Was the ‘surveillance state’ a price worth paying?

 

30th August 2021

Over at the Foreign Affairs journal is this fascinating, well-argued article:

From a liberal perspective, there are parts of the piece that are both convincing – and disturbing.

For example, the author Thomas Hegghammer avers that not only is the west better resourced:

‘Western governments have also proved to be less scrupulous about preserving civil rights than many expected in the early years of the war on terrorism. When faced with security threats on their own soil, most Western states bent or broke their own rules and neglected to live up to their self-professed liberal ideals.’

The gist of this seems true – and what is disturbing for the liberal is that it may well have been a ‘price worth paying’.

Hegghammer amplifies this point in respect of privacy laws and the surveillance state:

‘The reason information technology empowers the state over time is that rebellion is a battle for information, and states can exploit new technology on a scale that small groups cannot. The computer allowed states to accumulate more information about their citizens, and the Internet enabled faster sharing of that information across institutions and countries. Gadgets such as the credit card terminal and the smartphone allowed authorities to peer deeper and deeper into people’s lives. I sometimes serve as an expert witness in terrorism trials and get to see what the police have collected on suspects. What I have learned is that once the surveillance state targets someone, that person no longer retains even a sliver of genuine privacy.’

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Hegghammer sets out that surveillance and the disregard for civil liberties are just one element of a general anti-terrorist strategy – alongside techniques, resources, intelligence, and the dynamics of the state-terrorist relationship.

And it is not clear whether it is an essential element.

Had Western governments and their citizens been more mindful (or to critics, precious) about their civil liberties, would it have meant that the other elements of anti-terrorism policy would not have worked so well?

And what would it have practically meant for Western governments to have been more ‘scrupulous about preserving civil rights than many expected in the early years of the war on terrorism’ rather than less?

Most liberals will accept that the state can do all sorts of things for the purpose of anti-terrorism, as long as it has a lawful basis and is subject to democratic and judicial supervision and the principle of proportionality, and it lasts no longer than necessary.

Would such requirements really have hindered the security services in their work?

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To a certain extent Hegghammer’s argument has a flavour of ‘just so’ story – there is less terrorism now than before, and so what happened between then and now must explain why there is less terrorism.

But that said: Hegghammer’s observation that the state now has access to online information and communications data that makes it difficult-to-impossible to use electronic devices, media and payments for the purposes of organised terrorism is compelling.

However: terrorism, like other forms of human cruelty, adapts.

It may well be that we have not ascertained or imagined how the next generation of terrorists will work out how to be cruel.

But in the meantime: we will still have the surveillance state – and no state voluntary surrenders its powers.

Perhaps that was – and will continue to be – the ‘price worth paying’.

The price was a high one, all the same.

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“I am sorry but I make no apology” – words and meanings and politics

12 August 2021

The eminent jurist Elizabeth Doolittle once averred:

‘Words Words Words
I’m so sick of words
I get words all day through’.

Of course, the problem of too many words and not enough meaning is an old problem.

Once can point at a current example and deplore it, and soon someone in reply will point out it is nothing new.

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Perhaps it is not new, and perhaps the only difference now is that, because of the internet, there are just far more words to be seen.

An ever-growing tower of babble.

But.

The use (misuse, abuse) of words by the authoritarian populist nationalists in today’s politics – in both the United Kingdom and the United States – does seem to have something novel to it.

Maybe it is the shamelessness of the knowing disconnect between words and their meanings – as if our ‘post-truth’ and ‘fake news’ predicament meant that politicians do not even need to try to have words that correspond with reality.

If so, and if this is indeed a novel situation, then there is no inherent reason to believe that politics will be happily cyclical, and that we will return to the good days of there being a match between what politicians say and what they do.

That said, it may not actually be that happy and good, if those politicians – like Orban in Hungary (see here) – next say illiberal things and very much do mean them, because they no longer care about liberal pieties.

For the illiberal politicians of our age, it seems the first step is to rob words of meanings, and then to be unafraid of saying what they really do mean.

This in turn makes the political challenge difficult for those (of us) who are liberal and progressive.

Not only do we have to combat the assault upon truth, but we then have to combat the follow-on candid and unapologetic assault upon human dignity and autonomy.

It is a grim prospect – and it is one for which illiberals ‘make absolutely no apologies’.

Brace, brace.

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