Liberties vs. security: where to draw the line?

Your use of the word “unwarranted” focuses attention on the issue at hand. Do you think that the government shouldn’t have computers listen to phone calls between here and the middle east for key words that might lead to actionable intelligence? I think it’s foolish not to. As I said before, the reasons to do it have been made clear more than once. People have died. All the other side of the argument has to offer is ideological anger and slippery slope paranoia.

Are you wanting me to say that it’s ok with me if the NSA listens in if I call Pakistan? Yes, it’s ok.

Do I think they’ll be snooping around my life in general? No, I don’t.

Or maybe the insurance policy doesn’t cover acts of God, acts of war whether by foreign nations or by international organizations unaffiliated with a particular nation, and who knows what else. And the chemical plant owners probably figure they’ll get help from the Feds if they’re demolished by a terrorist attack.

There’s also the reality that the liability of the company owning the chemical plant is limited to the value of that company’s assets. A chemical spill or leak affecting thousands of people could greatly exceed that.

At any rate, I’m already involved in one major thread hijack. I’m not going to get into a discussion of libertarianism in this thread, if that’s where you’re trying to take this.

I’ll bite though.

All but the most fervent libertarian would concede that both national security and enforcing personal freedoms are just governmental functions. The subject of this thread is how to maximize each of them (sort of like those max-min problems in calculus for those who recall). An attack that has the potential to contaminate the water supply, or to create a huge toxic cloud, is a security issue. More so than another plane hijacking. In so far as the government has a function to provide for national security in a manner that limits personal freedoms the least, assuring reasonable standards of security from attack for our water and air supply is well in the range of greater benefit for less cost.

There have been several threads recently, in which the “idea” being discussed is, that we have to give up this right, that privilege or this liberty, in order to “allow” the government to protect us. I reject that completely. I do not live in fear of any imaginary bogeyman. We already have laws, policies, procedures and methods to deal with “bad people”. Any new “protections” that do away with due process, habeas corpus, sworn out warrants backed by sworn testimony, right to trial, any or all of that, I reject. Anything that hands over sweeping, unlimited “powers” with no oversight, I reject.

Sorry, no hijack was intended and given the OP’s phrasing I don’t believe it is a hijack. But continuing with the example as an example, consider the liability of the owners of the plant. They mitigate this by insuring against this risk. Part of that is by going to Lloyds or wherever, and part of that is physical security: guards, procedures, and the like, maybe even their own fleet of fire appliances. Now, if the business disregards the increased threat and ends up paying megabucks (America being the land of the expensive lawsuit) because they were liable and not insured for that liability, the business will see a huge loss and the shareholders will want to know why - resulting in those fat-cat execs losing their jobs. Executives should see this risk and act against it. Someone will be caught out the first time around (e.g. I believe they only insured against one of the WTC towers going down) but no-one will be caught again. So, in the longer term the problem is self-correcting. No government intervention required. Sucks to be the statistical anomaly, though.

But Leaper is right, and the comments he ‘quotes’ are right too: there are undoubtedly people on each side with something like those views. And it’s their right to hold those views. But that there is this vigorous debate is a good thing.

I suppose others have made this point but if so I’d like to repeat it.

The default position should always be maximum individual freedom and minimum abridgement of individual rights. When a right is to be abridged on grounds of security then the executive, or anyone else, needs to go the other branches of the government and present a justification for such action. In the case of the executive, it would be the Congress.

And regardless of who you are individual rights are to be respected. The Constitution doesn’t restrict the guaranteed rights merely to citizens. People taken during the course of actual combat or the immediate consequences of it are prisoners of war and are properly under the rules of war. So they are in a category that is treated in accordance with agreements among countries as to the rules of war, like the Geneva Conventions.

I think that supected terrorists should have all the protections of due procesx. The argument is made that they will turn their trial into a showplace to rail against the US. Surely our system is defensible against charges against it by means other than stifling the charges. I agree that the exposure of detailed means of getting intelligence is a problem. For example requiring the agent who got the information testify in open court as to how he or she got it is a serious problem. However, secrecy is a big rock under which all sorts of slimy creatures can hide. With precedent being such an important part of the legal picture, a bad precedent can return later to do great damage to our presumed freedom.

Security without liberty soon becomes tyranny.
Liberty without security soon becomes anarchy.

Determining how to balance between the two has been the central challenge of western politics since the Enlightenment. It was a key factor in the establishment of the United States of America. The founding fathers sought how to prevent both tyranny and anarchy from arising. The central principle they decided to follow was the rule of law, yet recognized that the law is fluid, not set in stone. And with that principle they established certain safeguards in our government that have worked fairly well, particularly the Fourth Amendment. Its application has not always been just, but such is humanity.

And since the dawn of the Republic, we have continually debated what the balance should be as each generation came across its particular challenges. The fundamental difference I see in this administration is a complete disregard and near contempt for the democratic process. Rather than argue their positions before the public and Congress and seek to implement changes to the laws and the application of the Fourth Amendment, they simply ignore both the public and Congress. Rather than petition, they dictate. Instead of seeking discourse, they seek only opinions to justify their own stand. Congress and the Supreme Court are the legislators and arbiters of the Constitution and the law. Not the Department of Justice. Not the White House Counsel.

