Foiled plots and bathtub falls

[n2doc]

If gutting the fourth amendment would forever put an end to bathtub tragedies, would you favour it? Conor Friedersdorf of the Atlantic made a similar argument at length:

Of course we should dedicate significant resources and effort to stopping terrorism. But consider some hard facts. In 2001, the year when America suffered an unprecedented terrorist attack—by far the biggest in its history—roughly 3,000 people died from terrorism in the U.S.Let's put that in context. That same year in the United States:

71,372 died of diabetes.
29,573 were killed by guns.
13,290 were killed in drunk driving accidents.
That's what things looked like at the all-time peak for deaths by terrorism. Now let's take a longer view. We'll choose an interval that still includes the biggest terrorist attack in American history: 1999 to 2010.Again, terrorists killed roughly 3,000 people in the United States. And in that interval,

roughly 360,000 were killed by guns (actually, the figure the CDC gives is 364,483—in other words, by rounding, I just elided more gun deaths than there were total terrorism deaths).

roughly 150,000 were killed in drunk-driving accidents.

The thrust of this argument is simple: terrorism is such a minor threat to American life and limb that it's simply bizarre—just stupefyingly irrational and intellectually unserious—to suppose that it could even begin to justify the abolition of privacy rights as they have been traditionally understood in favour of the installation of a panoptic surveillance state. Would Americans give up their second-amendment rights if it were to save 3000 lives? Well, it would, but we won't. Surely the re-abolition of alchohol would save more than 3000 lives, but we're not about to discuss it. Why not? Because liberty is important to us and we won't sell it cheaply. Why should we feel differently about our precious fourth-amendment rights?

This argument seems somehow glib, doesn't it? Why is that? This is a profoundly interesting and important question, because the argument is in fact perfectly sound, and the fate of American liberty may depend on wider recognition that this is so. That so many of us find this argument somehow silly and immaterial surely has something to do with the way terrorism (whatever that is) rattles our sense of safety far beyond reason. But why does it do that? Because it injures our national pride, and Americans are too insecure to countence that sort of insult against ego? Because we are in the grip of deep-seated but erroneous belief that hegemony buys total security? It's a bit mysterious to me. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that certain people benefit enormously from an irrational fear of terrorism.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2013/06/cost-benefit-analysis-and-state-secrecy

[Scuba]

1. Kick.

[surrealAmerican]

2. Terrorism is just a convenient excuse ...

... for a trend that started well before 2001. There were other excuses before that: crime, drugs, communism, etc.