The Irrationality of Giving Up This Much Liberty to Fight Terror
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
Educating people out of beliefs they mostly don't have is not going to solve the problem.
That means that it plays in the same game as everything else in the PR world: politics, advertising, social signaling, and so forth. The last thing it has anything to do with is logic.
It would be great if we could tally up all the things that kill us and spend proportionally on those. It's the logical thing to do. Heart disease would come first, then cancer, and so on. But instead we spend and give attention to those things that the public perceives we should: AIDS research, nuclear war deterrence, terrorism.
And if you think about it, that's the way it ought to be. Spending and making laws are all about the consent of the governed, doing things they want. They're not about math or logic.
The problem here is that, with the Cold War over, the defense and intelligence industry saw 9-11 as a call to arms. They're going to go out and do things a good defense and intelligence industry should. And as Americans we have traditionally been forgiving of having our civil liberties temporarily trampled on during times of war.
But you can't have a war forever. A democracy cannot survive this. Instead of the natural overreaction to a war that always happened, we started creating permanent infrastructure to address all terrorism, forever. We're fighting a war with nobody to surrender, and no amount of spending or government monitoring will ever be enough.
The original laws around 9-11 were temporary, and for a very good reason. But somehow politics has gotten to the point where terrorism is the new third-rail: some national politicians might grandstand a bit, but nobody is going to do anything except for give the security state apparatus whatever it says it needs. Otherwise they'd be thrown out of office. Public perception demands it.
Adding up numbers has nothing to do with it, unless you're using them to make some kind of persuasive argument, and then we're right back to public perception and politics. You're in the same boat as those who asked for more cancer research instead of AIDS research. Different people, rightly, see things differently, and everybody deserves to be represented. We're running a country, not an insurance agency.
The litmus test for me would be this: If I took a sample of the population, thoroughly educated them about the matter to the point where there was no reasonable doubt left, would the majority have changed their position to mine. If so, and if we do not have the resources to teach the public about the nuances of every issue, then acting according to what they would come to believe is ethical.
Furthermore it isn't even that simple. Not only is the public damaging itself, but it is also infringing on my rights. The added likelihood that I will die in a car crash vs a plane crash due to the extra hassle and delays at the airport is unsanctionable, regardless of claims to "consent of the governed".
Righhhhhhhhhhhhht.. Let throw out thinking, ethics, and morality just for some "heart". No, this is not how humanity should conduct themselves. Emotion should be calibrated to logics and numbers, not the other way around.
If heart attacks and motor accidents isn't photogenic as terrorism, the response shouldn't be to cater to the terrorism fearing population, but making heart attacks and motor accidents photogenic.
Let do what we really want rather than we think we want. Know ourselves, and we will know that pursuing terrorists by losing our liberty should not be our future.
Why do we still go to war? Sending our own people to die senselessly by the thousands, for what again? It's 2013 and America is still spending vast sums of money on weapons and war. Utterly ridiculous. But that is what people have done since the dawn of civilization, and despite all of our knowledge and "enlightenment," we're still catering to these primal animal urges.
The nihilist in me says "fuck it, if that's what they want, that's what they get," but the idealist weeps at the thought of the existence we could have built...
You feel 100% safe, but you have a 100% chance to die tomorrow You feel 0% safe, but you have 0% chance to die tomorrow
Which is better? Well in the first case, you feel safe but are dead tomorrow. The second case, you feel completely in danger, but you stay alive.
I would say the one where you ACTUALLY die is worse. It doesn't matter how secure you feel if you are dead.
IMO quality-of-life is worth considering in such skewed cases.
That reminded me of a similar take on that topic from The Economist's latest, which may be worth considering here:
"... conventional terrorism poses no major threat to America or to its citizens. But that's not really what it aims to do. Terrorism is basically a political communications strategy... For the president the war on terror is what the Vietnam War was to Lyndon Johnson: a vast, tragic distraction in which he must be seen to be winning, lest the domestic agenda he really cares about (health-care, financial reform, climate-change mitigation, immigration reform, gun control, inequality) be derailed. It's no surprise that he has given the surveillance state whatever it says it needs to prevent a major terrorist attack."
- http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2013/06/wh...
Computing how many people die from terrorism is completely beside the point. For the terrorists, terrorism isn't about counting up dead enemies. It's about enacting political change. We'd be fools not to understand the war on the terms it is being fought.
