Schneier on Security

False Dichotomy • April 23, 2016 8:26 AM

Actually the entire surveillance debate is based on the false dichotomy of “privacy vs security” i.e. assumes we must sacrifice one to achieve the other.

First, the NSA can’t point to a single terrorist plot they have foiled. So that is pretty good evidence in and of itself that the surveillance state is a waste of time and money. Secondly, as also pointed out by Koerner at the Huffington Post:

To the defenders of the surveillance state, security means “saving American lives”. That is why Feinstein and her ilk justify governmental surveillance with statements like, “the NSA’s bulk collection of metadata might have prevented 9/11”.

That only makes sense as a justification if the mass violation of privacy is of less value than 2996 innocent American lives. Of course, it’s not just our privacy that has been sacrificed: our freedom of speech and our right to due process have been sacrificed by the same laws, and with the same justification, that paved the way to systematic and secret violation of privacy. So what the likes of Feinstein are really saying is that the American way of life has less value than 2996 innocent lives.

Moreover, most of the same people in government who advocate sacrificing the American way of life (liberty) to save American lives (security) support the sacrificing of American lives to save the American way of life. This inconsistency goes beyond the moral: it verges on the mathematical.

To date, the American government has, in the War of on Terror, sacrificed nearly 7000 American lives and somewhere between a hundred thousand and a million non-American lives to protect (we are told) the American way of life, which includes our privacy. Our way of life, of which our privacy is an important part, cannot simultaneously be worth fewer than the 2996 American lives lost on 9/11 and more than the approximately 7000 American service personnel and hundreds of thousands of innocents we have killed abroad.

Assuming Feinstein and friends are not being deliberately disingenuous, what she must really mean is that the surveillance state, and the War on Terror of which it is a part, would not just have saved 3000 Americans on 9-11, but that they are saving more American lives than –

(a) all the Americans we have lost through fighting “the War on Terror”, plus
(b) the non-American lives taken by our actions (presumably and somewhat sickeningly weighted by some factor that makes each one worth less than a “saved American”), plus
(c) whatever value we might give to the American way of life, which includes our privacy (measured, for mathematical consistency) in terms of a number of lives.

……

Since no one is arguing that killing innocent foreigners makes us any safer, but our government has killed huge numbers of them, it is apparent that the more closely an innocent non-American life is valued to an innocent American one, the more American lives must be saved by the sacrifice of liberty to reach this so-called balance between liberty and security.

……

I’ll offer up my own base-case strategy for preserving American liberty and lives. It’s in two parts, and it’s really complicated. Here goes.

1) Don’t give up any liberties. 2) Don’t put Americans in harm’s way.