After Paris Attacks, C.I.A. Director Rekindles Debate Over Surveillance
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
But if anything the attacks prove that the whole surveillance thing isn't effective, not that we need even more of it. After all if a bunch of lowlifes and assholes are capable of setting this up without any triggers in spite of some of them already being in police databases for activities related to terrorism then clearly that approach is bankrupt. So, thanks for the 'rekindling', now please shut it down. And divert those funds to old fashioned policework, which seems to have worked pretty good in the past (RAF, IRA etc).
Nine assholes get together in a room and decided to hit nine different places at X time. How hard is it to synchronize watch times?
"Masterminded" or "sophisticated" would be to assassinate Hollande in the stadium.
There does not seem to be a very strong "theme" in the attack, which would have been sophisticated, like targeting predominantly Jewish population, or a group that offended the Islamic fundamentalist sensibilities.
Also, "being in a database" is not enough and doesn't point to the failure of the concept of surveillance. In fact, it points to the failure to properly surveil.
> Also, "being in a database" is not enough and doesn't point to the failure of the concept of surveillance. In fact, it points to the failure to properly surveil.
Hence my suggestion to divert funds to the police rather than to the intelligence services.
Those terrorist plots (real ones, not ones all but executed by the authorities) that were foiled were foiled either by coincidence or by personal bravery of one or two people that happened to be accidentally on the scene.
Maybe, I'll concede that much, if a total surveillance state were operational where each and every one of us had a continuous cops eye following us attacks like these could be prevented. But that's in my opinion not world worth living in. Open societies are vulnerable to small numbers of assholes working in a coordinated fashion. And that's something that will be very hard to fix without changing that society for ever so let's not run down that path before the victims of these crimes are even in the ground and think things over for a bit.
The points he is trying to score are with politicians to untie his hands and give him more power. So yes, that is what he is doing. He conveniently ignores France already passed and implemented his "Dream" of being able to engage in highly intrusive surveillance methods without judicial oversight.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/05/france-passes-n...
> The new bill, which allows intelligence agencies to tap phones and emails without seeking permission from a judge, sparked protests from rights groups who claimed it would legalise highly intrusive surveillance methods without guarantees for individual freedom and privacy.
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2015/07/france-new-su...
> The surveillance measures authorized by this law are wildly out of proportion. Large swathes of France’s population could soon find themselves under surveillance on obscure grounds and without prior judicial approval.
http://www.nytimes.com/live/paris-attacks-live-updates/turke...
> The Turkish authorities warned their French counterparts twice in the past year about one of the attackers, Ismaël Omar Mostefaï, a 29-year-old French citizen who was known by the authorities as someone who had radical Islamist beliefs, an official said on Monday.
> The official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, in line with government protocol, said the government never heard back from France and only received an “information request” about Mr. Mostefaï after the Paris attacks.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2015/nov/16/paris-atta...
> During an investigation, the Turkish authorities identified Mostefai and notified their French counterparts twice – in December 2014 and June 2015 – the official said.
> “We have, however, not heard back from France on the matter,” the official said. “It was only after the Paris attacks that the Turkish authorities received an information request about Omar Ismail Mostefai from France.”
https://theintercept.com/2015/11/15/exploiting-emotions-abou...
Granted, it's from Greenwald, but his arguments are backed up with the real history of events pre and post-9/11.
Care to explain?
However, even if you take an optimistic view that in these events: that every actor is doing his honest due-diligence to prevent attacks... it is still terrorism if you are knowingly using the fear created by these events to affect your change.
A good read on this idea:
So, they either need to wait for a truly catastrophic attack, or find a better way to foil attacks without making it look like they knew something they shouldn't have been able to know.
That's of course, assuming it does work, which is probably pretty charitable.
This one could have been a lot worse. What are they waiting for then, a nuke in a football stadium?
So I guess the time to politicize these attacks has come already.
This certainly is a valid point, but here you're complaining that he took the wrong political action, not that he took a political action.
The most dumb thing one can do is repeating the same operation over and over again expecting a different outcome.
He just disagrees with you. (And me probably.)
That's my problem with what he's saying it is just 'more of the same' rather than a new course in reaction to what happened because there appears to be a bug in his system after some reflection.
His response is not one that has anything to do with what happened in Paris and why, this was his position last week and it is still his position this week, hence my use of the word 'cynical'. He's even trying to blame Snowden for the Paris attacks.
More of the same will definitely not get us out of this mess, it will likely only make it worse. Let's see him argue for more up close and personal contact with would-be terrorists, infiltration, covert operations and so on. But more dragnet surveillance seems to be a broken strategy, given the evidence available.
