Once someone decides to kill a lot of people, it's already too late. There is no, repeat, no way to prevent every mass murder. A determined killer will always find a way.
Nobody wants to soberly admit that the only way to prevent terrorist attacks are to keep people from wanting to do so in the first place, which is a long and imperfect process with absolutely no guarantee of success.
A lot of America's mass shooters are simply deranged and hungry for national infamy.
Why would anybody asks? But, your point stands: I've been absolutely amazed that nobody had blown up our (Parisian) metro at 8:30 in the morning already. If you want a maximum casualty count, just bring a bunch of stuff and shake it in a pressure cooker. Just synchronize payload over multiple lines, and boom, you got something around thousand of casualties, plus a massive panic mouvement, and a genuine fear of public transportation for a while.
There do exist more reasonable compromises. For example, we as a society have already said that you can search someone's property if you get a court order. That's a smaller cost, because the authorities are forced to go through a supervised process before anyone's privacy is in jeopardy, and it's still sufficient to find the evidence in a huge proportion of cases.
But the proposal on the table is extreme. It affects everyone's privacy, before there's even a notion that a crime has been considered.
Burning down the house to kill a spider is stupid no matter how many people vote for it.
This sort of surveillance, on the other hand, is supposed to be all about effectiveness... But it ain't.
There is a difference between something like chemotherapy, which has drastic negative side effects but can save the body, and fake cancer drugs, which might have little to no side effects(or massive ones!) but you die either way, enriching the scam artist on your way out.
That said, I would also like to see more discussion of alternatives instead of just saying "it'll never work".
Some hypothetical approaches for discussion:
- Convincing violent groups to be less violent; demonstrating that they can get more of what they want by participating in society than by attacking it (a multi-generational issue)
- Finding a place for the "lone wolf" types to feel like their needs and concerns are addressed, including mental health
- Getting first-world powers to stop purposely destabilizing other countries
- Accepting what remains of the problem as if it's a natural disaster (e.g. just as people accept or ignore the 1000x worse problem of traffic deaths)
I do think that this is going to be the correct path for us as a society, long term. There are a lot of obstacles though; convincing people their theological beliefs have been manipulated, fixing the havoc created around the world from globalization, and the profits gained by some (powerful) people.
- Finding a place for the "lone wolf" types to feel like their needs and concerns are addressed, including mental health
Mental health availability in the US needs to improve immediately.
- Getting first-world powers to stop purposely destabilizing other countries
Ha ;)
This is a very naive argument.
Of course it is possible. I can search all my Facebook messages now. We know the NSA can search a large proportion of the world's internet traffic.
The methods needed to reduce attacks (geopolitical unrest resolved) is probably not within the capacity of the police forces we have, and even pretty good safety is so expensive no one is willing to pay for it (even if we did all agree to register every action we took with the government.)
There is no government action which can promise results when it comes to motivated attacks, so when you hear "oh if we allow this police action then terrorist attacks will stop." you are hearing purposeful naivete at the best, and power grabs at the worst.