Daily Inspiration Quote by Otto Schily

Crisis is doing the heavy lifting here. Schily’s sentence arrives dressed as bureaucratic maintenance, but it’s really a political technology: take a traumatic event ("After Madrid") and convert it into momentum for permanent state expansion. The verb choice is a tell. "Intensified" suggests diligence rather than escalation; "investigative efforts" sounds neutral, almost scientific. Yet the payoff is not merely more policing, it’s "expansions in security laws" - the quiet normalization of exceptional powers.

The most revealing phrase is "in the process of bringing about". It smears agency across an administrative fog, as if no one is choosing this, as if the laws are evolving on their own. That passivity is the subtext: accountability is made optional. Schily doesn’t argue for the tradeoffs; he treats them as a procedural inevitability. It’s governance by workflow.

Then comes the clincher: "creating an index file system". The language is antiseptic, mid-century office-supply bland, which is precisely why it works. An "index" sounds like organization, efficiency, modernity - not surveillance. But indexing is power. To index people is to render them searchable, sortable, and suspectable at scale. In post-attack Europe, that vocabulary let officials frame a leap in data collection as mere record-keeping.

Context matters: Madrid (2004) was a turning point in European security politics, when counterterrorism broadened from targeting acts to mapping populations and networks. Schily’s intent is to reassure and pre-authorize. The deeper message: fear has a filing system, and the state is building it.