Which sort of takes for granted the idea that the government official's position -- which no one doubts precedes the attacks -- is not honestly held for the reasons presented, and that the official does not honestly believe that the attacks represent the kind of problem that adopting the policies he advocates would help prevent.
It doesn't seem to me that this style of argument serves much except to win kudos from people who already agree with the ideas behind it and oppose the policies being advocated.
I'd rather see some more introspection and a bit less clamoring for more budget and fewer restrictions from the intelligence community after this attack. And it is not as if this is the first spectacular failure of the intelligence services when it comes to actually preventing this sort of thing either (Which does not surprise me because I strongly believe that it is fundamentally impossible to protect an open society against these kinds of attacks without a substantial change of that society, after which we could probably no longer call it 'open').
Given France already possessed the desired legal capability and was warned by a friendly government about one of the suspects in 2014 and again in 2015...
I'm not sure how asking for the same measures that failed is a strategy of someone with genuine concerns. Why do you think that?
ISIS and many in that area of world do not like Western nations because they see as us both immoral and a threat to their beliefs. We then feel guilt and don't take action because of "fears" it will further the problem while totally ignoring the fact that sitting back and watching is merely allowing them to establish their foothold and carry out wholesale slaughter which in turn makes the victims of ISIS hate us for not helping.
As per a government official being cynical, look at it from the stand point of his job. He thinks he knows what he needs to do but finds most avenues blocked because the government tends to take an authority given to it and abuse it to no end.
As an American I know there is a price to freedom and I want my encryption and such because I don't trust all elements of my government. I want that illusion of freedom preserved. When terror once again comes to our shores how many won't?
Treating IS as a virulent unstoppable philosophy is giving it far too much credit, and throwing our rights out the window in their name is and will be one of our nation's great shames. It's absolutely fair to treat people who would do either of those things with the contempt and judgment they deserve
In history, one can find examples where an enemy shut down an economy by killing civilians, and that doing so is not very hard. Essentially a western economy cannot operate with a weekly terror attack, it would simply freeze (well, in practice that situation lead to a civil war, because a LOT of people get screwed because of the distrust these attacks generate, and to a lesser extent by the security measures). So nation states are extremely wary of these sorts of things.
In a way states respond strongly because people respond strongly. Because too few people are willing to carry out their jobs as normal when they get openly confronted with a 1/1 million chance they'll be gunned down.
In Western Europe, this is a lost fight. The problem, at one point, decades ago, was that islamic ideology does indeed push these sorts of attacks. Raids is what they called it 1500 years ago, but they're not all that different. Send out a small force whose sole intention is to kill everyone they find, who have at best a small chance of returning alive. So you can make a very hard to refute argument that this is indeed "islamic", and muslims are very sensitive to criticism that they're not religious enough. Criticism of muslim attacks was silenced in the muslim community itself. Then they replaced pretty much all teachers in a lot of schools. That's how it started. That's how violence preachers got into schools and mosques, into city hall and ... And yes, it is really organized from islamic religious infrastructure. Even that is not new. Did you know that a "prayer house" is "masjid" in arabic ? What does "mosque" mean ? It translates roughly to "fort". Mosques are not for prayer (though, like forts, they often have prayer spaces).
Right now these people in the "banlieues" in Paris, Bordeaux, Brussels, Rotterdam, ... are embedded into those locations and can only be dislodged by a war. They're also looking to start a war, to dislodge everyone else. They are pushing their own people into poverty, by constantly pushing notions of muslim superiority into the kids, then throwing them into the street. Society, not even their own limited society, doesn't agree with muslim superiority : they have no skills, they're aggressive because of this superiority shit (the hate preachers weekly "scandal" doesn't help either), and they have no respect for the law or local customs. So very few people hire them, and never into positions that would require them to be trusted. So in the real world, they are an underclass (exceptions exist of course).
That muslims who are taught constantly about their superiority are an underclass is according to them, of course not the result of not having any skills, and generally being aggressive morons that everybody moves away from. You see this is a vast conspiracy. Not one of the traditional western conspiracies, not a right wing conspiracy (although they're involved), not a left wing conspiracy (although they're involved), it's not the Jews (although they're REALLY involved), it's not whites (although ...), it's not the illuminati (although they're involved).
You see, it's a conspiracy of EVERYONE against their own little group directly.
The problem is that these are groups of a few hundred 15-35 year old muslims, and all they do is complain about it, maybe have a few kids, and generally hang out jobless in the street. They are useless, they have no prospects, they can't be trained and there's about to be millions more of them in half a decade or so.