They have actual political goals, but they don't necessarily care about what America does internally. Certainly they don't send people to die just to give a farmer in North Carolina "irrational fear". They do it for strategic goals all their own.
In a manner of speaking, a full embrace of all civil liberties plays directly into their hands as it gives them much more freedom of communication and movement while affording the citizens only a very marginal increase in those civil liberties by comparison.
Obviously it doesn't make sense to swing way too far the other way and to restrict our civil liberties so much that they turn into security theatre (like the TSA) without any marginal increase in our ability to deter and defeat terrorism.
But acting like taking any change to deter terrorism "let's the terrorists win" is itself kind of missing the point. That's not even the game they're playing.
As part of a larger strategy, sure. Osama bin Laden stated publicly that his goal was to bankrupt the U.S.[1] The NSA is wasting billions of dollars on this while we run enormous budget deficits.
[1] http://www.cnn.com/2004/WORLD/meast/11/01/binladen.tape/
>In a manner of speaking, a full embrace of all civil liberties plays directly into their hands as it gives them much more freedom of communication and movement while affording the citizens only a very marginal increase in those civil liberties by comparison.
Only if their end goal is to kill people rather than bring about some specific political result. Presumably the killing is a means rather than the goal, and if the goal is made unachievable through attacks because we resist overreactions to them then there will be no incentive to go on killing people.
The war in Iraq (and even the eventual occupation of Afghanistan) are far, far more costly to the American taxpayer than an NSA data center and staff.
But either way, if bankrupting the U.S. is what OBL wanted then his soul should hope that AQ digs deeper: Even WWII couldn't bankrupt America.
Laws should be about the informed consent of the governed. Security built on a lie is still a lie even if people feel more safe. During the first days of 9-11, the military sent personal down to the airport to reinforce peoples perception of safe travel. What they did not tell anyone at the time, was that the guns did not have any ammunition in them. Instead, the military were basically posing as an "armed force", because having guns with ammunition at airport would then actually create a security issue at the airports.
The security theater of the US feels somewhat like a doctor who has started to only give out placebos to his patients. If anyone feels better, sing praises, and if anyone get worse, give them more sugar pills. Soon, everyone start to get sick on the sugar alone, while the sugar pill manufacturer crave for more sick people.
The security theater from 9-11 has gone on long enough. People are not going to feel more safe from it, and will just get sicker on the solution.
That is a huge can of worms, because it depends on being able to determine who is and isn't "informed."
That's been gone a long time now, and what we've got are more-powerful, longer-termed representatives sitting in the Senate.
I don't claim that abolishing the 17th will fix much now, but it probably would have helped significantly over the last 100 years.
Not only that, even if you concede that making people feel safe (as distinct from actually improving their safety) is a legitimate goal, the existing system is an outrageously poor way of satisfying even that.
If the goal is to increase the perception of safety then we could certainly do so without spending trillions of dollars, destroying privacy or enabling dangerous levels of government power. Just bring out the dog and pony show. Tell everyone that there is at least one secret sky marshal on every plane who is trained to assassinate anyone who tries to hijack it and run a bunch of ads about how badass they all are. Permanently station a canine unit at every major airport and let everyone see the cops with the dogs continuously sniffing around everywhere. There are innumerable things like that which don't cost trillions of dollars or bring about any serious cause for objection which allow the public to see that something is being done to address their fears.
Compare this to the NSA surveillance apparatus, which is no doubt costing many billions of dollars in and of itself, creates an enormous high value target for hackers and foreign spies, and couldn't have possibly made anyone feel safer if it had continued to be held a secret as intended because the general public wouldn't have even known it existed.
| Spending and making laws are all about the consent
| of the governed, doing things they want. They're not
| about math or logic.
And many times this should be about math and logic. Do we really know if all of the measures taken after 9/11 are what the public demanded? What if the politicians went over-board and the the American public just went along with it? What if the American public would have been ok with a much smaller reaction? It's not like there was a poll asking the American public: "How far should we go?"
http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2013/06/wh...
Think about the incentives to the _President_ (whoever that is) to NOT let an attack happen, no matter what the cost. As Daniel says, it's not about numerical risk or objective damage, it's perception. Obama would have done anything not to have an attack during his terms.
