To keep us safe? Living in a free society means we accept a level of risk
How much freedom are we willing to give up for the illusion of additional safety? Certainly, time has proven many are more than willing to give up the freedoms of other people for what they think is a “safer” life for themselves, but this week we’ve entered into new territory. The government now has the power to easily index, search and sort what most of us would consider personal data all in the name of “keeping us safe.”
Is this what people in the 1940s and 1950s heard throughout Germany and behind the iron curtain? Let me get back to the headline of this article: An acceptable level of risk. Everyone has their own definition of acceptable when it comes to risk, but when you’re talking about government activity to reduce risk in a free society you can only go so far. We accept it is necessary to pass through a metal detector when entering a secure area like an airport terminal, but a full strip search and a complete hand search of your bags in view of the public would be unacceptable. But if we accept the standard is “to keep us safe” how do we respond? Certainly that additional search would keep us a little more safe right?
In what other ways can we keep ourselves more safe? Certainly if the government tied into every single phone and computer network and converted all voice communications into text, indexed those communications and searched for keywords or phrases, we may well could stop something as significant as the Boston Marathon bombing.
We’d be more safe, and the dollar cost to do something like this will be a lot less than you think in five to 10 years. We’d stop a terrorist attack.
If police officers had the right to detain or search you on a hunch, certainly more crimes would be solved faster and many crimes would be stopped. Why would you have a problem with that? If you’ve done nothing wrong, you have nothing to worry about. You’re just giving up a little more of your freedom in the name of safety. And it’s all about keeping us safe right? The inconvenience you might go through during a stop could be worthwhile if it stopped a drug dealer bringing crack to a 15 year-old kid … right?
If the government had an decryption key for the Internet, allowing them to read data passed through virtual private networks (VPNs), secure (SSL) connections, and open your documents and photos located on an encrypted drive would that go too far? In this example, you would not be inconvenienced at all, and their ability to monitor this traffic, index the content and search for keywords could certainly make us “more safe” and stop a terrorist attack bigger than Sept. 11. Certainly you can trust your own government with this data … right?
Passengers adapted their behavior and now we’re wrapping threats in duct tape.
Speaking of Sept. 11, I want to point out the public can, and quickly does, change their behavior based on past experiences when it comes to safety and risk. It’s not likely a terrorist attack involving taking over a cockpit and flying the plane into a building will happen again in the US. In just over one hour, the passengers on Flight 93 adapted their behavior based on events within the previous hour and they took the steps needed to save lives. God bless them all.
Did you lock your doors and windows after the Cheshire home invasion? Did you install an alarm system and commit to using it?
- Monitoring data and communications.
- Indexing and keyword searches of emails.
- Microphones listening conversations, converted to text, indexed and searched.
- The IRS targeting conservative or liberal groups based on politics for audits.
- Lying to the public for weeks claiming an Internet video started a riot in Benghazi, Libya.
- The government’s secret seizure of Associated Press phone records when they already knew who the leaker in the government was.
- The government’s seizure of a Fox News reporter’s – and his parent’s – emails, when they already knew who the leaker in the government was.
I’m sorry, but none of the above equates to a free society. None of it. It’s a simple truth, to live in a free society, legal residents and citizens must be willing to accept a certain level of risk and that means that bad things – God forbid – may happen on occasion.
We must not use individual tragic events to nip away at more and more of our freedom.
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Having worked in 2 police departments over the past 40 years many times people would ask me about the safety of a neighborhood. I would never give them my opinion. I would explain that each person has their own perception of what is safe and what is not. I would tell them how to get the information they needed to draw their own conclusion. Steve is right we all change our behavior based on the information we have at hand. All I need from my government is the information I need to decide how to change my behavior.?
When it comes to if a neighborhood is “safe” depends on who you have for neighbors. Do you have neighbors who are willing to help you out with snow shoveling or grass cutting?
The question I have is are we in a “silent coup?”
My heart is telling me that I don’t trust the govt with the Prism program. In some ways, we are letting the advancing technology take over and losing “human” intelligence to keep us safe. ?We had direct information from Russia about the Boston bombers, ?instead we relied on technology. Is it possible that the huge volume of information will not keep us safe? I trust court orders for targeted searches over massive computer directed searches to keep me safe, thank you. My head tells me that I don’t think anything the government could do would keep us completely safe in a jihadist global war. I accept that risk.
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Read the following on a message board I frequent. Powerful stuff. -55six
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I live in a country generally assumed to be a dictatorship. One of the Arab spring countries. I have lived through curfews and have seen the outcomes of the sort of surveillance now being revealed in the US. People here talking about curfews aren?t realizing what that actually FEELS like. It isn?t about having to go inside, and the practicality of that. It?s about creating the feeling that everyone, everything…
So Obama needed to take all of Verizon’s phone records, tap congressmen’s phones, project perfect citizen and all the other measures that are an invasion of our privacy to help fight terrorism…that was a great help stopping: Ft. hood, the times square bomber, boxers bomber, or the boston bombers. you said, “You can’t have 100 percent security and also then have 100 percent privacy and zero inconvenience. We’re going to have to make some choices as a society” Do Americans want privacy (liberty) or security. I’d have to say that that debate has been settled since 1775, “Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!”
Oh and Glenn Beck is once again proven right.? TheBlaze the only reliable name in news.
Remember that many of insiders in Washington have been there for a long time, and have learned form the best…. The Clintons!
Anyone here remember the Clinton White House Council and DNC created the report,
“The Communication Stream of Conspiracy Commerce”?, after Matt Drudge and other new online news sources reported on the Clintons ?
http://www.wnd.com/1999/02/1306/
But it was Hillary Clinton who hired the ?Shadow Team? ? some believe to do work that employees of the federal government could not do.
Former congressional investigator Barbara Olson, who was killed Sept. 11, 2001, wrote that, ?In the political life of the Clintons, it was she [Hillary] who pioneered the use of private detectives. It was she who brought in and cultivated the professional dirt-diggers and smear artists.?
Hillary?s detectives engaged in ?a systematic campaign to intimidate, frighten, threaten, discredit and punish innocent Americans whose only misdeed is their desire to tell the truth in public,? former Clinton adviser Dick Morris charged in the New York Post of Oct. 1, 1998.
Read more at <a style="color: #003399;" href="http://www.wnd…
This is all about intimidation of Perceived Public Enemies.
This is 10 times worse than having a staffer steal 1,000 FBI files, and then say “I don’t Know” when asked who authorized Craig Livinston to steal them, like Hillary did.
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Just wondering what Obama had on Justice Roberts?
Were they spying on Supreme Court Justices too?
Yes to both. Everyone!
Read this today on my fav blog : zerohedge.com
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Submitted by Mark J. Grant, author of Out of the Box,
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Perhaps you have noted in your life, as I have in mine that denial is often the preface to justification.
?They, who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.?
-Benjamin Franklin
A government, any government, the American government, can justify its actions based upon national security. It is an often used tactic that is supposed to explain and rationalize…
Ah yes, the liberal “risk free utopia”, obtained, as Steve noted, at the cost of all of your freedoms.
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No risk = no excitement, no innovation, no growth.?? Just the stagnation that is the perfect statist goal, frosted with the censorship of political “correctness” to ensure that nobody is offended by anything (if you are offended by liberal ideology, too bad!)
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What better way to kill the greatest nation on Earth?