Published on this site, September 14, 2001
An American quoted by the Washington Post said that “after seeing the nightmares of the past few days, Big Brother doesn’t sound all that bad.” Can Big Brother really prevent nightmares?
Consider how all the air-travel security measures imposed over the last few decades could not prevent the September 11 horrendous terrorist acts. I am not only referring to the fact that all pilots are licensed and all airliners registered, but more generally to the gradual transformation of airplanes and air terminals into enclaves of total citizen surveillance, control, and impotence – indeed, into miniature Big-Brother countries. The terrorist attacks have shown that such prior control of passengers does not provide absolute security.
Moreover, think about the resources spent on the armed forces and domestic law enforcement – amounting to at least US$500 billion in the U.S., i.e., more than total public expenditures in Canada. Think about the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Administration, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, Echelon (an international communications surveillance system), etc.
When assessing the efficiency of security measures, one must consider substitution phenomena. More government-imposed security is partly compensated by fewer private precautions. For example, airlines will not think of having, like the Israeli airline El Al, armed security on board. Actually, Canadian law forbids this in many cases. Government-imposed security measures may create a misleading sense of security.
Security measures also lead to some substitution in the types of actions terrorists will engage in. If it is more difficult to bring guns on board, they will use box cutters or made-up weapons, or will operate with larger commandos (parties of four or five, as they did last week). If they have difficulty obtaining explosives or rocket launchers, they might use commercial airliners as manned missiles. It is not always clear that such substitutions lead to less undesirable outcomes.
Yet, on the net, heightened security measures may have prevented terrorist acts. But this is not a sufficient justification, for were do we stop? For example, requiring interior passports or specific travel authorizations (which honest citizens could easily get on the Web before taking trips) would provide additional security. The problem is which trade-offs to make between liberty and privacy on one hand, and security on the other hand.
Fanatic terrorists are especially problematic. Religiously motivated crimes are probably the least deterrable crimes, as illustrated by the numerous wars of religion in the history of mankind. When eternal salvation is seen as the reward, the expected cost we can impose on the potential criminal doesn’t weigh much in his cost-benefit calculation. There are other means than prior controls to combat even such crimes: prevention through intelligence, destruction of terrorist networks, and armed protection to stop crimes in the process of commission.
Prior controls imposed to everybody carry high costs not only in terms of the immediate loss of privacy and liberty, but also in terms of the sort of society they lead to. Big Brother is nice as long as… he is not yet Big Brother. The second reason, then, why Big Brother does not relieve nightmares is that he himself is pretty nightmarish.
In a sense, imposing prior controls to peaceful citizens means that we are conceding victory to the terrorists. They are the ones who win if we accept that our societies be brought under surveillance states, if we accept that our governments move closer to the kind of tyrannical states they would impose on us.
In order to avoid taking this road, or continuing on it, two broad types of solutions should be considered.
First, we should respect the different preferences that individuals have for the trade-offs between privacy and security. In practice, this means not outlawing diversified private arrangements. For example, why force all airlines to adopt uniform security, or non-security, measures? Why not allow them to offer what they think their clienteles want? It would not be an inconvenient, but an advantage, if different airlines started offering different security packages, so that passengers who prefer more privacy could choose airlines that offer less invasive security.
And, yes, think about the unthinkable (and the now illegal): What if, on the highjacked flights, a few citizens had been armed?
Second, Western governments must review their priorities. In Canada, 3% of public expenditures (all levels of government) are spent on national defence and about 5% on domestic law enforcement. The main problem is that a large part of the latter is spent on enforcing detrimental economic regulation and prosecuting victimless crimes, like the American-inspired war on drugs, or other attacks on politically incorrect lifestyles. If governments spent fewer resources on false crimes and on criminalizing peaceful citizens, they would have more to fight real criminals.
Of course, the planers of, or accomplices in, the terrorist acts of September 11 must be punished. Or course, we have to take means to combat terrorists. But this does not justify undermining our liberties – or what’s left of them. If we impose still more surveillance, searches, intrusive questioning, etc., to ordinary citizens, what will be left to defend against the totalitarian terrorists? Our lives? Let’s remember what an American fugitive slave, Frederick Douglass, said about his period in servitude: “ … and in thinking of my life, I almost forgot my liberty.”