A commission headed by Supreme Court Judge, Ketil Lund, documented that during the Cold War many people had been under surveillance solely because of their political opinions. It was probably illegal during the Cold War, but it was only after the Lund Commission released its report that the last remnants of political surveillance were weeded out.

Now many people are demanding political surveillance again. They don't say so as such, but it is considered a matter of course that the PST not only follow what is being written online, but that they also take note of who is writing what, and examine whether there might be a network or activity that gives cause to fear crime. If the PST is to do this systematically and over a long time, it will be difficult to avoid registration. The promise of democracy is apparently in contradiction to the obligation not to be naive.

The question of whether there is a conflict between openness and lack of naivety has been the subject of much discussion in recent months. Again, it is necessary to go back more than a decade. When the so-called freedom of speech commission presented its report the main premise was that witchcraft explodes when it gets out in the sun. So: murky and/or extreme attitudes are made safe once they are exposed in public. As a result of this attitude, extra-strong protection of free speech is given to anyone who writes or talks about politics and society.

Post 22 July there have been objections to this approach. Several academics and the organisation Centre against Racism argue that the public does not function in the way that the freedom of speech commission thought. Experience now is that extreme and xenophobic attitudes can be reinforced on the Internet because public groups of peers are formed. For a time a kind of order was sent out to all liberals that they had to sign up to the extreme right debate forums online, but the result has seldom been a more open debate. To a much greater extent, the liberals' attempts to counter the extreme right-wing have led to websites being closed down or subdued.

Less openness?

This in turn has provided the basis for a more familiar, but no less important, discussion - namely that of political correctness and meaningful assessment. If there is a claim that has been promoted with increasing intensity after 22 July, it is this: "Stoltenberg promised more openness, but there has been less of it”.

Some of this criticism is related to the government's evaluation of what did happen and what did not happen on 22 July. A lot of criticism of police emergency preparedness has come out, and it seemed for a long while as if the Government would not respond to this criticism before next summer, when the recommendations of a special commission of inquiry are expected to be ready. During the autumn, in different ways, there have been some assessments from responsible politicians about what did not work, and it is probably most appropriate to look at the criticism of the Government's openness as part of the regular party-political debate.

It is different with the public debate in which several participants say that they express themselves in a different way than before 22 July. The anthropologist Unni Wikan is among those who say that she is now reluctant to enter into debates about various Muslim cultures, because she is afraid of having suspicion thrown on her. In principle, everyone agrees that it should be just as easy to talk about problems with immigration and integration now as before the summer, but in practice some people feel that there are such strong demands on the level of nuance that they would rather pull away from the public debate arena. It is not possible to say how many people interpret it in this way.

Whether the group is large or small, it can at least seek the support of the Progress Party's leading politicians. In the campaign leading up to local elections in mid-September, the Progress Party was also exposed to public scrutiny for its political rhetoric on immigration. The party leader, Siv Jensen, issued a warning about stealth Islamisation in Norway a year ago. The former party chairman, Carl I. Hagen, said a few years ago that "almost all terrorists (...) are Muslims."  In the election campaign these two were repeatedly asked to apologise for these statements because they were generalisations and threw suspicions on people.

Left-wing radical opinion monopoly

Jensen and Hagen regretted nothing and the party dropped from almost 18 to just under 12 per cent. We do not know if there is a connection, but the Progress Party's leadership has certainly concluded that the liberal press is out to get them, and that there is pressure to conform in the public debate.

The feeling that the general public is controlled by left-radical liberals has been very widespread in the extreme-right groups on the Internet. Anders Behring Breivik wrote, for example, that he saw a gathering of investigative journalists as a suitable target for terror. The notion that a left-wing radical opinion monopoly exists in newspapers and broadcasting could obviously in itself inspire extremism. The result in each case is that the conditions for community dialogue are poor.

The views expressed are those of the author.