Discretion is the better part of valour.

This administration knows neither.

I firmly believe that liberty is the fundamental principle behind our country, and comes before security. And the decision of whether to trade liberty for security rests with the people as represented in Congress to MAKE law, not in the adminstration which is to merely IMPLEMENT the law.

What should the balance be today, during this ‘war’ on terrorism? That which is decided openly by the public and their representatives. Not by the classified memoes and closed meetings of sycophants.

[QUOTE=Evil One]
Your use of the word “unwarranted” focuses attention on the issue at hand.

[QUOTE]
Sorry, the word was meant in the sense of “a wiretap put in place without a warrant approved by a court of competent jurisdiction.”

More people have died from drunk drivers than terrorist acts, should the government be allowed (or encouraged) to monitor every car on the road with a required in-car breathalyzer?

The major problem with all of this (and the primary “ideological” objection, at least for me) is that legal residents of the United States have the presumption of innocence until proven guilty. They also have the right to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects. The right to know that the only way they can be searched is if a court issues a warrant based “upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

Okay, so the government may listen in to your overseas phone calls. What about domestic phone calls?

Seriously, please think about it and complete the list I started for you.

Well shit. Butchered that, didn’t I?

Sorry, the word was meant in the sense of “a wiretap put in place without a warrant approved by a court of competent jurisdiction.”

More people have died from drunk drivers than terrorist acts, should the government be allowed (or encouraged) to monitor every car on the road with a required in-car breathalyzer?

The major problem with all of this (and the primary “ideological” objection, at least for me) is that legal residents of the United States have the presumption of innocence until proven guilty. They also have the right to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects. The right to know that the only way they can be searched is if a court issues a warrant based “upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

Okay, so the government may listen in to your overseas phone calls. What about domestic phone calls?

Seriously, please think about it and complete the list I started for you.

I’ve already mentioned this, but let me try again:

Suppose you’ve got a chemical business worth a half-billion dollars. You’ve got some toxic chemical plants near major population centers; if one of them gets blown sky-high, your exposure (if you had the assets to cover, at least) might be in the tens of billions. But you figure the odds against this happening are about a million to one (although the insurance company has a different view, judging by their proposed premiums); you choose not to worry about it, because it’s very unlikely, and you’d need to be covered for many times the business’ value in order to have enough insurance to protect the business. It makes more sense to you to say ‘screw it’ and figure that if the terrorists strike your business, it goes under, and that’s the end of it. What your shareholders will think won’t matter at that point.

So the magic of the market leaves everybody unprotected here. The ‘self-correcting’ nature of the problem is that, after another terrorist attack where thousands die, people ask, “why was the government still asleep, this many years after 9/11?” and belatedly throw the bums out in favor of a party that is willing to regulate businesses to protect people against a terrorist attack.

Some of the liberty of the individual plants to determine their own security needs must be sacrificed in the name of the security of the public at large.

Where it is left to the individual plant, you will have variations in the level of security, and some of those variations may dip below adequacy unless there is a government-mandated minimum.

I’m sorry but I don’t believe that the reaction to a new attack would necessarily be as you describe. If continuous and well managed anti-terrorism measures are in place I’m confident that the public would understand that no safety measures are 100% effective. Always excepting a few head cases.

I have no problem with the Patriot Act as written, except for the library records provision. I don’t think the government needs to know what people are reading. If they are that suspicious of someone, they probably have other evidence for a warrant. I also don’t like the idea of monitoring domestic phone calls without a warrant. Anybody who’s not an idiot would use code to talk about terrorist activities anyway.

I disagree: which shareholders are going to hire those directors in the future? “Joe Shmoe lost billions at XYZ, we’re not hiring him.”

If you’re Joe Shmoe, CEO, then what’s your risk? An incredible longshot chance that you won’t get another CEO job after the terrorists bomb your chemical plant.

Why would one expect Shmoe to give stuff with lightning-strike odds a significant role in his career plan? I mean, if the odds against my getting caught were of the same order as the odds against a terrorist attack on a particular American chemical plant, my career plan would be to rob banks and retire early.

Okay, so I think we’re narrowing down on something here. Basically, the only liberty you’re willing to give up is a weakening of the 4th in that any overseas electronic communication could be monitored, with or without a warrant. But, …

So, what’s the point? Why is it necessary to give this liberty up when even you admit that it won’t have any significant effect on security? Why even open the door to weakening of the Constitution? I mean, if the person in question is dumb enough to talk in clear on an overseas phone call, they’ll most likely make other mistakes and get caught anyway, right?

Is there any evidence from anyone that either the Patriot Act provisions or these NSA taps would have allowed the government to prevent 9/11? If not, what makes you think they’ll prevent a future attack (especially since they’ve all now been well-publicized)? If they won’t prevent a future attack, then we’ve traded our liberty for nothing.

If there is we will probably never see it because of security classification and old-fashioned butt covering. The truth is, there will still be monitoring, coercive interrogation and all sorts of other things that we’ll never know about. All this debate is sound and fury, signifying nothing.

