Suppose I told you that taking bazookas away from people that live in the city prevents bear attacks? You might say that there aren't bear attacks in the city anyway, which would be true, but you couldn't prove it one way or another. Who knows, maybe there would have been one bear attack if people ran around with bazookas shooting up the nearby forest.
Now add in the complexity that terrorism is more like a rate than a yes/no question. What if I told you that taking away bazookas in the city reduced the crime rate? Well, the crime rate in many cities has decreased, but how are those two related? Once again, we're left with a statement that might sound good to some and bad to others -- and no way to reasonably discuss it.
The only thing we can say with certainty is that no matter what we do, terrorism will continue exist. We can never eliminate it no matter how hard we try. So unless we want each new terrorist act to wreak havoc with massive changes on our societies, we're really talking about trade-offs here. How much stuff do you want to give away for a 50% reduction in terrorism? And once you come up with that answer, how would you know if your giving those things actually was the thing that reduced it?
It's one thing when a pubic discussion has reasonable people talking about the various sides. It's another thing entirely when we start injecting these semantic landmines into our conversations. I'm not saying you're wrong or right; I'm saying there is no way to know.
When Sept 11 happened the popular meme for why we were attacked was "Because they hate our freedom." On a strategic level, they're doing a dramatically good job at winning: look at how much our freedom has been curtailed since then. And they can do it without touching an American; rather, the fear of what they might do provokes the U.S. government into destroying our freedom for them.
(A secondary goal for Osama bin Laden was to bankrupt America, something they are also winning at: since 2001 the U.S. national debt has grown from $6T to $23T.)
You are totally right of course, but the public "debate" around these kind of issues is so emotion-driven that this line of questioning is never explored. Humans generally want someone in power over them that will grant them safety and security, and a sense of certainty that nothing bad will happen to them. Any argument that relies on probability and the idea of trade-offs will never be effective in the public square of a democratic society
The article: Surveillance fails to catch terrorist.
Your argument: Without surveillance we cannot catch terrorist.
My question: How are we catching them now? How did we catch bad actors and saboteurs before surveillance?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_United_States...
After September 11, the typical number of deaths from terrorism in a given year was...0, give or take a few, with a disconcerting uptick since 2013. Great, our efforts to curb terrorism are working!
From 1975-2001, the typical number of deaths from terrorism in a given year was...2. Wait, the massive surveillance state has saved 2 lives a year? What? We saved more lives by posting a guard at the Caltrain tracks in Palo Alto to keep people from killing themselves.
By the numbers, terrorism just wasn't a problem, because rational people don't blow themselves up to make a point. Mentally ill people do, and a significant number of mass shootings are not counted in the terrorism statistics but actually kill far more people. But by making terrorism into a big bogeyman that's going to kill you, it feeds into the interests of the media, of the state, and of the military-industrial complex, and so there are a lot of powerful forces shaping the discourse around terrorism that aren't necessarily reflective of reality.
Britain and France had geopolitical and business interests in the Middle East since the 18-19th century. America since the 20th, when oil suddenly had all the spotlight.
Fundamentalists are convinced that "the West" is the Devil on Earth. No political force can pacify fundamentalists nor avoid future generations.
Most of the problems in the Middle East, at least with regards to them hating the US, are because the US did something to directly make them hate the US. Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan - at least in their current iterations - are all problems the US created. This is barely even beginning to describe the list of atrocities the US has committed against other countries.
The US has terrorists because the US creates terrorists, sometimes from us terrorizing other countries that are too insignificant for the world to take notice.
If you think I'm being hyperbolic, look into the history of US drone strikes just for a very recent example of the US leveraging its military superiority to decimate other countries. What's interesting is it gets worse regardless of the president.
On a grand historical scale, the Powers That May at any given point in time become the main offender against those having something of value. Next time it'll probably be China (beginning with the "Security Theater" [1] in Xinjiang).
[1] https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2009/11/beyond_secu...
What change? Why don't you let them effect those changes?
The reason is simple: terrorists and bad actors assume they're being surveiled, and take countermeasures, and those countermeasures are far more effective than the surveillance. Anyone with moderate technical knowledge can use GPG and Tor. It's not rocket surgery.
The people caught by surveillance are for the most part uneducated young men of color who are driven into low-level drug dealing by poverty, and anyone who thinks that putting these people in jail is an effective measure against drug addiction is willfully ignoring the evidence.
Personally, I'm willing to accept a level of risk from terrorism and crime if it means that I get to live my life the way I want to without being constantly monitored by government.
Regarding checks and balances, it's extremely hard to have robust authorization when the group calibrating and performing the authorizations is the same group or adjacent to the group who wants to look at the data. To do it well you need true, apolitical, independence between gatekeepers and users, and users can never be in possession of the actual data because access control can be easily bypassed if this is the case. We have never had that in this country, countermeasures against misuse always seem to be non-transparent and policy based rather than technical (ie secret courts and warrants that no one can actually audit), and data is repeatedly misused over and over with no consequences (eg parallel reconstruction, people spying on partners, people spying on celebs, etc).
I can embed standard EXIF metadata into an image and send it to someone's facebook wall. You think NSA is looking at that?
It's not that hard.
There are alternatives:
If you support anything but paying lip service to checks and balances then you would support restricting US government's surveillance powers and requiring a warrant in many more instances than it is required today (almost never when it comes to the NSA, and now the FBI and other agencies can warrantless look at your data before going to court, too, thanks to the latest FISA extension).