And that's the really sad part. Due to the political process, different interests, and so on, the terrorists WERE able to inflict grievous damage to us as a society.
However, I think the main point of the article still holds and is important in our fight towards a stronger rule of law.
There's a political game being played here, and we need to see it clearly. I don't mean to defend Obama at all, but _any_ administration is under extreme pressure to "fight terrorism" and this creates a huge distortion between the actual risks and consequences of an attack compared to the measures taken by the Executive branch to: 1) avoid attacks, and 2) create the perception they're doing all they can to avoid attacks. There are also other players, like the defense industry, federal departments, etc., with their own interests at play.
Remember DFW's commencement speech? [0] In our situation the political game _is_ the water. We need to see it clearly to fight back and keep our societies lawful and free. While logic is important, it's not going to win an essentially political battle.
0: http://moreintelligentlife.com/story/david-foster-wallace-in...
http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/06/08/counterterror...
There's also the fact that air travel restrictions probably cost lives on net, because the number of people encouraged to drive instead of fly who then go on to die in traffic accidents almost certainly exceeds the number of people they save from terrorist attacks.
When it comes out to be in the billions-per-life-saved range for anti-terrorism while alternatives like cancer and heart disease research and treatment come in at thousands-per-life-saved, maybe people will get the message.
Isn't that exactly what the article and the argument is getting at?
Folks on the right talk about not wanting to create a welfare state, to have a large segment of the population dependent on the federal government for their livelihoods. Yet those same folks will spend as much as possible on the defense industry, ostensibly doing just that.
(OTOH, you could say that all this is a PR stunt and Snowden is being paid to be part of it, but now that would be a conspiracy theory I'm certainly not willing to support)
Public perception is driven by media. Why was so much time spent covering the Boston bombing? The event claimed three lives, it should have been a byline on the local Boston news.
If you self immolate, no news outlet will cover it because they want to discourage this kind of behavior. We need to do the same thing with terrorism for related reasons: terrorism makes people irrational. The risks of terrorism are practically non-existent but people get emotional and irrational about it. So the best thing is to just stop covering terrorist attacks.
How many people did CANCER kill in the US 2001-2012? Roughly 6 million. 6,000,000 people. 2000 times more than terror attacks.
Cardiovascular disease and stroke: roughly the same, and just as likely to benefit from medical data.
I - personally - would much prefer that my medical data becomes known, than my e-mails and telephone conversations. I think that applies to 99+ % of us. Certainly the argument "if you did nothing wrong, you got nothing to hide" applies to medical data - few medical problems would land someone in trouble.
The trouble with the idea of "terrorism" is it doesn't distinguish between Boston Bombings and a 500k+ casualty attack from a nuclear device. The former can and should be dealt with within the normal rule of law and using normal law enforcement. In the case of the latter, we hope and expect that the full national security apparatus is directed toward preventing the event, and that a suspension of the normal rule of law could probably be appropriate.
The problem is, like the 2008 financial crisis and the 2009 Gulf oil spill, the probability of these massive impact "black swan" events is much higher than naive statistical modeling and intuition would suggest. That is, the distribution of these events is "heavy-tailed": the probability of an extremely bad thing happening cannot be easily extrapolated from looking at the frequency with which less bad things have actually happened.
I think people may have a sense that the distribution of terrorism events is "heavy-tailed", making our reaction not entirely irrational (though much of it is). The real problem is that the word "terrorism" conflates normal garden-variety shootings, bombings, and ricin-laced-letter-mailings with the events that could kill millions. If the NSA is only working on preventing the latter, then I think most people would be happy to let them read everything. But when peace activists are called threats to national security (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/20/peace-activists-nuc...), and people in the IC joke that Glenn Greenwald should be "disappeared", it's hard to have faith that our national security apparatus is appropriately allocating its resources.
Also, given that the most rational reason to steal a nuclear weapon is to sell it, it goes a long way to just be the highest bidder. And Uncle Sam is going to outbid Al Qaeda every day of the week. There is a reason that terrorists have never detonated a nuclear weapon.
In any case, looking at just the death toll misses the point. The attack on the World Trade Center was the largest attack on continental U.S. soil since the British sacked the White House. The reaction it engendered was very understandably out of proportion with the number of lives lost in the attack. It was deeply disturbing to a nation that has for nearly its whole history felt secure, being isolated from anyone who would harm it by the world's largest oceans.