I think the larger the scale of the potential attack, the more effective increased security measures will be. More planning, money movement, communication, personnel, etc are required for a 9/11 scale attack. Any or all of these open up the opportunity for detection. For smaller scale operations, it’s more of a needle in a haystack.

I take issue with your apparent definition of the phrase “well-reasoned.” However, I never said nor implied that the whole article was about that incident. I said he wrote about it in his article. This statement was true both in fact and in implication. If you drew a different conclusion, you may want to read more closely next time.

Some of his supporting evidence was invalidated. (You would think a Senator would be more careful than to publish an op-ed relying on false information – especially a Senator who is so quick to denounce reliance on information that later turns out to be false as lying.)

And rather than admit that he’d proliferated a false story, thus damaging the credility of law enforcement officials and programs, Kennedy thought that it was more important to “raise awareness” about the corrupt Bushista regime. “So what if the information I’m sending out is false? It hurts Bush, so it’s good false information.”

[Which begs the question – if Kennedy is arguing that the Bush administration is violating our civil rights, and his evidence of that assertion is false, then how do we know that Bush is violating our civil rights?

Halliburton. That’s how.]

Again, your definition of “solid footing” and mine apparently differ by wide margins. But a) Kennedy’s article did rely on a false anecdote; b) the anecdote wasn’t found “wanting” so much as it was found “totally made up;” c) Kennedy was guilty of proliferating a false story for political gain. And when the story was admitted to be false, he didn’t renounce the story; he said it was a good lie because it “raised awareness” of the bad things that had been done.

So lies are good so long as they’re in service of Kennedy’s political gain. That’s the noise to fact ratio I was talking about. He could have reduced the noise by admitting that the story was a lie; instead, he said the story was good because it “raised awareness” that made his political opponents look bad. That’s ignoring the truth for political gain; a/k/a “politicizing an issue.”

And the fact that nothing I said was either false nor misleading shows that you’re the one being misleading. And you’re right; the fact that my statements were accurate was not accidental.

So Senator Kennedy was not making the assertion for the truth of the matter asserted? In other words, Kennedy said that public reports indicate that HSD interrogated a poor college student because he checked out the Little Red Book; and it’s your contention that the point of this anecdote was not for the purpose of asserting that HSD interrogated a poor college student because he checked out the Little Red Book? He was merely talking about public reports, and the truth of those reports was irrelevant? What a load of hooey. He said it because he wanted the reader to believe HSD interrogated the poor college student. Prefacing your words with “public reports indicate” does not make you immune to charges that you’re proliferating false information.

I suppose you called this a “relatively minor point” because it’s totally ridiculous.

“It would be helpful if he was even-handed” or “it would be more logically consistent to be even-handed” is much different than “claiming to be even-handed.” You claimed he did the latter. He didn’t.

The problem I have with this is that it requires an implication of bad faith in the policies themselves. For one, I believe that’s something different than Scylla was talking about. For two, I have no idea how you judge this, other than guessing at the motivations underlying an action. And your only evidence of motivation appears to be the assumption that Bush is evil and the Dems are sweet and decent.

I understand that evidence might not be a bar to you, but I’d rather not play mind-reader. I tend to give politicians the benefit of the doubt, and assume that they advance policies based on their actual merits unless presented with evidence otherwise. Thus far, you’ve presented no evidence otherwise.

That wasn’t my understanding from reading your post, but I’ll agree to that definition of “lefty.”

I don’t see why that would necessarily be true. But you said he wasn’t a lefty. I took that to mean that he’s a righty, or at least that his criticism couldn’t have been partisan in nature. I was merely trying to clear the record by making abundantly clear that a) he wasn’t a righty, and b) his criticism could certainly be partisan.

Baloney.

First of all, Bush is often criticized for not listening to dissent and not being willing to compromise. Obviously, those are both false and ridiculous. DHS shows that. He disagreed with the policy, then listened to opposing viewpoints, and changed his mind. Or do you have some *evidence * that he didn’t think it was a good idea and just went for it “because that’s where the votes were”?

Of course you don’t. I’ll also assume that you have no evidence whatsoever that Bush didn’t “know what they were creating, really.” Once again, it just shows that you’re willing to accept any argument – no matter how ridiculous – as long as it implies Bush stinks.

Doesn’t it seem much more likely that the Dems added the union portions because they wanted them, and the Reps removed it because they didn’t want them? Or can you only fathom one reason to oppose the unionization of the Department of Homeland Security – to get Dems to vote against it?

Again, you have no evidence of the Bush White House actually moving any policies based solely on politics, rather than policy.

Most Reps vote the way they do because they believe it makes better policy. Most Dems vote the way they do because they believe it makes better policy. The fact that you agree that Dems are motivated by policy concerns, but assume that Reps are motivated solely by political concerns, doesn’t show anything other than the fact that we shouldn’t rely on you as an impartial judge of the facts.

This might sting if it came from a well-respected poster. But then again, this type of statement is one reason why you’re not well-respected.

I have responded to these repeated instances of making shit up in the Pit. I’m done with you here.