A civil war in Western Europe is coming, it is a done deal. It is like a comet hitting the top of the atmosphere : not much damage yet, maybe it's even pretty. But the explosion is coming soon no matter what anybody does, and it'll be like nothing you've ever seen before. It is a matter of time, and nobody knows how much.
Also, I'm sure if it was brought up randomly, with no linkage to a current terrorist attack, you and others would be saying "There haven't been any terrorist attacks on (countrys) soil in X years, so whatever system we have now is working just fine"
> The new bill, which allows intelligence agencies to tap phones and emails without seeking permission from a judge, sparked protests from rights groups who claimed it would legalise highly intrusive surveillance methods without guarantees for individual freedom and privacy.
https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2015/07/france-new-su...
> The surveillance measures authorized by this law are wildly out of proportion. Large swathes of France’s population could soon find themselves under surveillance on obscure grounds and without prior judicial approval.
http://www.nytimes.com/live/paris-attacks-live-updates/turke...
> The Turkish authorities warned their French counterparts twice in the past year about one of the attackers, Ismaël Omar Mostefaï, a 29-year-old French citizen who was known by the authorities as someone who had radical Islamist beliefs, an official said on Monday.
> The official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, in line with government protocol, said the government never heard back from France and only received an “information request” about Mr. Mostefaï after the Paris attacks.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2015/nov/16/paris-atta...
> During an investigation, the Turkish authorities identified Mostefai and notified their French counterparts twice – in December 2014 and June 2015 – the official said.
> “We have, however, not heard back from France on the matter,” the official said. “It was only after the Paris attacks that the Turkish authorities received an information request about Omar Ismail Mostefai from France.”
I'm just going to leave this here since I suspect most people aren't aware that France passed legislation enabling what is effectively total population surveillance as well as was warned about one of the attackers, repeatedly, while they had this capability.
Similarly, while I understand it doesn't "sit right with you" there is really no debate to be had. The facts are pretty clear the problem is operational, not the scope of the powers available.
France had the surveillance authority, was warned twice about at least one of the terrorists, yet failed to act. This isn't a problem solved by providing them with more power but rather with operational and management changes. If they can't do it with total authority to spy on anyone they can as well as with warning from a friendly government...yeah.
Similarly, such changes are not political acts but simply the acts of responsible managers that do not require publicity.
A sober approach is to accept that there is no way to prevent people from killing each other; after all, even in prison people manage to kill each other.
Similarly, the organization needs to adjust to avoid similar lapses in judgement in the future.
I suspect that the main focus is preventing as much terrorism as operational constraints permit. Some of the people fingered as "possible terrorists" are not terrorists at all; maybe their friend or their brother is trying to recruit them, so they show up as a possible. How much are you willing to infringe on those peoples' lives in order to prevent terrorist attacks? How much of that will society put up with?
The problem is that you often don't know someone is a terrorist until they actually do something. You may suspect, but you don't know. But you also suspect 10 times as many people who never do anything ("10" being a made-up number, but I'm pretty sure it's more than 2). What's your threshold for cracking down? How many innocent people do you jail to prevent 130 innocent people from being killed?
IS would be properly categorized as a non-state actor.
>It seems a pertinent time to have the debate on what should be done in response, as well as what preventative measures should be taken in the future
This is basically one of the main functions of the UN. While people are free to discuss these things all they like, it would probably be worthwhile to come to the table having an understanding of international law and the use of armed force (i.e. the laws of war). Though the UN has only existed a brief time, there is plenty of precedent regarding: when a state may respond to the use of force (from state or non-state actors); what type of response is permitted (i.e. proportional); and what if any preventative measures are permitted.
Though there are dozens upon dozens of great case study style textbooks, start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Use_of_force_by_states
Given the exclusive control of territory, even with contested edges, it looks like a state to me...
Obviously other states don't recognize it as one, which is generally considered the litmus test, but has always seemed to circular to me.
However, the same could be said of the current, US recognized Iraqi government. In common parlance it essentially comes down to whether the Western powers that be recognize you as a state, and as Hollande has claimed France is at war with IS, there is certainly a case to be made.
Lots of people have said that the current, US recognized government of Iraq is a make-believe state, and that the strongest claim to actually being an effective state in that area is the notionally-subordinate government of the Kurdish region within Iraq.
So, yeah, the same is often said about the current, US recognized government of Iraq.
> as Hollande has claimed France is at war with IS, there is certainly a case to be made.
