Why Do We Do Terrorists Jobs For Them
Every time I see another terror attack I mourn for the victims. I lived in NYC during 9/11 and felt the acrid cloud of black and white smoke that burned my lungs. I saw the people leap from hundreds of floors up rather than burn to death. And yet, as soon as I mourn for the victims, I find myself cringing as I wait for politicians and governments to use it as another excuse to subvert the very principals that make democracies special:
freedom of expression
freedom of assembly
freedom to say and think whatever I damn well please.
These are unique traits not shared by most societies. And they’re under attack everywhere in the world, in places like Russia and China and the strong man dictatorships of the Arab world and unfortunately, right here at home and now places like France.
The calls for restricting freedoms are inevitable. They come like clockwork. As soon as the Hebdo attacks hit I knew another round of restricting freedoms was on its way. It didn’t take long. As the New York Times pointed noted in article a few days later:
“In Paris, a dozen interior ministers from European Union countries including France, Britain and Germany issued a statement earlier this week calling on Internet service providers to identify and take down online content “that aims to incite hatred and terror.” The ministers also want the European Union to start monitoring and storing information about the itineraries of air travelers. And in Britain, Prime Minister David Cameron suggested the country should ban Internet services that did not give the government the ability to monitor all encrypted chats and calls.”
These are stupid, arrogant and incorrect approaches. In short they do the terrorists work for them.
And here’s the worst part: they don’t work.
I study China extensively, as I’m working on a SF book that takes place there. They have some of the most restrictive internet freedoms on the planet. They just . They’ve clamped down on foreign sites with widespread blocking. Their internet is a slow, buggy, piece of shit that’s is painful to use. I know, I was there for a month and watched countless sites spin and spin as they tried to call out to some google service that randomly got blocked that week. They attack VPNs that scholars and everyone else with a brain in their head use to get around those blocks and get news from the outside world. And yet China still had a string of violent assaults from Uighur nationalists that have only accelerated into a full blown armed rebellion in parts of the country, as the Chinese authorities react with typical iron fisted tactics. No matter how many professors and student groups they lock up with two hour show trials they attacks don’t stop. No matter how many sites they block, it keeps going. It always will. We can NEVER achieve perfect stability in this world. We always exist on the razor’s edge.
Security and freedom are diametrically opposing forces. They’re like sunshine and rain. They don’t exist together. If you have openness, you have many avenues open to exploit and attack. We see this in computer software all the time. A browser that lets anyone install anything at ends up allowing some malicious bits to get through.
Representative democracy and theocracies are opposite ways of seeing the world. One favors freedom and the ability for individuals to choose their own destines and the other believes that God told them that a few violent morons should be in charge of what everyone else thinks, says and does. These two ideologies can’t get along.
I say let democracies do what they do best: speak freely. That means offending some people. Why? Because not everyone agrees on everything. If someone thinks all vegans are psychotic tree huggers, you can be well assured that die hard vegans think meat eaters are barbaric animals killers. The two won’t ever see eye to eye, no matter what they say. Our job is not to make it so they can’t offend the other. In a democracy you have no right to NOT be offended. You’re free to take offense and to call the other side a bunch of idiots and buffoons. What you are not allowed to do is suppress their right to call you the same and point out your ideas and weak and dangerous.
Let newspapers and blogs and zines and every other written form make fun of other’s belief systems. If your beliefs can’t stand up to scrutiny and ridicule, they aren’t very good beliefs after all. Let cartoonists lambast them, let people call each other ignorant, stupid, arrogant, obnoxious, and then print a zillion copies and replicate it all over the internet or sell them to whoever will buy them.
Instead politicians propose the opposite. They swiftly propose the same tired garbage: let’s restrict what people say. Let’s tip toe around, lest we offend people. Let’s cut back in just this one case. Oh and this one and this one too and these five others we couldn’t think of, because once it starts it never stops, as our forefathers discovered when they started this amazing, wonderful, imperfect, maddening country of ours.
Terrorists attack us to do damage to these principals. So why do we do their job for them every time?
For a small supply of bullets and few fanatical soldiers, tiny, radical groups of terrorists have successfully encouraged us to restrict freedom of speech, ratchet up warrantless surveillance, reduce transparency in government and the judicial process and in general trample and spit on our own values in the name of keeping everyone safe.
Here’s the truth: you can’t keep everyone safe.
People die. They die every second of every day by the millions. You’re going to die. I’m going to die. But your changes of dieing from heart attack, cancer or on the freeway tomorrow outweigh your chance of getting killed by a terrorist bullet by a trillion to one.
And so why do we give these bastards so much power over us? Why do we power up a massive surveillance state and restrict what people can say because a few moronic fanatics blow themselves up or shoot some people? They should be a footnote in history and yet they’ve costs us hundreds of billions of dollars, done untold damage to our values and in general made us look foolish. And they still won’t go away. You know why? Because they never will. You can’t kill all the bad guys in the world. They keep coming back. They are produced in endless supply just like everything else.
If you adopt the methods of darkness, the darkness inevitably corrupts your from within.
The terrorists attack don’t destroy us with fire and ice, they cause us to turn inward and destroy ourselves.
There is only one answer: stop doing it.
Remain open.
Fight efforts to get more secretive. Oppose everything that restricts transparency.
Oppose limits on our right to say whatever they hell we feel like saying, whenever we want to say it.
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