Sigmar Gabriel’s Norwegian Fairy Tale

Sigmar Gabriel, then chairman of Germany’s Social Democrats, had a rough week even before his combative on-air argument with ZDF anchor Marietta Slomka became the main thing everyone was talking about. The spat was good television. What barely got covered was something more straightforwardly damning: he lied, on public television, about data retention law, and he did it by invoking one of the worst terrorist attacks in European history.

The lie concerned mandatory data retention—the legal framework that requires governments to collect and store communication metadata on all citizens regardless of any suspicion, in addition to whatever intelligence agencies are already doing in the dark. Gabriel was defending the policy on ARD, Germany’s main public broadcaster, and to sell it he reached for the massacre on Utøya.

On July 22, 2011, Anders Breivik killed 77 people in a coordinated attack that included a bombing in Oslo and a shooting at a Labour Party youth camp on the island of Utøya. Gabriel claimed that Norway’s data retention laws had been essential in identifying Breivik quickly. His exact words: And we have—if you think of Norway—through the data retention law there, people knew very quickly who in Oslo was the killer, whether he had accomplices. That helped enormously.

The problem is that Norway had not implemented data retention law by 2011. The legislation wasn’t set to come into force until 2015 at the earliest, and Norwegian civil liberties organizations were still actively fighting it even then. So either Gabriel had no idea what he was talking about, or he knew and said it anyway. Neither reading is good. But what bothers me more than the factual error is the rhetorical move itself—using seventy-seven murdered teenagers to sell surveillance infrastructure to a public that mostly can’t fact-check it in real time. That’s not a slip. That’s a technique.