War between states and non-state actors is not new, though the most common case is between a state and an internal non-state actor. Perhaps the defining attribute of the modern "wars against terrorism" is that they are wars between states and external non-state actors (or, at least, non-state actors that have a substantial external component relative to many of the states that are fighting them.)
IS is more like North-Korea or the former USSR in this particular respect.
France would still be subjected to international law. So let's watch where this concept of war with non-state actors breaks down.
1. IS is responsible for the use of armed force violating France's territorial integrity.
2. France responded with use of force (bombing) against IS targets in Syria, violating Syria's territorial integrity.
You see there is no IS territorial integrity, that is the problem with being a non-state actor. Although France was attacked by IS, France can not follow IS any where it likes.
So the legal question is:
1. Did France have a lawful right respond with the use of force against IS in Syria?
Likely yes, because: a.) some of the individuals most responsible for the acts in Paris and potentially planning future attacks are operating in Syria; and b.) Syria is not likely to stop IS attacks from originating within its own borders.
Now lets take the extreme example of a potential IS teenage recruit in the US, do you think France will lawfully be able to bomb the IS recruit in US borders under those facts? Not likely.
Take the middle of the road real life response in Belgium, where some of the Paris attack planning may have originated, notice France did not bomb in Belgium like in Syria and instead worked with Belgium to do police style raids.
2. Was France's response (bombing) proportionate to IS's use of force?
I don't think there will be many who argue France's use of armed force was disproportionate to the Paris attacks (someone will), but in the case of IS you see where it could be a slippery slope. Hypothetical: the mastermind could be hidden among an otherwise entirely civilian population, and if it were shown bombing killed thousands of civilians to get 1 IS member there may be some issues of proportionality.
Some would say that it is especially poor practice to take drastic legislative action when emotions are high as they tend to be in the wake of a terrible event such as the one that took place in Paris Friday.
>even if you are vehemently against certain preventative measures.
Since not everyone agrees, some might say it's a good time to re-assess our positions on counter-terrorism. I haven't changed my mind on Orwellian surveillance. A single terror attack isn't likely to change my mind. I still feel okay calling Brennan's action shameless opportunism because this is a position that Brennan has held for a long time. Brennan is not adding anything new to the discussion, he's simply repeating old worn out rhetoric in hopes that people will accept it while they're in an agitated state. It remains unproven in my eyes that more surveillance means fewer terror attacks. It is also dubious to assume that more surveillance, even if it did imply fewer terror attacks, would be a preferable condition.
For instance, any time there's a shooting, the respective pro/anti gun control folks start at each other with things like "the blood hasn't even dried yet!"
Okay, so? If the argument were for ensuring decisions were made with a cool head, I could understand that, but it never is, usually it's an attempt to make a non-sequitur snipe at the other side for their sincerely held beliefs.
The alternative to there not being a "time to politicize the attacks" is that the government doesn't act on them; which is absurd.
Get two people in a room talking about something, and you've got politics - moreso when we're talking about laws.
"The blood hasn't even dried yet!" - meaningless, emotionally manipulative pap.
"We should think long and hard before making knee-jerk decisions" - sanity.
> So I guess the time to politicize these attacks has come already. Pity.
Believe it or not the people pushing for surveillance are not villains out of a movie or TV show. They see a tragedy like Paris and they really believe that more surveillance would help prevent these kinds of things in the future. They may be misguided and wrong from our perspective, but that doesn't make them evil.
When it comes to political issues it's very helpful if you can avoid reducing your opponents to caricatures. Usually they are motivated by the same thing you are; they want to fix a problem. It's just they disagree about the solution, or sometimes even what the problem is.
And either way complaining about people you disagree with "politicizing" a tragedy is absurd. Immediately after the tragedy is exactly the time we should be taking steps to prevent it in the future.
Stanford prison experiment, Milgram, etc show this ability to rationalize and do things socially unacceptable in an every day context.
We collectively need to discuss what is right and wrong; point out gaps and bias, and opt for most benefit/least harm.
Mass surveillance/security theatre appears to have high cost, little benefit and negative consequences for those its meant to protect.
Having the character genuinely believe that their harmful actions will serve the greater good is pretty much the most frequent advice to writing believable villains in any context, including for movies or TV shows.
> Immediately after the tragedy is exactly the time we should be taking steps to prevent it in the future.
Immediately after the tragedy is when we should start taking steps to understand why it happened, and how (and at what costs) similar tragedies could be prevented. Jumping based on emotionally-driven haste into steps intended to prevent recurrence without due consideration is a great way to maximize the effect of the Law of Unintended Consequences, and to prove the adage about the paving material used in the road to perdition.
