In the present draft, 60% of the space is taken up with your personal stories. It is not clear what the reader gets from this material that could not be presented in two brief paragraphs, leaving you time to present something more than a personal opinion as the conclusion of the second part. In this, state surveillance is treated as more widespread than commercial surveillance, which is almost certainly wrong, and of roughly equal competence, which is wrong too. That Brussels is the capital of a Europe that is now ceasing to exist, run by a sham national government that ceased to exist long ago, is never mentioned.

I think it would help to define the subject, which presumably is not Belgian incompetence and ridiculousness, nor the particular form of hysteria involved in living with potential "terrorists" one resolutely refuses to understand. If the subject is really "security" versus "privacy," and the goal is to take the opposition seriously, rather than as an act of simplistic political rhetoric, then the least we can do is to rise above the parochialism of one city's experience. It might be better to abandon the rhetoric of "tools" altogether, and to inquire what the social and communicative functions of this ritual actually are.