<story><title>The Irrationality of Giving Up This Much Liberty to Fight Terror</title><url>http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/06/the-irrationality-of-giving-up-this-much-liberty-to-fight-terror/276695/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>belorn</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;Spending and making laws are all about the consent of the governed.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Laws should be about the &lt;i&gt;informed&lt;/i&gt; 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 &amp;quot;armed force&amp;quot;, because having guns &lt;i&gt;with&lt;/i&gt; ammunition at airport would then actually create a security issue at the airports.&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;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.</text></item><item><author>DanielBMarkham</author><text>I completely agree that we&amp;#x27;ve overreacted, but I&amp;#x27;ve always rejected this argument, and here&amp;#x27;s why: Terrorism is not about numerical risk, it is about &lt;i&gt;public perception&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;It would be great if we could tally up all the things that kill us and spend proportionally on those. It&amp;#x27;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.&lt;p&gt;And if you think about it, that&amp;#x27;s the way it ought to be. Spending and making laws are all about the consent of the governed, doing things they want. They&amp;#x27;re not about math or logic.&lt;p&gt;The problem here is that, with the Cold War over, the defense and intelligence industry saw 9-11 as a call to arms. They&amp;#x27;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.&lt;p&gt;But you can&amp;#x27;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&amp;#x27;re fighting a war with nobody to surrender, and no amount of spending or government monitoring will ever be enough.&lt;p&gt;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&amp;#x27;d be thrown out of office. Public perception demands it.&lt;p&gt;Adding up numbers has nothing to do with it, unless you&amp;#x27;re using them to make some kind of &lt;i&gt;persuasive argument&lt;/i&gt;, and then we&amp;#x27;re right back to public perception and politics. You&amp;#x27;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&amp;#x27;re running a country, not an insurance agency.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>AnthonyMouse</author><text>&amp;gt;Security built on a lie is still a lie even if people feel more safe.&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;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&amp;#x27;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.&lt;p&gt;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&amp;#x27;t have possibly made anyone feel safer if it had continued to be held a secret as intended because the general public wouldn&amp;#x27;t have even known it existed.</text></comment>
<story><title>The Irrationality of Giving Up This Much Liberty to Fight Terror</title><url>http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/06/the-irrationality-of-giving-up-this-much-liberty-to-fight-terror/276695/</url><text></text></story><parent_chain><item><author>belorn</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;Spending and making laws are all about the consent of the governed.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Laws should be about the &lt;i&gt;informed&lt;/i&gt; 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 &amp;quot;armed force&amp;quot;, because having guns &lt;i&gt;with&lt;/i&gt; ammunition at airport would then actually create a security issue at the airports.&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;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.</text></item><item><author>DanielBMarkham</author><text>I completely agree that we&amp;#x27;ve overreacted, but I&amp;#x27;ve always rejected this argument, and here&amp;#x27;s why: Terrorism is not about numerical risk, it is about &lt;i&gt;public perception&lt;/i&gt;.&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;It would be great if we could tally up all the things that kill us and spend proportionally on those. It&amp;#x27;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.&lt;p&gt;And if you think about it, that&amp;#x27;s the way it ought to be. Spending and making laws are all about the consent of the governed, doing things they want. They&amp;#x27;re not about math or logic.&lt;p&gt;The problem here is that, with the Cold War over, the defense and intelligence industry saw 9-11 as a call to arms. They&amp;#x27;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.&lt;p&gt;But you can&amp;#x27;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&amp;#x27;re fighting a war with nobody to surrender, and no amount of spending or government monitoring will ever be enough.&lt;p&gt;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&amp;#x27;d be thrown out of office. Public perception demands it.&lt;p&gt;Adding up numbers has nothing to do with it, unless you&amp;#x27;re using them to make some kind of &lt;i&gt;persuasive argument&lt;/i&gt;, and then we&amp;#x27;re right back to public perception and politics. You&amp;#x27;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&amp;#x27;re running a country, not an insurance agency.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>finnw</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;Laws should be about the &lt;/i&gt;informed* consent of the governed*&lt;p&gt;That is a huge can of worms, because it depends on being able to determine who is and isn&amp;#x27;t &amp;quot;informed.&amp;quot;</text></comment>