Suppose I told you that taking bazookas away from people that live in the city prevents bear attacks? You might say that there aren't bear attacks in the city anyway, which would be true, but you couldn't prove it one way or another. Who knows, maybe there would have been one bear attack if people ran around with bazookas shooting up the nearby forest.
Now add in the complexity that terrorism is more like a rate than a yes/no question. What if I told you that taking away bazookas in the city reduced the crime rate? Well, the crime rate in many cities has decreased, but how are those two related? Once again, we're left with a statement that might sound good to some and bad to others -- and no way to reasonably discuss it.
The only thing we can say with certainty is that no matter what we do, terrorism will continue exist. We can never eliminate it no matter how hard we try. So unless we want each new terrorist act to wreak havoc with massive changes on our societies, we're really talking about trade-offs here. How much stuff do you want to give away for a 50% reduction in terrorism? And once you come up with that answer, how would you know if your giving those things actually was the thing that reduced it?
It's one thing when a pubic discussion has reasonable people talking about the various sides. It's another thing entirely when we start injecting these semantic landmines into our conversations. I'm not saying you're wrong or right; I'm saying there is no way to know.
When Sept 11 happened the popular meme for why we were attacked was "Because they hate our freedom." On a strategic level, they're doing a dramatically good job at winning: look at how much our freedom has been curtailed since then. And they can do it without touching an American; rather, the fear of what they might do provokes the U.S. government into destroying our freedom for them.
(A secondary goal for Osama bin Laden was to bankrupt America, something they are also winning at: since 2001 the U.S. national debt has grown from $6T to $23T.)
You are totally right of course, but the public "debate" around these kind of issues is so emotion-driven that this line of questioning is never explored. Humans generally want someone in power over them that will grant them safety and security, and a sense of certainty that nothing bad will happen to them. Any argument that relies on probability and the idea of trade-offs will never be effective in the public square of a democratic society
The article: Surveillance fails to catch terrorist.
Your argument: Without surveillance we cannot catch terrorist.
My question: How are we catching them now? How did we catch bad actors and saboteurs before surveillance?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_United_States...
After September 11, the typical number of deaths from terrorism in a given year was...0, give or take a few, with a disconcerting uptick since 2013. Great, our efforts to curb terrorism are working!
From 1975-2001, the typical number of deaths from terrorism in a given year was...2. Wait, the massive surveillance state has saved 2 lives a year? What? We saved more lives by posting a guard at the Caltrain tracks in Palo Alto to keep people from killing themselves.
By the numbers, terrorism just wasn't a problem, because rational people don't blow themselves up to make a point. Mentally ill people do, and a significant number of mass shootings are not counted in the terrorism statistics but actually kill far more people. But by making terrorism into a big bogeyman that's going to kill you, it feeds into the interests of the media, of the state, and of the military-industrial complex, and so there are a lot of powerful forces shaping the discourse around terrorism that aren't necessarily reflective of reality.
Britain and France had geopolitical and business interests in the Middle East since the 18-19th century. America since the 20th, when oil suddenly had all the spotlight.
Fundamentalists are convinced that "the West" is the Devil on Earth. No political force can pacify fundamentalists nor avoid future generations.
The reason is simple: terrorists and bad actors assume they're being surveiled, and take countermeasures, and those countermeasures are far more effective than the surveillance. Anyone with moderate technical knowledge can use GPG and Tor. It's not rocket surgery.
The people caught by surveillance are for the most part uneducated young men of color who are driven into low-level drug dealing by poverty, and anyone who thinks that putting these people in jail is an effective measure against drug addiction is willfully ignoring the evidence.
Personally, I'm willing to accept a level of risk from terrorism and crime if it means that I get to live my life the way I want to without being constantly monitored by government.
Regarding checks and balances, it's extremely hard to have robust authorization when the group calibrating and performing the authorizations is the same group or adjacent to the group who wants to look at the data. To do it well you need true, apolitical, independence between gatekeepers and users, and users can never be in possession of the actual data because access control can be easily bypassed if this is the case. We have never had that in this country, countermeasures against misuse always seem to be non-transparent and policy based rather than technical (ie secret courts and warrants that no one can actually audit), and data is repeatedly misused over and over with no consequences (eg parallel reconstruction, people spying on partners, people spying on celebs, etc).
I can embed standard EXIF metadata into an image and send it to someone's facebook wall. You think NSA is looking at that?
It's not that hard.
There are alternatives:
If you support anything but paying lip service to checks and balances then you would support restricting US government's surveillance powers and requiring a warrant in many more instances than it is required today (almost never when it comes to the NSA, and now the FBI and other agencies can warrantless look at your data before going to court, too, thanks to the latest FISA extension).
> "The patchwork of U.S. surveillance laws has proven ineffective at countering terrorism"
Where is the proof? I can not find it in the article.
The claim is that "sacrificing liberty is providing us more safety" __not__ "our sacrifice of liberty has been ineffective at providing more safety." The latter statement comes from the lack of proof from those that carry the requisite burden. The former claims were made when liberty was initially eroded. Now that we have had time and calmed down people are asking "was it worth it?" and no one has provided a compelling "yes, here's (with evidence) why".
The problem is that this article, and the resopnses to it, are focusing on the wrong thing: The efficacy of violating ones consitiutional rights should have no bearing on wether or not that violation is legal.
Well, no, actually it was impossible to get into the cabin from outside long before 9/11 (in fact, I think since the 70’s). The hijackers smuggled box-cutters on board and used the box cutters to kill stewardesses until the pilot agreed to open the door - after which they had full access to the plane.
Also, they don't forbid you from bringing an abrasive stone through with which you can make a shiv out of LITERALLY ANYTHING.