You're disparaging Brennan for taking a political stance on the issue, then in the same breath also taking a political stance about the issue ("Shut it down, this proves it's ineffective!").
The attacks are inherently political, they can't be "politicized".
Now, its true that they are being exploited to push positions that those pointing to them were pushing long before the attacks, but it only makes sense to call that "politicizing" an event when the event itself isn't political to start with (and, even them, "politicizing" isn't really the issue, what these critiques usually try to do -- but only by implication -- is to suggest that the use of the event in the policy debate is disingenuous or shallow.)
So yes, Daesh/ISIS/ISIL has won already, this is EXACTLY what they wanted, the western world to reject refugees.
There are a number of state governors that have said that, which might actually mean something, if the US Constitution allowed state governors the authority to make that kind of decision, rather than reserving it exclusively for the federal government.
Well, holding it up in courts has them losing until a decision is made, since they don't have actual physical control of immigration (this is sort of the opposite of the case with Medicaid expansion, where they had to actively do something to achieve it, and so, even if the cases challenging it hadn't been decided before the mandate went into effect, they could have effectively stalled it until the a decision.)
Frankly, both regular policework (HUMINT, usually) and SIGINT have to be employed. The question is how to limit the SIGINT so you're actually ethically collecting and analyzing what matters and what directly concerns a target, rather than slurping up everything and storing it for later scanning or "just in case".
That's not to say surveillance is the answer, but its saying it may be an answer depending on effectiveness and our willingness to make this bargain.
See for instance:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsuccessful_terrorist...
It does not look as if the Snowden revelations have made America any less safe.
Note that this is the second attack on Paris. The UK is a harder target because you have to cross a border that is not as easy to traverse as a road and the Spanish police has gotten a lot more 'up-close-and-personal' with wanna-be terrorists than they were before. Belgium it turns out is an easy place to hide for these characters and that's one reason I suspect Amsterdam would be more likely than Madrid simply because it is physically a lot closer. It is also why I doubt the effectiveness of the 'double screening' for airline passengers announced today, none of these guys traveled by plane.
Even so, that doesn't rule out another attack in Spain - or even Madrid - nor does it rule out an attack in London, Amsterdam, Berlin, Copenhagen or anywhere else in the Schengen zone. Weapons and easily radicalized youths aplenty.
It's a matter of time before the next attack, but that doesn't mean we should sit still. It means the plan of attack needs to change, possibly radically so, but not after sufficient reflection on why the current approach does not appear to work as well as it should.
I understand we can expect more attempts and sadly more attacks and we need to take more innovative measures, but I wonder if you think current methods have been a complete failure or have succeeded in thwarting other attempts we are mot privy to. For one plans dont go from 0 - 100 instantly, they develop over time. So any plans could be intervened any time in between and we may only get to hear about the late stage interventions, or, perhaps were ineffective and the terrorists kind of really lazy baddies who aren't opportunists.
Sleeper cells are a very old concept. Go about your daily business and wait for a pre-arranged signal, go to a place, pick up instructions and weapons, do the deed. It could go from 'innocent dude working in a bakery' to 'hey, that's my brother that blew up 20 people' in less than 48 hours.
And that's precisely how they should do it if they wanted to stay under the radar. This recipe could be repeated just about forever without much chance of interference, and even that wouldn't matter much as long as once every year or so a group would make it through.
The window in which one should catch a would-be terrorist is between 0 and 19 years of age, not in the last 2 days before they execute a plan. That is playing very bad odds.
One possibility is they only catch people at T -1, or not caught at T 0, or there could be many more caught at T -X.
In the U.S. the ATF isn't disbanding just because we haven't seen manor action by supremacists. And just because we haven't seen any announcements does not necessarily mean the ATF aren't doing their work or aren't successful.
Look at it another way: if they could field let's say 100's of attackers simultaneously, don't you think they would? Or do you think they'd keep them in reserve for the next 10 years possibly being discovered? I can't rule it out, obviously, but I think the time between insertion and activation would have to be kept small to avoid losing control of the assets once placed. I'll do some reading up on this, it is an interesting question.
If they want but can't field hundreds in the EU (or other non ME/NAf regions) does that not speak to current intel and ops being successful?
Your original assertion was "But if anything the attacks prove that the whole surveillance thing isn't effective, not that we need even more of it." To me, your responses seem to indicate the opposite [however that does not speak to the future]
Not just policework, intelligence with covert agents. That's what most intelligence agencies have been giving up in favor of electronic surveillance, and we see now how ineffective it is.
