Trading civil rights for a safer society...

[mrph]

Various politicians and columnists seem to be talking about how swapping some civil rights for increased protection from terrorists is a fair trade.

There are lots of reasons why I don't agree with that, but here's one of the main ones: would it actually work? Has anyone got a case study, an example of a country that's actually done this and seen some tangible benefits as a result?

Because right now, I'm having real trouble thinking of one...

Comments

[ninshubur.livejournal.com]

I don't really have any study to point you at. But looking at the 30 year history of the Rote Armee Fraktion in Germany, the strong-arm tactics of the government against everybody even vaguely on their political wavelength and the questionable way the government delt with the real terrorists they actually got, mostly had the effect of driving more people to symphatise with the RAF, and some of them to become active members of the later generations of the organisation.

Interestingly enough the public picture of toughness that was painted by the governement about these laws and measures to make its citizens feel safer probably contributed as much if not more to their long term inefficiency than the measures themselves, which by the way were not that successful to begin with, even ignoring the side-effects. Often the measures were just a reworded version of something which was possible to do for the state anyway and where it wasn't they quite often didn't get away with it in the high court anyway. I certainly see a parallel to recent UK legislation here.

Once the government discovered this and noticed that dealing more silently with the problem using the normal legal, invetigative and intelligence instruments and just treated the people who actually did something criminal as criminals and kept a close, but fairly discreet eye on those people who they thought might do something, the support for the RAF in the public waned which led to its official dissolution after a rather long time of relative inactivity in 1998.

I don't know how much of this you can apply to the phenomenon of Al-Quaida-style terrorism, but upping the pressure on certain groups of people and cutting down on their civil liberties might possibly be a short term win. But in the long run these measures will only serve to enlarge the pool of people drawn to this kind of action and hence actually increase the problem they are designed to solve.

[(Anonymous)]

Agreed
In Most countries the law allows sufficent tools for Law Enforcement / Intellegence personnel to track down and obtain the information required to convict such individuals through the courts - the problem is General Intellegence to enable an investigation to be targeted accurately.
However Govenments in reaction to a major attack "need" to be seen to be doing something to avoid critisism and hence look to introduce new legislation to give Police etc the Extra Powers "they need" to catch those responsible.
Historicaly Knee jerk reactions (as pointed out above) can actually generate sympathy (and even recruits) from the Minority community within which the terrorists shelter. In fact it can generate sufficent support that it can (by some more ruthless organisations) be considered worth helping along the Isolation of that community - the release to an islamic tv stn of one of the 7th July Bombers video with him calmly rationalising why he believed he had to do what he was doing was a step in this direction.

The major problem with detection of the present threat is that while you may be able to eventually track down the organiser's & Bomb makers (the support organisation) and shut them down. One of the traditional ways of doing this - by capturing a bomber and getting him to talk, by the nature of present attack method is eliminated (unless like the 2nd batch there is a fault in the devices - and we won't get a break like that again). So it does boil down to traditional law enforcement techniques - it's going to be slow and people need to realise that.