Why Terrorists are like the X-Men

[andrewducker]

Whenever anti-mutant hysteria appears in the X-Men comics it usually has two justifications - (1) They are different, and therefore to be feared and (2) People of such power cannot be trusted around ordinary mortals - the damage they can do, should they choose to, is just too high for them to be trusted.

The same is now true of ordinary people.

Advances in technology increase leverage - they translate a small amount of human effort into a large amount of actual work.  The more technology increases the larger the ratio between effort and work, until you reach the stage where a person can press their finger on a button and cause a nuclear winter.  Or 19 people armed with box-cutters can kill 3000 people and cause billions of dollars of damage.  Or 4 people can shut down the entire London underground. (In addition to, y'know, all the nice people who do fantastically good things with technology - I certainly don't want to come across as a luddite here).

The question being: given that you cannot tell who may at any point decide to cause damage, how do you balance freedom with security?

It seems ridiculous to limit the freedom of 99.99% of people because a tiny number of them want to cause problems.  And, in general, I actually fall into the freedom of speech, freedom of movement, freedom of pretty much everything side of things.  I don't like being told what to do at all, and my original sympathies definitely tend in the libertarian direction.

But just as I started tending away from that direction economically when I understood the effects on the poorest parts of the population, I've pulled back from total social freedom based on the fact that a very few people can cause massive damage.

Which isn't to say that I think that police, security forces and the like should have free reign to do what they like.  I believe heavily in oversight, regulation and control of those with power to try ensure that they don't abuse it.

It's an uncomfortable situation for me to be in - I'm not sure where to draw the lines - or at least, there are huge grey areas where the lines could be drawn across and I wouldn't be sure how I felt about it.

The only thing I'm sure of is that we ought to be sorting out the underlying problems that cause people to feel that their only option is this kind of destruction - because while I can live with the lesser of two evils I'd much rather that we didn't need to do so in the first place.

Comments

[missedith01.livejournal.com]

I don't think we're generally being given the choice of freedom v security. We're usually given the choice of: this much freedom v less freedom. Because the extra powers they want will not increase our security, they will merely give us less freedom.

A central government in a liberal democracy cannot protect me or anyone against suicide bombers. That's the coffee and we all need to wake up and smell it.

[andrewducker]

Some of the articles I've read recently talk about there having been several groups of people that _were_ found and stopped before they caused damage.

There are some things that most definitely won't make a difference - Charles Clarke admitted, for instance, that ID cards would have made no difference to the bombings.

[missedith01.livejournal.com]

Some of the articles I've read recently talk about there having been several groups of people that _were_ found and stopped before they caused damage.

I don't doubt it ... I think lots of people out there have probably been working really hard to prevent this and without their work it would have happened a lot sooner. My point is, it would always have happened in the end, because a suicide bomber doesn't need a shadowy terrorist infrastructure. He only needs to be pissed off enough and have the ability to obtain a very few materials and combine them and the "luck" to not be physically searched on the way to his target.

I don't say that there isn't any kind of regime that could prevent it. I'm only saying that a liberal democracy can't prevent it, because if enough surveillance and restrictions applied to stop that level of threat we wouldn't be living in one any more.

[andrewducker]

agreed - if you want to be 100% then we're all going to have to be tagged, videod and phone-tapped.

But that doesn't mean there aren't compromises somewhere - the question is where are we willing to make them.

[missedith01.livejournal.com]

But that doesn't mean there aren't compromises somewhere - the question is where are we willing to make them.

OK, well, I think the first question we should ask when asked to give up a freedom is: if I allow them to do this is is going to reduce the threat of a lone suicide bomber blowing himself up by a significant margin?

That cuts out ID cards, phone tapping, random searches and more detention without trial, for starters. What else is being proposed?

[andrewducker]

I wouldn't cut out phone tapping - largely because most of the people don't seem to act alone - The Economist has a great article here about the way that known cells have formed, and they mostly seem to need a group of disaffected people egging each other on.

I'm against mandatory ID cards, random searches and detention without trial - as those would seem likely to do more harm than good.

I'm not against data collation and mining in order to find (for instance) that people have been buying combinations of things that could be used to make explosives - so long as this is used to point investigations in the right direction and not as evidence by itself.

[heron61.livejournal.com]

As long as everyone has equal access, I'm increasingly thinking that Brin's transparent society would be a good balance of security + freedom. At minimum, I think that all on-duty police and other security forces should have to wear cameras that record everything they see and hear when on duty. That way, if they end up shooting someone, it will be far easier to determine if this was a necessary or reasonable choice.

As long as a society is highly permissive and accepting of diversity (ie as long as it's not much very like the modern US) I don't consider universal surveillance to be antithetical to freedom, as long as the authorities (especially in the course of their jobs) are just as open to being watched as ordinary citizens. I expect such measures to prevent more abuses of power than terrorist attacks, but abuses of power are IMHO considerably more dangerous and damaging than terrorist attacks.

[andrewducker]

Generally speaking, I'm with you. Abuse of power can be endemic to a society, affecting everyone, whereas terrorist attacks tend to be sporadic and sparse (at least in Western societies).

re x-men

[laserboy.livejournal.com]

Talked to you a little about this already, but regarding the x-men... The terrorism angle, as a reason why there's such hatred against ordinary mutants, is barely used in the comics. This is -with- Magneto and the 'Brotherhood of Evil Mutants' kicking about too...

Time and again it's ignored in favour of cliched teen wank, when frankly it's the strongest material the property has to offer.

(Wouldn't X2 have been more interesting if it had been ordinary people who were attacked at the start rather then the President? I could then believe that non-mutants would quite reasonably be afraid etc...)