The price of liberty?

[sawyl]

Here's an interesting comment on liberty and the cost of terrorism from Ross Anderson:

First, there’s the political question: are Western societies uniquely vulnerable — because we’re open societies with democracy and a free press, whose interaction facilitates fearmongering — and if so what (if anything) should we do about it? The attacks challenged our core values — expressed in the USA as the Constitution, and in Europe as the Convention on Human Rights. Our common heritage of democracy and the rule of law, built slowly and painfully since the eighteenth century, might have been thought well entrenched, especially after we defended it successfully in the Cold War. Yet the aftermath of 9/11 saw one government after another introducing authoritarian measures ranging from fingerprinting at airports through ID cards and large-scale surveillance to detention without trial and even torture. Scant heed has been given to whether these measures would actually be effective: we saw in Chapter 15 that the US-VISIT fingerprinting program didn’t work, and that given the false alarm rate of the underlying technology it could never reasonably have been expected to work. We’ve not merely compromised our principles; we’ve wasted billions on bad engineering, and damaged whole industries. Can’t we find better ways to defend freedom?

Anderson, R., (2008), Security Engineering, Wiley: Indianapolis, 769–770