As someone from a country with questionable security, let me tell you that you cannot measure the value of safety merely in lives lost. I bet in Bangladesh the violence of hartals (labor strikes) probably doesn't add up to very many lives at all, but the disruptive force of that violence is much stronger. A major terrorist attack just every year would make the U.S. a very different place (see, e.g., Israel).
Also, if you want to be hyper-rational about this: the NSA program probably has incredible bang-for-buck. If it costs $500 million a year, it only has to prevent a 9/11-scale event once or twice a century to justify itself.
Also, if we're "keeping things in perspective" why do you compare lives as if each one has equal value? One WTC worker was probably worth several times as much, in terms of GDP, as the average person who dies of heart disease. 3,000 people dying in Manhattan's financial district == 15,000 people dying in a Kansas City tornado... Obviously I'm being glib with this line of argument. You can't callously compare the two situations in the interest of "keeping things in perspective." So to can you not compare people dying in a terrorist attack to people dying of heart disease.
My argument was very much not "there are more deaths by X than terrorism, ergo we need to deal more with X". However, I think most people are not at all aware of the staggering difference in the levels of risk they bear from various sources, and pointing out the radical differences helps to keep things in perspective. A narrow counting of the dead is absolutely not the only correct perspective. At the same time, telling people they need to worry more because other people will be worried is only making matters worse. Better that they refuse to be terrorized (http://www.schneier.com/essay-124.html); that they recognize that by bearing in mind the actual relative threats they can legitimately feel safer.
"Also, if you want to be hyper-rational about this: the NSA program probably has incredible bang-for-buck. If it costs $500 million a year, it only has to prevent a 9/11-scale event once or twice a century to justify itself."
That is not what rational means.
"Also, if we're "keeping things in perspective" why do you compare lives as if each one has equal value? One WTC worker was probably worth several times as much, in terms of GDP, as the average person who dies of heart disease. 3,000 people dying in Manhattan's financial district == 15,000 people dying in a Kansas City tornado... Obviously I'm being glib with this line of argument. You can't callously compare the two situations in the interest of "keeping things in perspective." So to can you not compare people dying in a terrorist attack to people dying of heart disease."
There are so many things wrong with this.
First, you pick a metric that is most emphatically not just counting lives, find it ick, and conclude that you can't just count lives. Which isn't really here nor there - my intent with number of lives was never to be precise but to give a sense of scale; adjust according to whatever perceived value you place on the respective lives.
More importantly, you're making an emotional appeal that is frankly absurd: yes, comparing certain things can seem crass, but resources we're spending on "fighting terrorism" aren't being put to other use and liberties we're giving up for "fighting terrorism" are enabling abuses (now or down the line), and we need to make comparisons if we're going to make any decisions. Making decisions anyway is implicitly making those same comparisons, just with less care, and people's lives are at stake!
Did you really just blame the Internet bubble bursting on 9/11 ?
And the 1100 points gain from Sept 21 to Oct 12?
Even if America went to great lengths to offend nobody and make everyone happy, they'd always be the one with the target painted on their back.
Worth a try, anyway?
But I would like to stress that it's actually possible that America might make different choices about e.g. foreign policy issues than other nations and it still be a reasoned, deliberate policy choice and not 'tyranny and oppression'.
The easy example is how freedom of the press in the U.S. naturally conflicts with the Islamic prohibition against depictions of the Prophet Muhammad. I can only imagine how well freedom of expression would have went over during the ancient battles between iconoclasts and iconoblasts.
So many people are preconditioned now into opposing what America does for no other reason than that America did it. China or Iran spies on their citizens and filters what they can see? Who cares, they're China and Iran, we expect them to be totalitarian; but because they do what we expect we give them a free pass! Why? Instead we buy stuff from China and Iran even while we're busy boycotting the USA? Uh huh, OK.
The U.K. and Sweden manage to out-do even the USA in public and net surveillance? Whatever, they're European, they're the "good guys". Nary a whimper anywhere in the world.
So if people want to hate America than whatever, but at least stop acting like they're applying the same standards to the USA that they do to the rest of the world.
On the other hand, if there was a magical place where all diseases would be cured, I imagine there would be a mad scramble to get in.
I also made a crude estimate for economic impact of disease in another comment of ~$250 trillion per year.