What's changed is twofold. Physical access to the cabin, and the knowledge that no pilot will ever let another soul onto the flight deck no matter how many people they can shiv to death.
That's the problem -- that there was a door that could be opened. It seems to me that there shouldn't be. The pilots should have their own separate entrance from the exterior of the aircraft.
Meanwhile the vast majority of what the TSA and a significant-enough chunk of what security agencies do is pure theater, in exchange for a significant headaches and loss of privacy/dignity/time/etc of citizens who fund and technically support such organizations - and everyone else visiting the country as it deters plenty of tourism and business travel.
because that seems ridiculous
Franklin was actually supporting the authority of government to act/govern in the interest of collective security. [1]
[1] https://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famou...
tl;dr; Franklin was defending government spending on defense
But bureaucracy is just so evolves that it perpetuates the problem it was created to solve. Trivially, those agencies which reliably have achieved their goal get disbanded as no more needed, the only remaining in the long term are such whose goals are elusive.
This is how well-intentioned, honest people try to grab more power for their agency, because it seems to help achieve that elusive goal.
(To say nothing of people with less integrity in a position of power.)
Ugh. It's a fine article, but I worry the VPN industry's constant mis-selling of services under the banner of privacy will eventually taint the message.
There are a lot of VPNs with really bogus claims on their websites but I didn't notice anything appalling about this.
So you've transferred the lack of privacy from one company (your ISP) to another (your VPN vendor). Heck - look what happened to Onavo - facebook bought them and reaped a treasure trove of private browsing habits.
One can argue that IPs and ports matter, but if all the IPs you visit are in AWS (and their ilk) over 443 (including real time communication protocols), it becomes meaningless.
I never really saw that as a VPN's main purpose. Far from cutting out the ISP, you now have 2 ISPs. One that can see "everything" and another that can make inferences about your habits by analyzing your encrypted traffic.
The job a VPN actually does really well is hide your IP from sites and services that you visit which reduces the information they have available with which to track you.
This article links to a report that gives a number for terror incidents and how many were foiled.
You can see a map here: https://www.typeinvestigations.org/domesticterror/ which talks about the incident, and in the case of foiled incidents, links to something like court proceedings. This doesn't necessarily show clandestine operations led to foiling them vs regular police work, though...
Seems to say that surveillance does work, but that we're perhaps surveilling the wrong people/in the wrong proportions. It could be consequence of homegrown terrorism being, errr, homegrown, which therefore entails the much more legally tricky surveillance of American citizens. Islamic terrorism tends to be funded/trained/orchestrated abroad, where collaborators don't enjoy the same freedoms from surveillance.
Also, nobody is born a terrorist. They're overly fixated on catching terrorists instead of preventing terrorism altogether. Domestic crime, including terrorism, is the result of a broken education system. If you want to fix domestic terrorism, fix education, fix mental health, fix life in general for US citizens, and a lot of problems will quite literally magically disappear.
- Number of gun deaths in the US in 2019: 15381
- Number of mass shooting incidents in the US in 2019: 434
- Number of deaths actually reported as being due to "terrorists" in the US in 2019: 0
Or maybe just saying "as the commonly used phrase goes" is better.
For instance: The government goes after Islamic terrorists and Mexican illegal immigrants. So what to complain about? Mix cause and effect to pose the illegal immigrants as targeting based on race. Or pose the extremist religious as vulnerable Muslims, targeted on religion. Remove their status as far away from the cold-hard reality, so you can claim racism and prejudice and use that to cripple surveillance. But the suspect is a "citizen"! All weasel words to stay away from the real dirt. Let's go after the atheists for counter terrorism, so we don't discriminate in the eyes of the ACLU...
Then the "ineffective against terrorism"-claim. This can't be supported, because no clear numbers/cases are known. Then conflate laws against terrorism with actual actions against terrorism: Sure, no law directly contributed against countering terrorists, but the surveillance certainly did. Thanks NSA for passing along information to my country many times, so we could capture really dangerous people before they could strike.
Anti-terrorism is also a red herring for surveillance efficiency. Surveillance predominantly used for other national security purposes, such as counter intelligence, foreign intelligence, border safety, crime fighting, and even economic espionage.
Sure, posing any immigrant as a bad hombre, potential MS-13 gang member, selling your children fentanyl-laced drugs, is ridiculous. But the other side of that same coin is posing bad people as vulnerable undocumented citizens who are being targeted on race. It does not do justice to the situation on the ground.
The cold-hard reality is that states who have established a system of domestic surveillance have sent millions of their own citizens to crematoriums.
Sane nations have destroyed your political faction back in sixties.
Pro-communist, race chauvinists who look up to Mao for inspiration were thrown in the garbage bin of history, and thank god for that.
Very fortunately, America of today is not Cambodia, nor Laos, and you all have to thank Rockefeller commission for grinding the legacy of Allen Dullest to dust
It is intellectually dishonest to pose the effort of governments to combat illegal immigration as a targeting of people based on race. It is a sensitivity trap that shuts down our rational faculties. Yes... all religious extremists are also religious. Most immigrants have a different race. Yes, being an undocumented immigrant makes you vulnerable. But deserving of coddling, because they happen to also share a protected variable? No.
The problem is the lack of heavy-weight counter-balance, always demanding more privacy, fewer laws, and less firepower. The best we've got is "the status quo" and a few non-profits (that thankfully are punching way above their weight class).
Without such a counterbalancing agency, each small gain by law enforcement rarely reverts, so rather than oscillating between a bit too much freedom and a bit too much policing we have an arrow moving us steadily toward a police state.
Not that other countries couldn't also look to Germany's example, but that would require trans-national empathy so LOLno.
It's about control.
Security is just how it's sold to the public, the politicians, etc.
