With all the different aspects that can be posted about this chapter from terrorism to thought crime I would like just to respond to two questions Garfinkel poses in this chapter.
This book and hence this chapter was published in January 2000 and a secondary version (paperback) was published in January 2001. I preface my post with this because I'm going to talk about how hindsight is 20/20 in relation to his questions posed in this chapter in relation to the terrorist attacks on September 11th 2001.
The two questions he poses are: 1) Is it possible to prevent future incidents of terrorism by systematically monitoring all potential terrorist and imprisoning them before they can strike? 2) And, if so, are such measures worth the cost?
1) The extent of the incidents prevented since September 11th will never be known to the U.S. public mostly because we truly don't want to know. Every now and then we here a plot was thwarted and inside we are thankful, and go about our day to day business.
The amount of monitoring now available to law enforcement agencies to deal with terrorism is quiet scary but at the cost of "freedom" we as Americans have made that sacrifice to insure stability for ourselves and for our way of life.
2) Are the measures worth the cost? It's funny that this question is posed because in my finance class over the summer we discusses this same thing. How much is too much spending on the Defense budget. The teacher posed an interesting solution, since thinking term of economic and finance and said "No limit". I have to agree with him in this area. The United States of America is still (may not be for too longer) the strongest world economy and to maintain our way of life and freedom, there is no expenditure that we would not be willing to pay up. Stability of our government and economy is what drives American economic success. (Quick summary on this point Market effects economy, Fed effects market, Fed is backed by full taxing authority of US Government). And lastly there is nothing that we wouldn't do to insure this freedom.
There is a bunch of other arguements that can be made off this point (just war, no weapons of mass destruction) The only point I want to make is that America will always try to pursue protection for its citizen and sometimes at the citizens cost.
2 comments:
Hindsight is always 20/20 and I think that a lot of the author’s predictions were true, but his solutions proposed were a little weak. I like the point you brought up about how do we even know if our monitoring or terrorism prevention efforts are even working.
There definitely is a trade off between privacy and protection. It is hard to know where to draw the line and this subject has become a legal gray area. It will be interesting to see what changes will take place in the future.
I also believe that many incidents since 9/11 have been thwarted because of the surveillance that is now available to law enforcement. I definitely have mixed feelings about the issue though. On the one hand I don’t want my privacy being invaded by government agencies but on the other hand I know that there is monitoring going that has possibly saved thousands of lives. Who knows, maybe even mine. The concept of “the greater good definitely comes into play. I also agree that “no limit” on a defense budget is necessary. Freedom is essential to or country’s continuance as the leading world power and a strong defense budget is necessary to preserve that freedom.
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