Look at e.g. Chicago. 500 or so murders a year, dwarfed by the number of deaths from heart disease, etc, and people freak out. But that reaction has an economic cost--it's harder to get middle class people to move into and stay in the city when they fear crime.
Maybe people shouldn't be so unnerved by crime and terrorism, but they are. 1,000 traffic deaths a year in Illinois does absolutely nothing to curb car culture. 1,000 terrorism deaths a year in Illinois would gut the economy of the state as people fled to saver environs.
B. I don't undestand the following types of argument:
1. people are ignorant of something and have irrational fears about it.
2. Lets spend a bunch of money so they feel better.
What ever happened to education?
I'm also not saying its as easy as the numbers I threw together. Its just a ballpark estimate, until someone comes along and gives a better estimate.
"The two major component causes of all firearm injury deaths in 2009 were suicide (59.8%) and homicide (36.7%)." (source: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr60/nvsr60_03.pdf)
Guns are gaining agency and killing people. Better ban 'em.
Even if it doesn't really concern me too much, I can respect your concern over it. But if you turn the NSA snooping into some doomsday thing, I won't really listen to you for very long.
Case in point, me.
I have done absolutely nothing wrong, but (symmetrically) 1. I am having my liberties taken. 2. I am not a terrorist in any sense of the word.
I suggest it is the odd framing the story that makes it seem irrational.
"Liberty is the value of individuals to have agency (control over their own actions)"
Privacy is not a liberty. It's a restriction on the action of others.
TSA and no fly lists are restrictions on liberty.
The media isn't fearmongering off 'death by planecrash'. Why can't he use something more direct like 'mistakenly-shot a family member that forgot their keys', or drive-by shootings, accidental-discharge-of-a-firearm-while-it-was-being-cleaned deaths? Unlocked gun cabinet related deaths?
There are some monumental things that can be done for a trillion dollars (see http://costofwar.com/ which doesn't even include the TSA or other homeland security operations).
Terrorism prevention spending is an easier pill to swallow/get behind/comprehend/profit from/ compared to any other type of possible "thing" tax dollars can be spent on. The government needs to spend money on something. The economy depends on it. But what?
People are obese. They have long lists of health problems and are plagued by the high cost of healthcare. But somehow the one thing that can help them directly (healthcare) alludes them. How is that such a difficult problem?
But mention terrorist or the potential of an attack and people will usually get behind all kinds of different programs and spending. We'll fight these damn terrorists together. Hand in hand! For FREEDOM and DEMOCRACY. We might have to give up a few things. Want to read my emails? Eh, they're mostly just funny pictures of cats...so I guess that's fine. Oh you need money to fight terrorists? Here's a trillion dollars. If we get some cool gadgets out of it afterwards, then that's awesome! Just as long as it has a spill guard because you know I'll be sucking down some soda when I use it.
Priorities...
Just some facts:
http://www.iags.org/costof911.html
- The destruction of major buildings in the World Trade Center with a replacement cost of from $3 billion to $4.5 billion.
- Property and infrastructure damage: $10 billion to $13 -billion.
- Federal emergency funds (heightened airport security, sky marshals, government takeover of airport security, retrofitting aircraft with anti-terrorist devices, cost of operations in Afghanistan): $40 billion.
- Direct job losses amounted to 83,000, with $17 billion in lost wages.
- Losses to the city of New York (lost jobs, lost taxes, damage to infrastructure, cleaning): $95 billion.
- Fall of global markets: incalculable.
Keep in mind the reason terror attacks have been successful here is that the terrorists use our own laws against us in order to gain an advantage. The lax immigration laws allowed many of the 9/11 hijackers to set up shop here. Keep in mind a large number of illegal immigrants being stopped at our southern border are middle eastern:
http://www.wnd.com/2010/05/156441/
"A 2006 congressional report on border threats, titled “A Line in the Sand: Confronting the Threat at the Southwest Border” and prepared by the House Committee on Homeland Security Subcommittee on Investigations, indicated that 1.2 million illegal aliens were apprehended in 2005 alone, and 165,000 of those were from countries other than Mexico. Approximately 650 were from “special interest countries,” or nations the Border Patrol defines as “designated by the intelligence community as countries that could export individuals that could bring harm to our country in the way of terrorism.”
