November 2001
The Price of Killing Terrorism
by Fred McMahon
There is an optimal level of terrorism, and it is probably not zero.
Similarly, there is an optimal level of street crime, and it is not zero. Flood the streets with enough cops, eliminate civil liberties, exile anyone who commits a street crime to a barren, arctic penal camp, and street crime would virtually disappear.
The streets of Soviet Moscow were safer than the streets of Toronto or New York—but at what cost? We must be wary of any attempt to reduce our civil liberties to fight terrorism.
In today’s world, terrorist plots are inevitable— not just from the Middle East, but from aggrieved groups around the world. Both Canada and the United States have suffered terrorist attacks from domestic groups, as has every major advanced nation.
Yet successful terrorist attacks could be virtually eliminated. It would be a relatively easy thing to do. We think of the micro-electronic communication/computing revolution as liberating, and it was. The West, powered by the great economic engine of free thought, has left communism behind.
But the communication revolution has a dark side. It created the very tools— and more—that George Orwell imagined in his nightmare totalitarian world of 1984. The technology was not ready in 1984, but it is now. In Orwell’s world, an all-seeing, all-hearing, interactive television brought Big Brother into every home. That technology is a piece of cake today. Monitoring millions of listening and seeing devices would be labour intensive. But, scientists are just a small step away from developing artificial intelligence machines that would dramatically reduce the labour cost of electronic spying. Police could put a device in every home and every street corner, and monitor all of them in a cost-effective manner.
It’ll soon all be technologically possible, if it’s not already. But that’s not the end of the technological possibilities. We could be tracked wherever we go by signals generated from mandatory ID cards. A more immediate threat comes from Java-enhanced ID cards—smart cards—which could be required for certain purchases and for travel, just as internal passports were once required in the Soviet Union. Imagine the impact of being able to effectively bar someone from travel by denying them the privilege of buying tickets or vehicles.
Technology allows an even darker vision. Authorities could "outlaw" people, in the ancient sense of "outlaw"— excluded by everyone in society—by making all purchases dependent on approval from an ID card. Without such approval, someone could be effectively excluded from society.
None of this will happen overnight, but we need to be wary of any erosion of civil rights. New technology could quickly place extraordinary power, information, and the ability to analyze this information in the hands of government authorities. Such power and knowledge is ripe with conflicts of interest, opportunities for abuse, and openings for further expansion of state powers behind the scenes, unseen by those outside the "know." People enjoy power and, given the chance, they will expand their own. For the first time in history, governments can boast: "We have the technology—for an Orwellian state."
Even under worst-case scenarios, terrorism will rarely, if ever, kill as many people— or even close to as many people— as are killed in motor vehicle accidents every year. We haven’t given up driving because of that. We shouldn’t give up our far more important civil liberties for the far less deadly threat of terrorism.
Terrorism can be made a rare event without going to extremes, but it cannot be eliminated without going to extremes. Eliminating terrorism is no more an optimum than eliminating street crime by hiring every third citizen as a police officer or informant.
These are dangerous times, and some of that danger comes from within—not necessarily today or tomorrow, but in the long run. We must understand our great technological power, and how easy it would be to turn it against ourselves.
Fred McMahon (fredm@fraserinstitute. ca) is Director of the Social Affairs Centre at The Fraser Institute. Formerly with the Atlantic Institute for Market Studies, his most recent book is Retreat from Growth: Atlantic Canada and the Negative Sum Economy.
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