So, people expect you to protect them and make sure that no terrorist attacks happen. So, how exactly do you do that?
You mention some formulas that "worked" in the past, I don't think they worked - so many people died at the hands of RAF and IRA. And the times have changed, some of these old formulas do not work anymore - people can communicate without meeting in person.
So, what do you propose Brennan should do? Honest question.
The effect of that admission would be that he would be replaced by someone who would claim the opposite, that it is of course possible to do something.
The whole problem lies in the timing and the fact that our societies are extremely easy to attack by a bunch of cowards with machine guns. That there is no simple last minute defense - a silver bullet if you wish - is a harsh reality but one that we're going to have to deal with if we really want to solve this problem.
So my suggestion - also made elsewhere in this thread - is to concentrate on the formative years of these people, rather than on the last two days of their lives. I suspect (but obviously can not prove) that that would be a far more fruitful, if less spectacular and less financially lucrative, avenue. Once someone has made up their mind to harm society it is extremely hard to stop them.
But the thing is, it comes with the disclaimer that, it will take 15 or more years to work, and we don't really know that it will work at all. And nobody will get elected on the 15-year promise when there is a boatload of other candidates that promise an easy fix.
Anyways, my point is, that government official has this, damned if you do, and damned if you don't, position. It is not clear at all what he (rather, we) should do.
It's the best plan I have, and I'm not even in a position to put that one into practice but most of the other stuff I hear seems to mostly revolve around either killing people or nabbing them on the way to the venue and those don't stand a chance. Hence my assertion that we'll see a lot more of this before we can put an actual stop to it. Even stopgap measures are going to be very hard to come by.
Here's an excerpt,
> One key premise here seems to be that prior to the Snowden reporting, The Terrorists helpfully and stupidly used telephones and unencrypted emails to plot, so Western governments were able to track their plotting and disrupt at least large-scale attacks. That would come as a massive surprise to the victims of the attacks of 2002 in Bali, 2004 in Madrid, 2005 in London, 2008 in Mumbai, and April 2013 at the Boston Marathon. How did the multiple perpetrators of those well-coordinated attacks — all of which were carried out prior to Snowden’s June 2013 revelations — hide their communications from detection?
"Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." -- Benjamin Franklin - 11 November 1755
He also went on to say "Things that we had postponed for too long, that were long-term, are now immediate and must be dealt with. This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before."
As for your (IMHO) cliché Franklin quote - that was in reference to a tax dispute.
"He was writing about a tax dispute between the Pennsylvania General Assembly and the family of the Penns, the proprietary family of the Pennsylvania colony who ruled it from afar. And the legislature was trying to tax the Penn family lands to pay for frontier defense during the French and Indian War. And the Penn family kept instructing the governor to veto. Franklin felt that this was a great affront to the ability of the legislature to govern. And so he actually meant purchase a little temporary safety very literally. The Penn family was trying to give a lump sum of money in exchange for the General Assembly's acknowledging that it did not have the authority to tax it."
sigh
Without knowing the context it sounds like a politician stating outright what they seem to be doing all the time, which is exploiting a crisis to impose something that benefits few at the expense of many, while the context is the opposite.
I'm sure politicians have this exact thought in either case, but the quote isn't the bullseye it might seem.
Franklin also said in Poor Richard's Almanack, "Sell not virtue to purchase wealth, nor Liberty to purchase power." (https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Poor_Richard%27s_Almanack) This was 17 years before the line in his "Reply to the Governor".
This absurdity is actually what's responsible for any of terrorism's effectiveness. It's basically a hack designed to provoke an absurd overreaction. On that count, it succeeded with flying colors in 2001 - I'm hopeful that we've learned enough in the intervening years (both in terms of the war and police state) to prevent repeating our mistakes.
You are unable to provide evidence, i.e. data, to support your claim (yet again). I cannot prove a statement false if there is no evidence to call into dispute. You do not have any concrete information that supports the notion that more people, in a direct comparison, would care about speeding, as opposed to government surveillance. Your statement is an unfounded assertion, not an accurate measure of what is just, valid, and/or righteous.
Without evidence, your statement merely explains what you want, not what society as a whole is looking for, or what policies should be put into place.
And no, this has nothing to do with what I want. I'd love the opposite to be true. I am just not so out of touch with reality to believe that it is.