It's a tough balancing act. You don't want to give the bad guys an advantage, but when you keep the laws relaxed and reduce the amount of money being spent on this, all you do is play into the hands of the people who want to kill Americans.
Really? If you look at the DJIA over the period from mid-September of 2001 on, you will see that the fall lasted all of about one month. Within weeks it rebounded right back where it had been.
That is an incredibly unwarranted assumption. Spending less may in fact drastically reduce the threat to Americans.
Food for thought: Why do you think people want to come over here and kill Americans, as opposed to people similar to us in other countries? Might it be correlated to the amount of money we spend doing unfriendly things to non-Americans?
Do you honestly think that way? I'm sure you don't.
And I agree with the grandparent here -- there's something which draws US to be the hotspot target for terrorism, and that terrorism originates from certain areas of the world with strong US military presene. Could it be that the best way to avoid the total amount of terrorism on US targets is to actually try to play nice towards non-Americans? Kind of like rest of the western countries like to do apart from US-led operations.
Ditch the War on Terror, and fix the problem at the root rather than try to brute-force through it. It is my claim that for some people this solution means "surrendering" and as such a knee-jerk reaction would be to not consider such options. Just imagine he PR failure for the president and congress who would even mentio that "hey, what if we're at fault...".
> Homeland Security Subcommittee on Investigations, indicated that 1.2 million illegal aliens were apprehended in 2005 alone, and 165,000 of those were from countries other than Mexico.
Sounds pretty scary! 165,000 non-Mexicans, I bet there are tens of thousands of terrorists coming this way!
> Approximately 650 were from “special interest countries,” or nations the Border Patrol defines as “designated by the intelligence community as countries that could export individuals that could bring harm to our country in the way of terrorism.”
Oh. Less than a thousand -- .05%
Hmm.. I guess if they were all from Saudi Arabia or Pakistan or something, what counts as a 'special interest country'?
> Cuba (712), Iran (14), Syria (5) and Sudan (5), as well as Somalia (9), Afghanistan (9), Pakistan (37), Saudi Arabia (5) and Yemen (11).
So when you said: "Keep in mind a large number of illegal immigrants being stopped at our southern border are middle eastern"
You really meant, out of 1.2 million stopped, approximately 50 or 60 were middle-eastern.
US agencies place a $5-10 million value on an American life [1]. This is not the value of a life anywhere, though. For example, part of the valuation comes from discounted earnings calculations, which is lower in lower-income countries.
Furthermore, just because problem A is worse than problem B (measured in dollars) doesn't mean we should spend more money fighting problem A. Money should be spent where it has the greatest impact.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/17/business/economy/17regulat...
Also the greatest impact of spent dollars comes from investing in knowledge creation since new knowledge benefits everyone who will exist in the future, and we are extremely close (on the earth time scale) to our species becoming effectively permanent (space faring). So any minor new discovery can have enormous benefits, or at least benefits that are many orders of magnitude greater than stopping any number of different terror attacks.
You also have biological terrorism to worry about. Both natural (new severe viral outbreaks as in 1918 virus) and man made threats, which are not included in any estimates of the toll of disease.
Why ordinary people seem to obsess over terror probably stems from all of the coverage an attack (or even a foiled plot, for that matter) gets. Which shouldn't surprise once one remembers how cozy the media is with the government.
Comparing traffic related deaths to terrorism related deaths is invalid since we don't spend the same resources or give up comparable liberties to prevent traffic related deaths.
Any analysis that doesn't seriously consider that cannot be taken seriously.
As the Boston Marathon Bombing showed us, it's very easy to create a lot of destruction and disruption and fear with very mundane items (gunpowder and pressure cookers). If it's so easy to accomplish, why doesn't it happen more? Either terrorism is genuinely not a serious threat or our security organizations are very good at what they do using the tools they have at their disposal.
I would be in favor of our security apparatuses 'taking a break' or scaling back spying operations for about 5 years just to see what the result would be and if the American public would be able to tolerate it. Bombs going off every week in a major shopping mall or in an airliner or in a bus (like in Israel in the 90s) would probably not be acceptable to the American people.
Alternatively, we would discover that terrorism is not a big threat and the debate about giving up liberties to prevent terrorism would be a very simple one.
Maybe $15 billion looks silly in comparison to hundreds of billions, but it at least starts to look pretty comparable.
