Sacrificing Freedom for Safety
Many people rightfully criticize the Bush administration for sacrificing freedoms for (a feeling of) safety but European governments do the exact same thing.
In Germany, a proposal from the Ministry of Justice would essentially prohibit using false information to create an e-mail account, making the standard Internet practice of creating accounts with pseudonyms illegal.
A draft law in the Netherlands would likewise go further than the European Union requires, in this case by requiring phone companies to save records of a caller’s precise location during an entire mobile phone conversation.
And the real problem is that my fellow Europeans just let it all happen. Our media aren’t paying a lot of attention to it.
One of the problems with most European cultures, at least with the Dutch culture, is that we trust our respective government too much and too easily. As a conservative liberal I don’t trust my government blindly, which puts me at odds with the majority of my fellow countrymen.
opinions powered by SendLove.to
8 Responses to “Sacrificing Freedom for Safety”
My question is: can measures be inserted into these laws to protect civil liberties?
As in- these phone records can be used only in national security, not criminal, cases
– the records must be destroyed after X number of days
– there must be some body (court?) to supervise the use of these records
– can an individual contest the use of these records
I don’t trust the government, either. But I have to admit that the threat of terrorism scares me. How to reconcile these two issues is complicated, and I end up arguing with myself.
Yup, it’s a dangerous development, good to point that out. But you should have mentioned, too, that many of the new hardline provisions are based on US pressure. Imho it’s kind of ironic that Americans are stomping for the erosion of civil rights and liberties in foreign countries, and at the same time can’t even bring themselves to introducing an obligatory ID card for their own population. I never understood how you want to identify terrorists when you can’t even be sure if any person controlled for security reasons is really the citizen he/she claims to be…
“Those who trade their freedoms for protection deserve neither.”
Chuck, the actual Ben Franklin quote is: “They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”
Me, I’m all for detaining suspected terrorists at Guantanamo, wiretaps on calls by terrorists into or out of this country, you name it. That targets mostly the bad guys. But I’m strongly opposed to targeting everybody with garbage like this. We don’t work for the government in this country, they work for us. Beyond necessary exceptions for taxes, the government shouldn’t mandate the keeping of any records of private commercial transactions. Now, if those records are maintained, then the government has a right, with a warrant or subpoena, to access them, but they shouldn’t mandate the creation and keeping of those records. I’m also opposed to the National ID card and its barely-federalist cousin, Real ID.
I’m 110% with you on this one Pat.
“I’m all for detaining suspected terrorists at Guantanamo, wiretaps on calls by terrorists into or out of this country, you name it.”
Here’s the problem, you start detaining/wiretapping people based on the accusation of being “Suspected Terrorists”, you can then just call anyone you want that and then do what you want with them. If you can take away someone’s right to a trial with an accusation, it means no one is safe. Look at Jose Padilla.
For all I know he could have been 5 minutes away from setting off a nuke, he could have never ever been connected to terrorists in any way. All I do know is he was an american citizen whose been detained for years and for a long time was denied any access to a defense, all based on an accusation. It happened to him, which means it can happen to any of us. Guilt or innocence is irrelevant once you have dispensed with a trial.
That is not American, it is the most flagrant anti-american thing I have ever heard of. And we our assent like sheep oblivious to the magnitude of this danger, because we fear a bunch of saboteurs too much to be true to our nation’s ideals. The terrorists can take my life, but only my country can make me a slave and that is what I fear the most. As should all of us.
Sam, my point is that what really runs the risk of making us slaves is having to produce “our papers” to work and make a living, having to register our very existence with the government, being prohibited from engaging in any kind of commerce without providing positive, government-sanctioned proof of our identity. That’s the REAL threat to our liberties, not a very small number of people arrested at our borders and held on suspicion of terrorism.
Want to protect our liberty? Start screaming about the pressure against Bank of America because they dared issue credit cards to people without Social Security numbers and positive proof of American citizenship. Criticize the Clinton Administration’s Clipper Chip program which would have outlawed all encryption technology that didn’t have a government back-door in it. Start a petition to do away with the immigration I-9 form, by which I have the burden of proving my citizenship in this country and my identity before I am allowed to earn a living at any job.
THOSE are the real dangers to liberty. Going on and on against actions against probable terrorists is only a slippery-slope argument that is very unlikely, in my view, to ever be expanded past the very limited people it is being applied to right now. It’s a theoretical risk to almost all of us. The other stuff affects every single one of us every single day. Don’t want to be a slave? Then why aren’t you spending more time complaining about these other things?
I’m not complainging about those because they don’t have any possibility of ending me up in jail without a lawyer. You said, ” That’s the REAL threat to our liberties, not a very small number of people arrested at our borders and held on suspicion of terrorism” but I very much disagree. The numbers will only remain small as long as the gov’t behaves itself. It now legal to arrest people on suspicion and hold them as long as you like.
My point is now the gov’t has the power to do just that. Even if I give this administration the benefit of the doubt, that it is no abusing this new authority, the point is they could if they wanted to. And how many elections from now until we get someone in the office that decides the will abuse that authority? Does it not make you uncomfortable that you can be arrested, LEGALLY, without any proof? That means you don’t actually have to do anything, just be on the wrong side of someone from homeland security, and 3 years from now you’ll be seeing a court appointed shrink to determine if you are still mentally capable of standing trial. Thats what scares me.
I hate paperwork, but I can live with it.