Original Post from The Crime Analyst's Blog:
The modern surveillance state: What are we giving up for safety & security?
A couple of recent high profile news stories have got me to thinking about what we are giving up to the modern surveillance state in order to feel “safe”.
The first has been the ongoing scandal regarding NSA surveillance operations uncovered by whistleblower Edward Snowden. Snowden worked as a computer network administrator for the NSA and like most network admins, had the keys to the kingdom regarding all the government secrets on NSA computers.
As the story goes, Snowden didn’t like the things he was seeing, specifically the breadth of the NSA surveillance operation which seems to be so all encompassing that anything you do on the Internet or other telecommunications networks is being monitored by someone at the federal government. Snowden fled the country, spilled the secrets to Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian newspaper and the rest is history.
Of course, the NSA and the Obama administration have repeatedly beat the drum as to just how necessary these surveillance programs are to keep America safe from terrorists.
The second story is the recent decision by a federal judge that ruled that the NYPD’s “stop & frisk” policy was unconstitutional as it mainly targeted minorities and didn’t appear to be all that effective (nearly 90% of stops uncovered no evidence of criminal activity). The ruling resulted in a blistering response from NYC officials who declared that these intrusive searches were necessary to keep New Yorkers safe from criminals.
In the first case, the US government has claimed that “numerous” terror attacks were stopped by this surveillance and then announced an unspecified terror threat was imminent and closed several US Embassies in the Middle East.
Of course, no one seemed to notice that the most recent US terror attack, the Boston Marathon bombing wasn’t stopped by this NSA surveillance. The attack occurred even though the Russians had tipped the US off to their suspicions about the brothers later believed to be responsible for the marathon bombing.
In the second case, while NYPD officials tout their “stop & frisk” policy for driving crime down in NYC, other cities have also seen similar historic drops in crime even though they don’t use constitutionally suspect programs like NYPD’s stop & frisk.
In the first case, we give up the privacy of our communications in order to feel slightly safer from a terror attack. In the second case some, predominantly minority New Yorkers give up the right to walk down the street unmolested by police in order to feel slightly safer from crime.
But is it really worth it?
In 2010, the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports program recorded 14,748 murders. The same year, the Centers for Disease Control recorded nearly 2.5 million deaths in the United States. Homicide is not even in the top 15 causes of death. The number one cause was heart disease at 597,689 deaths. Similarly, cancer was number two with 574,743.
Out of those 14,748 murders in the United States in 2010 the grand total of people whose cause of death was listed by the CDC as terrorism was 0 (only 15 Americans died in terror attacks overseas that year). In 2010 more Americans died from lightning strikes and dog bites than terrorism.
So just how frightened should we be of terrorism and crime? Enough to cede our liberties to the surveillance state?
Justice Louis D. Brandeis said “The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.”
I don’t know about you but I don’t think it’s worth it.
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/politics/2013/08/most-damning-passages-new-york-stop-and-frisk-ruling/6522/
#crime #terrorism #surveillancestate
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