Then, still without evidence or justification, you imply that others are out of touch with reality for not seeing things from your point of view. ("Sorry you had to find out this way."; "I am not so out of touch...") How delightful. Perhaps you'd be more persuasive if you actually demonstrated how the current state of surveillance reflects public opinion and desires rather than just declaring that as self-evident.
Neither incident should influence policy since as you say, while horrible, there are a lot of other things killing orders of magnitude more people that don't get "addressed" the same way this is.
People need to stand strong and resist the urge to be reactive.
Well its quite well known that certain events create more "buzz" than others.
The plane crash is mostly limited in impact to the bereaved who are probably mourning rather than tweeting. At least in the UK the travel chaos afterwards caused more "buzz" than the actual event itself, perhaps because angry tourists are more likely to tweet/Facebook.
The attacks in Paris directly affected thousands who will have all communicated that experience directly to friends and on social media. It went on for hours and was watched by million. For most people it did have more impact, however shallow that may have been.
So I don't think it has as much to do with the event itself rather than with the degree to which the media put it on the front burner and what the nationalities of those involved are. A rule of thumb seems to be that the further east something happens relative to Greenwich the smaller the font will be. Ditto South of Spain. To the media some lives are fairly clearly more valuable than others.
Because it's the French government responding to the Paris attack, and it's the Russian government responding to the Russian plane bombing. That makes a fair amount of difference in the character of the response.
And France currently has personal liberties that could be repealed. Russia? Less so.
And France is sending a nuclear aircraft career on the Mediterranean, bombing a foreign country and further depleting our economy. Given the first profiles of terrorists show European-grown desperate adults, if anything were to be done, it would be to build more schools, have more job opportunities for everyone and more hope for everyone growing up here.
[1] http://www.ladepeche.fr/article/2015/05/14/2104320-tabac-78-...
I don't think accepting 200+ intentional civilian deaths per day is a winning argument.
If we were purely rational on number of casualties, we'd be working on preventing our own 2-nd generation immigrants from considering becoming terrorists, using better education system and economic development. Or we would just proportionally jail all smokers who kill as many people per day as terrorism in a year. So we're not acting rationally, or the rationality of fighting back is taking over the consideration of the cost, and I'm not understanding why that's so important.
Personally I think the tactical approach (border checks, security checks, pervasive surveillance, drone attacks, special ops, etc) has huge costs ($$$ and in lost civil liberties) with little or no return on the investment (and arguably a net loss).
The core conflict is one of ideas: liberal democracy vs sharia, individual rights vs. communal strictures, equal rights vs patriarchy, and so on. Curiously, the belief in individual freedoms, tolerance, and in particular prohibitions against government preferences towards religion make it extremely difficult for the government to actively oppose ideas that are based on religion -- even when those religious ideas are diammetically opposed to the foundational principles of the system of government.
Even in public debate, where the actions of the government aren't in play, we have a difficult time with the notion of public criticism of religious beliefs, never mind criticism of extreme religious beliefs. Even stranger, in some circles it is completely acceptable to harshly criticize Christianity, for example, but it is off limits to be critical of radical and extreme Islam. Strange.
We have to figure out how to engage in the realm of ideas over decadal time spans if we ever want to justly declare 'mission accomplished'.
If we speak only about economy, terrorism in Paris could make France loose several point of PIB, we are extremely reliant on tourism, this absolutely dwarf any foreign operation.
This is really all that should need to be said. Opportunists will jump on any event to push their own personal agenda, even if what they are pushing wouldn't have made a damn bit of difference in the outcome of said event.
The militaruy-industrial complex has found its own form of product-market fit. Arm Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda and the Taliban to eliminate Afghanistan's seculat government. Work with the mullahs to overthrow Mossadegh's secular parliament in Iran. Arm Islamic fundamentalists to undermine Assad's Syrian government. Then put military bases in, and bomb in some of the countries in which these Arab nationalists live. Well after a decade of US military occupation of "Saudi" Arabia, and some decades of arming him against secular threats, Osama and company attacked the Pentagon etc. ISIS just responded to France's month long bombing campaign with bombs of their own.
Then we're told we the people have to be spied on...when I was young Nixon was having burglars break into the Democratic campaign headquarters, then using the FBI to cover it up. The FBI which was bugging and intefering in Martin Luther King's campaign for all people in the US to get the freedoms which the law said we all were supposed to have.
It's a self-reinforcing circle. What the hell does the US have military bases all over the world for? Not for any good purpose, I have as much suspicion of the US and French's governments intentions in Arab countries as the Arabs do.
A number of U.S. bases and installations did shut down, and no U.S. bases in newly joined NATO states were established.
