Terror and surveillance

Attacks like the one in Florida this week, under the banner of ISIS, create a terrible bind for progressives and liberals. We can argue with conviction and evidence that the best way to minimize the danger is to unite with the Muslim community so they will offer no shelter or encouragement to extreme ideologies, and will join in thwarting terrorism. The right-wing impulse to exclude and harass Muslims has exactly the opposite effect, increasing the sense of alienation among marginalized youth and giving them a sense of grievance and unfairness to feed their darker impulses.

But that isn’t quite the whole story, and the rest is not so easy for a liberal view. Nowadays the threats have reached a new level. It has become easy for a single individual or a very small group to wreak very great damage. And it’s getting rapidly worse. If we look only a little distance into the future, with the increase in the complexity of digital connections and the rise of powerful technologies of destruction, that danger will become intolerable. We cannot allow even a little chance that a few people might set off an atomic bomb in one of our cities, or genetically engineer super diseases, or disrupt the programs that keep planes flying and water flowing.

But how to keep those risks near zero? Surveillance of Muslims certainly won’t do it: we have seen many times that the sense of grievance can come from many sources other than religious fanaticism. Dylann Roof took his inspiration for the church massacre from racist ideology; Timothy McVeigh’s bomb was motivated by anti-government frenzy; Adam Lanza’s school shooting seemed driven by personal feelings of romantic rejection. Sociopaths can always find a reason, and their weapons are only growing more powerful.

The only solution that I can see to such danger is surveillance of everyone. If someone is plotting mass destruction, we need to know.

I don't like that conclusion. The risks of tyranny and the loss of privacy are also intolerable. But as the potential rises for private people to do enormous harm, the rights of privacy have to be questioned. President Obama, who was a great advocate of civil liberties before becoming President, has pushed strongly for stronger surveillance capabilities. If he, who is basically on our side, sees that need, we should take it seriously – and try to find a better answer. 

I think the answer is probably to focus on how to prevent abuse of surveillance, rather than on stopping surveillance per se. We recoil from this almost instinctively: the idea that some power can keep tabs on our private lives conjures up images of Orwell’s 1984 and of Bentham’s panopticon prison. The trope that absolute power corrupts absolutely runs deep in our culture. But have we really put our minds to changing that equation? Is it possible to have enough surveillance to prevent the harm that terrorism can do, and the right controls to prevent misuse of that knowledge? I haven’t seen any serious treatment of that possibility – and it may be the only way out of our terrible dilemma.