On April 7th, Stockholm was struck by a terrorist attack. In the aftermath of this incident, public debate focused on two contradicting themes – one is to preserve the open society not to give in to fear, the other is to strengthen societal safety by increasing police or even military presence to deter further acts of terror. The augmented presence of security measures is also intended to have a reassuring effect on public perception, as it is believed that citizens react with fear. Instead, people took to the streets in order to show their support for the victims and for an open society.
This contribution presents data from two national surveys focusing on the acceptance of surveillance technology as a means of reducing risks of terror attacks. The first data collection was performed in 2009/2010 with a follow-up study conducted in May 2017, one month after the terror attack. The survey focused on investigating factors that affect perception of surveillance technology. Our results indicate that three factors explain almost 60% of the variance. These three factors are: Transparency, Risk, and Acceptance. Our results reveal that there are significant changes in these factors between 2010 and 2017, where the trend is that Acceptance seems to have increased, as has Risk and Transparency. This means that even if the need for surveillance technology has increased in seven years, so has risk perception and demands for transparency and scrutiny of these techniques. Our data indicates that there is no risk/benefit trade-off between increased societal safety and decreased privacy concerns. The respondent were asked to indicate whether or not they believed that increased surveillance is an effective tool in preventing terrorist attacks. The results indicate a moderate belief (M=3.2 on a 1-5 scale) in the efficiency. One conclusion of this study is that public perception of risk of terrorist attacks and an increase of surveillance technology is complex and not easily captured.