New Volokh conspirator Philippe de Croy makes sense on how we respond to terrorism in a post critical of the terrible ‘Total Information Awareness’ program.
There is a more general moral here. In the coming years, things are going to get worse in this country in two respects: (a) some of us are going to be killed by Islamic terrorists and (b) we are going to forfeit some things we like about our civilization in order to reduce the number of those killings. We are going to spend a lot of time making trade-offs between these evils over the coming years. Our goal should be to minimize their sum. It therefore is imperative that we recognize measures taken in the name of safety as trade-offs and debate them in those terms, without being cowed by the logic that every measure the government says will help decrease terrorism is therefore a good idea.
My response to that is to state that every erosion of our freedoms represents a victory for the terrorists. I’d give them nothing, even if it cost lives. Find another way to combat them that does not involve turning America away from the essential freedom that is the source of what greatness we possess.
You know, the debate, about what types of new powers we allow the government to fight terrorism, is definitely a debate we should be having. However, must we have a sacrificial goat prior to having the conversation?
As far as I can tell, the TIA program itself is guilty of nothing more than poor PR (that seal, putting John Poindexter at the helm, and not being sufficiently obsequious to the insufferable Will Safire). According to the publicly released information, they will experiment with data the government already has, and ‘simulate’ data the government doesn’t have, to test the effectiveness of various data-pooling, data-mining, and analysis techniques. The program collects no data of its own.
That seems like a noble goal, especially when you realize that the biggest customer for this program is likely to be America’s foreign intelligence agencies, which collect their data abroad. At that point, the question isn’t whether you want to give the government the ability to be more intrusive into our lives, it’s whether you’re willing to let the government be aggressive abroad in our defense.