Can a system like PRISM reduce the false positive rate? (Probably not, for domestic terrorists-to-be). If so, is it worth it? The answer might be "No", but it might be "Yes", too.
Another point to consider: If the intelligence agencies were able to get intel on the worst case scenarios (essentially "lone worf" budding terrorists) then how effective have they been in situations that play more to their strengths (which is to say, identifying and disrupting "cells" before they can proceed with an attack).
Sen. Udall has said that PRISM is completely redundant in stopping these attacks, but that doesn't mesh well with PRISM's prominent usage in the President's Daily Briefings. If PRISM isn't actually redundant, how useful does it have to be before we think it would be worth using?
If we already have enough data to predict criminal acts, and we are still failing, how is collecting more data the solution?
[Note, Fiction:] My smoke detector did a create job ringing when my house caught fire, but the fire department trucks didn't get to my house in time to save it. Why should I buy more smoke detectors?
To avoid getting into a debate about smoke detectors and fire departments, can you clarify the flaw in the actual argument he raised:
> If we already have enough data to predict criminal acts, and we are still failing, how is collecting more data the solution?
I still don't see a flaw with the underlying argument.
| it's very easy to create a lot of destruction and
| disruption and fear with very mundane items
| If it's so easy to accomplish, why doesn't it happen more?
| Either terrorism is genuinely not a serious threat or our
| security organizations are very good at what they do using
| the tools they have at their disposal.
| Bombs going off every week in a major shopping mall or
| in an airliner or in a bus
| I would be in favor of our security apparatuses 'taking a break'
| or scaling back spying operations
I don't think anybody is suggesting curtailing all intelligence gathering, but even if they just cut the program back to deal with extranational phone calls, you're now spying far less on your own citizens, and are indeed spying in a way less likely to generate as many false positives and that are more easy to justify an express reason for.
I'm not suggesting that's a valid fix, because I still wouldn't find that acceptable, but definitely it is preferable to what we have now.
Maybe because outside of Vince Flynn and Brad Thor novels, and Hollywood summer blockbusters, there aren't actually that many people who: A. are motivated to conduct a terrorist attack, and B. equipped / able / willing to do so.
It seems that no one who brings this argument up acknowledges the possibility that terrorism doesn't seem like a big threat precisely because of the extreme precautions taken to stop it.
The problem with this line of reasoning is that it's not falsifiable. I mean, here ya go: I have a Tiger Proof Rock I'll see you. It absolutely protects against tiger attacks. How do I know it works? Well, in 39 years, I have never once been attacked by a tiger.
Anyway, this whole line of discussion shows exactly why we need more transparency and less secrecy from our government. We don't know if what they're doing works or not, because we largely don't know what they're doing. And this is not how a free, open and democratic society is supposed to work. We should not be a nation of secret laws, secret court systems, and shadowy government agencies operating in the dark.
I explicitly acknowledged this in the very next sentence. The difference is that you assert this as a fact (for which you have no evidence) and I state it as a possible explanation.
> The problem with this line of reasoning is that it's not falsifiable.
And for the same reason the claim that terrorism is not a problem due to lack of sufficiently motivated terrorists is also not falsifiable. Hence my suggestion that the government scale back their anti-terrorism [spying] operations and see what the outcome is.
> we need more transparency and less secrecy from our government
Agreed.
I actually meant to end that with a question mark, but I mistyped it and didn't notice until I saw your reply. I definitely don't mean to assert that as fact, but just floating it out there as a scenario worth considering.
It seems that no one who brings this argument up
acknowledges the possibility that terrorism doesn't seem
like a big threat precisely because of the extreme
precautions taken to stop it.
It would increase morale at those agencies, increase their standing with the public and discourage other would-be terrorists. Not much is given away if we are told the 4 people apprehended 'planned to plant a bomb at a plane in JFK airport by sneaking past security'.
Instead, we only get the occasional apprehension of delusional people with ludicrous plans.
On the other hand, if there really were many terrorists with actual plans, there would occasionally be a successful attack. Even at an unbelievable 99% prevention ratio, some would come through. An illegal immigrant loner building pipebombs in his cabin-in-the-woods could easily escape detection.
The much simpler explanation is that there simply aren't many terrorists with realistic terrorist plots. If anything, this surveillance should be defended by appeals to 'stopping the next mass shooting': that's an example of a crime that occasionally happens, while also many are prevented.