If the state can't prevent every murder, why would you expect that it could prevent every terrorist attack? Why does it make any actual difference whether deaths are simultaneous or distributed? Horrible things, intentional and accidental, happen every day, and they can't all be prevented, but you don't waste your time worrying about drunk drivers or lightning strikes, because they're spread out and you don't notice.
You make a reasonable and proportionate effort to protect yourself to the extent that you can, and roll the dice and pray to the extent that you can't. What makes terrorism any different than plain old murder?
To the first, it depends on what we have to trade away and on what we get in return. There will always be risks, because our resources are finite and the world is occasionally hostile. A 9/11 scale terrorist attack happening every few years is bad, but unless the resources we shift there make a bigger difference in reducing those threats they can make elsewhere, you should be "content" in the sense that that is the result of the policy that you should prefer. In this context, freedom/power can be viewed as an important resource: power in the hands of the security apparatus makes them more effective, but freedom in the hands of the people helps to protect against government abuses (in the extreme, tyranny - but things don't have to get there for it to be important).
Once you get into the business of having your government spend trillions of dollars and destroying other countries in response to a couple idiots, you paradoxically make terrorism more likely, because shifts in policy accompany it.
When no one gives a shit, there's no incentive for ideological terrorists to attempt any interesting attacks, leaving only the occasional madman.
"We spend $0 a year on defense against flesh-eating bacteria. Should I, as a citizen, be content with flesh-eating bacteria happening every few years?"
"We spend $0 a year on defense against maniacs going postal. Should I, as a citizen, be content with maniacs going postal happening every few years?"
It's still wrong to say we spend $0 on X, Y, and Z.
David Foster Wallace says it better than I could: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2007/11/just-ask...
Yes.
We spend $0 a year on defense against alien invasions. Should I, as a citizen, be content with alien invasions happening every few years?
Also, you don't know that DoD spends nothing against alien invasions. :)
What about the psychological cost of fearmongering about the possibility of 1984-style dystopias vs. the reality of violent attacks whether broken up beforehand or not?
I'm not saying the government should have the powers that it has now, but if you can "live with" terrorism then you can just as easily "live with" surveillance.
"Terrorism" on the other hand does not scale, especially with an adversary so technologically limited oceans away from US borders. Terrorism isn't even meant to scale, it's entire purpose to create a maximal psychological impact because the adversary does not have the resources to achieve any significant damage through force. Even if you look at Isreal's total deaths and injuries from terrorist attacks you'll see that the numbers are small [0,1]. Also, unlike increasing government powers, there is no evidence that terrorists acts on US soil are increasing.
[0] http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/terrorism/terrisraelsum.html [1] http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Peace/osloterr.h...
If you really think that then you haven't been paying attention. For example, the Church committee, and later when the U.S. belatedly relaxed controls on computer cryptography, and then even put the NSA and NIST in charge of ensuring the public had great cryptography available to them to protect the public's and government's communications and data.
> "Terrorism" on the other hand does not scale
It doesn't have to scale. You could sit and prepare for years for a single massive attack and get maximal value out of it. As technology improves, so does the ability to for a single malicious agent to kill or maim more and more and more people at a single time, which only gets worse when you combine multiple such agents into a group.
And as you mention, the psychological impact is completely out of proportion to the resources expended. The government is following the public's lead on this. No one wants to be blown up, but even more importantly, no one wants those who try to attack the nation to be simply let off the hook or allowed to attack unopposed.
> Also, unlike increasing government powers, there is no evidence that terrorists acts on US soil are increasing.
Wow, it's almost like there's some unseen force interfering with Al Qaeda's previously-stated wishes to bring violence to American soil...
So, if we extrapolate towards the future, what you're saying is that the only way to prevent terrorist attacks that kill millions in a single blow is to abandon any and all privacy on a global scale? Because that's what i conclude taking your argument to its logical extreme.
Also, al qaeda didn't have any success attacking on US soil prior to 9/11, so it seems the NSA did some time travelling there. I might also point out that all the information needed to stop the 9/11 plot was known to the government at the time, they just didn't know they knew it. The NSA's warantless wiretapping wouldn't have been necessary to stop 9/11.
No, but what I am saying is that there is very little some suitable middle ground between letting extremists do whatever the hell they want and a total police state.
Notice I've not really been arguing with people who say that more controls are needed on government surveillance, as I agree completely.
I am arguing with people who say things implying that terrorists are dumb or that there is no amount of fatalities that would make even a little bit of law enforcement capability reasonable.
There's a lot of different arguments going on around this, but you'll note that there was not much public outcry about the idea of the police being able to wiretap cell phones, subpoena emails, etc. pursuant to an investigation.
So the issue IMHO is not with government surveillance per se, it with the type of surveillance now available to the NSA, and the oversight that is not currently going along with it.
Back to the point though, the increasingly deadly probability of a single event makes it correspondingly more of a good resource and policy allocation for government to take pains to avoid these events. That doesn't mean unlimited police powers by any stretch; but it does mean we expect people to be detecting and breaking up terror cells before they become deadly.
> Also, al qaeda didn't have any success attacking on US soil prior to 9/11
Don't be silly, the 9/11 attacks were at least the second attack by Al Qaeda on the WTC site.
And either way, what's that matter for this? The U.S. Navy sucked at combat in 1941 and 1942 but by 1944 outclassed the Japanese Navy and aviators even on a 1:1 basis.
The reason AQ sucked at terrorism was because they were crap in general, but they learned over time, gained operational experience, developed training methods and command & control, and built what we in the military call 'corporate knowledge'. All of which leads to a much more effective terrorism 'machine'.
Many people believe the Earth is 6000 years old. Many people believe it's impossible for humans to have evolved from apes. Many people believe gay people simply chose to be gay. Many people believed that Sunil was the Boston bomber, right up until it was proved it wasn't him at all. Many people believe that God will heal their child of disease modern medicine eradicated 100 years ago. Many people believe that vaccines cause autism.
In short, many people believe the dumbest things.
To the extent that these things are inaccurate they must be opposed; otherwise you can incite public panic by fearmongering and worse, the people who perceive accurate problems get lost in the noise of the crazies.
To the extent that these accusions are accurate, reason and logic are certainly the way to make that clear. You may get more followers with FUD and rhetoric but those tactics are still just as distasteful when used by us as it is when used against us.
Second, the issue is the marginal expenditure to marginal deaths. We spend tremendous effort and some freedom reducing auto accidents, and we reduce them substantially. We don't spend trillions more at this point, because we don't consider it worthwhile. Before 9/11, we had some level of expenditure (of effort, money, freedom) on preventing terrorism, and doubtless saw some reduction in terrorism over what it would have otherwise been, and had it down to some particular level. Since 9/11, we've been spending that plus trillions of dollars and more of our freedoms, and the most we can possibly do is reduce terrorism to zero - and even if the alternative were a significant increase in terrorism (something like 9/11 every other day, instead of - generously - once every several years) there would still be more room to save lives in these other ways.
Finally, 9/11 had an enormous cost, but a lot of the psychological cost is due to fear mongering from people who lack the perspective the numbers bring. Another large portion of that cost is due to lack of resiliency in the companies with offices in the WTC, and companies doing business with those companies, &c. The former is addressed through education and leadership, the latter by encouraging behaviors that will also help in the case of (say) a massive hurricane. None of this is served by a panicked focus on terrorism.