Glenn Greenwald points out that the massive increase in government surveillance has made us less safe, not more safe. This fearful response to isolated acts of sabotage provokes stupid reactions that clogs our intelligence system with useless, unrelated stuff that prevents us from finding what we really need. We give up our freedom for this?
Every debate over expanded government surveillance power is invariably framed as one of “security v. privacy and civil liberties” — as though it's a given that increasing the Government's surveillance authorities will “make us safer.” But it has long been clear that the opposite is true…
…The failure of the U.S. Government to detect the fairly glaring Northwest Airlines Christmas plot — despite years and years of constant expansions of Surveillance State powers — illustrates this dynamic perfectly. As President Obama said yesterday, the Government — just as was true for 9/11 — had gathered more than enough information to have detected this plot, or at least to have kept Abdulmutallab off airplanes and out of the country. Yet our intelligence agencies — just as was true for 9/11 — failed to understand what they had in their possession. Why is that? Because they had too much to process, including too much data wholly unrelated to Terrorism. In other words, our panic-driven need to vest the Government with more and more surveillance power every time we get scared again by Terrorists — in the name of keeping us safe — has exactly the opposite effect. Numerous pieces of evidence prove that.
Today in The Washington Post, that paper’s CIA spokesman, David Ignatius, explains that Abdulmutallab never made it onto a no-fly list because there are simply too many reports of suspicious individuals being submitted on a daily basis, which causes the system to be “clogged” — overloaded — with information having nothing to do with Terrorism. As a result, actually relevant information ends up obscured or ignored.
via Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com.
They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety. – Benjamin Franklin
A democracy cannot function in a permanent state of fear. We give up a bit of safety for our freedom. It’s small price to pay. There was another piece by Nate Silver at 538.com that puts it into perspective:
…there have been 7,015,630,000 passenger enplanements over the past decade. Therefore, the odds of being on given departure which is the subject of a terrorist incident have been 1 in 10,408,947 over the past decade. By contrast, the odds of being struck by lightning in a given year are about 1 in 500,000. This means that you could board 20 flights per year and still be less likely to be the subject of an attempted terrorist attack than to be struck by lightning
You have a much better chance dying in a car crash on the way to an airport, with odds of roughly 1 in 100 in a lifetime of driving. Maybe we should focus more on real dangers instead of imagined ones? Our media establishment lives off of hyping fears to drive ratings and underminds the basis of our democracy in the process.
