Here’s a long and fascinating article about something I touched on briefly yesterday, the tension between security and privacy.
Immediately after 9/11, politicians and pundits slammed the Bush administration for failing to “connect the dots” foreshadowing the attack. What a difference a little amnesia makes. For two years now, left- and right-wing advocates have shot down nearly every proposal to use intelligence more effectively—to connect the dots—as an assault on “privacy.” Though their facts are often wrong and their arguments specious, they have come to dominate the national security debate virtually without challenge. The consequence has been devastating: just when the country should be unleashing its technological ingenuity to defend against future attacks, scientists stand irresolute, cowed into inaction.
In a sense, the no-budge attitudes of privacy advocates serve a useful purpose — to keep constraints on what data-based security we use, and thus, potentially, abuse. That dynamic tension usually serves as useful restraints on governmental power, and drives reforms (as in law suits to create ways to get peoples’ names off of security lists).
The question is, will that useful purpose also lead to preventable further loss of life? And is that a cost we’re willing to pay?
Well, I don’t think it will lead to further loss of life. I don’t think that was the issue this time. There was ample warning and intelligence, no one was listening or didn’t want to listen. I’m hoping it was that they just weren’t. Check out this list of articles, all mainstream, and see if you agree.
http://www.wanttoknow.info/9-11cover-up10pg
i just had this sinking feeling that i had posted this comment here b4……i’m sorry if i did…don’t hit me!…..my brain is off today.
maybe it was at scott’s site…hmmmm….
To be honest, I don’t find the compilation that compelling. It’s:
(a) skimming from multiple decades of intelligence and foreign policy matters for the single bits that support its thesis.
(b) overstating the conclusions and ignoring the context of a number of items. (E.g., the article about the Baker report that supposedly advocates invading Iraq to take its oil doesn’t actually spell that out, though it does provide a context of Iraq causing significant disruptions to world oil supply via manipulation of its own production and that of its neighbors.)
(c) dredging up various discredited memes (e.g., Afghanistan was all about a Unocal plot to build an oil pipeline through that country).
(c) basically positing, if I follow it, that 9/11 was a huge conspiracy, a culmination of covert US plans dating back through at least the Bush, Clinton, and Bush Sr Administrations (if not further; Brzezinski was Carter’s Security Advisor, and served in the Kennedy and Johnson adminstrations), to provide a provocation to militarily take over the oil fields of Afghanistan and Iraq.
You are correct that there was a lot of intelligence, just not much coordination of it or analysis of it. (And it goes without saying that was not the only intelligence or terrorism or security matters being dealt with by any of the administrations involved.)
The question is, would better automated data analysis, and from different directions (examining the records of passengers) dig up data today that would assist in preventing another 9/11? And are the costs and risks of such analysis worth it? Or do we simply assume that intelligence reforms and baggage screening will catch future bad guys (assuming the CIA and White House and Halliburton actually want them to be caught).
I think that we don’t need the privacy violations to catch people. It would just make it easier. We need to stop spending money on wars on porn and spend it on cooridnating our intelligence and coming up w/ better ways to catch the bad guys w/out violating privacy.
But that’s just me.
I agree that there are a lot of things the DoJ seems obsessed with that don’t further our overall security.
Of course, there are a lot of people who feel that “coordinating our intelligence” is, itself, a threat to privacy and personal freedoms. Many of the restrictions on interagency cooperation stemmed from reforms in the 70s in response to civil rights abuses by the FBI in particular, but the intelligence in general.
And it’s worth noting that a lot of these tools are designed to integrate information across multiple agency and law enforcement databases.
Making it “easier” to catch people is probably a good thing, per se. The social costs of doing so are something that need to be balanced there. You can have your “life and liberty” as easily taken from you by a terrorist bomb as by a tyrannical Big Brother — and by a Big Brother as by a terrorist bomb. Protecting ourselves from both is important.