Categories
Accountability crime and punishment general freedom moral hazard national politics & policies privacy responsibility

In Plain Sight

The Berlin terrorist attack just a little over a week ago fit a noteworthy pattern. German authorities had investigated Anis Amri — the Tunisian man who drove that large truck into a crowded Christmas market, killing 12 and wounding 56 others — and found “links with Islamic extremists.”

Later killed in Milan, Italy, Amri had been wanted in Tunisia for “hijacking a van” and jailed in Italy for arson and a “violent assault at his migrant reception center.” And yet with all that known or easily knowable, the German authorities couldn’t prevent him from killing innocent Germans.

It’s not just a European phenomenon, either.

Consider Omar Mateen, this country’s worst mass shooter, having massacred 49 people in Orlando’s Pulse nightclub. The FBI had spent ten months looking into Mateen.

Years before the Boston Marathon bombing, the FBI had tracked Tamerlan Tsarnaev, one of the bombers.*

“In case after case … authorities have come forward after the fact to say that they had enough cause to place the suspect under surveillance well before the violence,” the Washington Post recently noted. This was the case with the majority of recent lone-​wolf terrorism plots.

“If any lesson can be learned from studying the perpetrators of recent attacks,” a report in The Intercept concluded, “it is that there needs to be a greater investment in conducting targeted surveillance of known terror suspects and a move away from the constant knee-​jerk expansion of dragnet surveillance …”

Yet intelligence agencies are still grabbing our metadata in violation of the Fourth Amendment. That needs to stop.

The fact that known threats are consistently not being stopped suggests curtailing mass surveillance won’t hurt our security, but improve it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* The same is true regarding the Ft. Hood (work-​place) shooter, Nidal Hasan. Likewise, Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad (formerly Carlos Bledsoe), who was under the active eye of the FBI after returning from Yemen … until he opened fire on a Little Rock, Arkansas, recruiting station killing one soldier and wounding another. Ditto Ahmad Khan Rahami, the less deadly bomber in New York City and New Jersey.


Printable PDF

terrorism, surveillance, privacy, fingerprint, targeted, illustration

 

Categories
initiative, referendum, and recall political challengers

Buccaneer Blitz

No one expected much of the “Pirate Party” in the recent Berlin election. It’s an upstart, and the program of the young men leading the renegade political group — which focuses on “Internet freedom” as well as (alas) “free public transit” — might not seem to be ideally suited for widespread advance in the target environment, electoral politics. The party only offered up 15 representatives for Sunday’s vote.

But it won every seat it attempted, gaining 8.9 percent of the vote.

Meanwhile, the Free Democrats went down to ignominious defeat, garnering less than 2 percent. The establishment must be shuddering. If an allegedly pro-​business party like the Free Dems get booted out of office by young men wearing Captain America t‑shirts, and if the Green Party now becomes the dominate coalition party in the nation’s capital, what then?

Well, the Pirate Party does not appear to be a joke. The candidates are serious, even if they aren’t wearing the traditional suit-​and-​tie uniforms. They parlayed popular Internet activism into votes, and what they do might make a difference.

So, what are they up to?

They seek to defend Internet privacy of individuals while enforcing complete transparency in government. Proposing an online participatory system they call “liquid democracy,” they balk at the status quo in legislative method. There are alternatives, as one spokesman explained: “You can stand up, stand tall and write the laws yourself.”

If this be piracy, make the most of it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.