Having a base in a foreign country is not the same as an occupation - especially when the base is there with the permission of the foreign country, because they want your support against other foreign countries.
It was as clear an occupation as you can have.
Obviously the 15 Saudis who flew planes into the Pentagon and World Trade Center had different ideas from you about the US's former military occupation of their country. Which resulted, within two years after 9/11, with the US ending military occupation of "Saudi" Arabia.
If you invest billions in surveillance, you will only achieve two things: having spent billions, and making sure that criminals communicate in some other way. You will have stopped no crimes, except the people who are stupid enough that they would have been caught anyway.
While it's understandable to think that they have failed at this, given that the task is impossible, it's probably not a good idea to last the failure at their feet.
However, it is noteworthy that in the end, the Israelis had to build a security fence around their country in order to combat terror. But this was for combating terrorists from outside the country.
Several of these French terrorist were French citizens and as such the Israeli the French could benefit from Israeli assistance.
One of the best counter factuals for this debate is that our terrorists are using high explosives in suicide belts and fully automatic AK47's in their acts. Both of those things are supposed to be "impossible" to get by non-authorized personnel and yet they are. Those physical things have to move through channels that the authorities already have the right to search and seize (trans-border crossings) so why not fix that problem?
It is a sad situation, and I mourn for the people of Paris and all the people and in the future who have been and will be killed by extremists. But that pales in comparison to how much I mourn for the death of a free and equal society with guaranteed human rights.
In many of these attacks the individuals are well known to the police and security services as they often have criminal backgrounds and have been in prison or custody of some kind. So either they are some sort of criminal masterminds, which I doubt, or the security services are completely inept even when they have a wealth of information or something more sinister.
So in my mind more intrusive intelligence is not really the answer.
Much rather we tackle social issues foreign and domestic.
For one, let's stop using violence to solve other people's problems. Violence is only justified in defense, as they're invading us.
Everything else should be through discussion in order to foster understanding and more importantly: empathy.
How about when they're shooting up our cities without invading us?
We might not find out what horrors they've done to "protect us" until late next decade.
That's just what I've heard. Id appreciate if someone could come by with more info or a source.
Because if we do not solve this problem Europe will have a major civil war on its hands somewhere in the next two decades.
http://www.perc.org/blog/rahms-rule-never-let-serious-crisis...
And further -
"You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before."
Rahm Emanuel
Before the bodies were cold, multiple mouth pieces were blaming encryption for the attacks. This is exactly what the quote was talking about.
https://theintercept.com/2015/11/15/exploiting-emotions-abou...
This is why privacy is doomed in "multicultural" societies.
There's so much research out there that shows that multiculturalism is the root of conflicts. For example [0] and see references too.
Just look at the current French republic and how that worked out for them. [1]
[0] http://arxiv.org/abs/1110.1409
[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/1199...
I'm not saying we're a shining model or anything, but we have a ton of different cultures living together more or less harmoniously, even taking into account the habitual blacks vs whites squabble.
You'll get people fighting over how they think the place ought to be run. You'll get people fighting over who gets what and why these guys have all this stuff and we have less stuff. If nothing else, it comes down to availability of resources and numbers of people (along the lines of Dunbar's number and all that).
Sure, ethnicity, race, and religion are convenient signifiers of groups of people and usually when you have two or more groups with significantly different cultures, you've probably got two or more groups with some level of inequality and power imbalance so you're already halfway there. But even if you don't start out with cultural differences, they'll pop up eventually. Groups of people over a certain size will always have a harder time avoiding conflict when things get tough. It's almost in our nature to split into "us" and "them" just to manage it all.
Now if both countries would import so much people from middle east that they would constitute something like 30% of the population of each country. Now ethnic Germans and Swiss seem to be "the same group" compared to Muslims. If shit hit's the fan, there is new pressure to readjust the borders. And move the people. Usually that stuff causes bleeding.
You could say that "if" is completely unrealistic right now. I agree. Nothing that has happened in Europe during past 15 years really warrants any policy change regarding immigration. The point was largely theoretical, just like your island.
We have many proofs of example (I mean, such a sweeping statement should apply to any society with more than "one culture" whatever that even means).
And even if you were right, that it hasn't happened before, you could say that about anything that didn't work the first time. "It never worked before, so it is doomed."
I (wish) that it is possible to have a multicultural society without having large swaths of population who want to do others harm
No real progress in stopping multicultural violence has been made since slavery was abolished. People are less violent overall when life is comfortable. But Balkans war and Syrian civil war show that nothing fundamental changes with few generations of peaceful living.