Keeping politicians' hands off the Net & everything else related to technology

Terrorism is a strategy used by the weak to goad the strong into self-injurious overreaction.

DownsizeDC has a campaign underway that I think is critical to defeating terrorism. It’s described on their site this way: “We’re looking for a few brave Americans to start a real war on terror — by not being afraid!”

The “I am Not Afraid” campaign is not about passing or killing any legislation. It is just to get Washington, D.C.’s consistent overreaction to the threat of terrorism under control. The sense of proportion this campaign seeks to create really makes it worth a visit, but here’s a taste:

Nearly 800,000 people have died in car accidents in the last twenty years. During that time there have been exactly two Islamic terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, with less than 3,000 total fatalities. That’s more than 200 TIMES as many Americans dying in their cars as at the hands of Islamic terrorism. And yet . . .

We’ve turned the whole world upside down in response to the two terrorist attacks. We’ve launched invasions, created vast new bureaucracies, shredded the Bill of Rights, compounded regulations, spent hundreds of billions of dollars, and disrupted travel and commerce. But no one is suggesting that we do 200 times as much to address the driving risk, which is 200 times greater.

Terror warriors, keep your straw men in the barn. This is not a pacifist, terrorism-denial campaign. It seeks proportional responses to threats, and acceptance of harms that cannot reasonably be prevented. The message to legislators:

“I am not afraid of terrorism, and I want you to stop being afraid on my behalf. Please start scaling back the official government war on terror. Please replace it with a smaller, more focused anti-terrorist police effort in keeping with the rule of law. Please stop overreacting. I understand that it will not be possible to stop all terrorist acts. I accept that. I am not afraid.”

This is good, important work to defeat terrorism.

Over at Ars, Julian sums up the state of the legislative battle over domestic eavesdropping:

The current wrangling continues a debate that began this summer with the hasty passage of the Protect America Act in response to a ruling by the FISA court—a ruling which the court has declined to release, but which is purported to have required intelligence agencies to acquire warrants when wiretapping conversations between foreign parties that were routed (and recorded) through US telecom switches. Eavesdropping on purely foreign communications had previously been unrestricted—primarily because, traditionally, the physical tap on foreign-to-foreign calls had occurred overseas, outside US jurisdiction. But the Protect America Act, which is due to expire in February, went beyond merely closing this “intelligence gap” and authorized a broad program of surveillance, under minimal court oversight, that permits Americans’ conversations with foreigners to be collected, so long as the American party to the communication was not “targeted” by an investigation. The bills now under consideration seek to establish a more permanent solution: the Intelligence Committee version of the FISA Amendment would remain in effect for six years, while the Judiciary Committee version sunsets in four. While media attention has focused largely on the question of immunity for telecom firms, the additional limitations on surveillance contained in the Judiciary Committee’s version of the bill are, arguably, at least as significant. That bill would explicitly bar “bulk” or “vacuum cleaner” surveillance of international telecom traffic that is not directed at a particular person or telephone number. It would require individualized FISA court review whenever the collection of an American’s communications became a “significant purpose” of an investigation, whether or not that person was a “target” of the investigation. And it would provide for a congressional audit of past extrajudicial surveillance by the National Security Agency.

It’s a little depressing that the debate in the Senate will be between a bill that will do a significant amount of damage to civil liberties and one that will do a great deal of damage to civil liberties. As I understand it (although I haven’t read the Senate bills closely) the House version is better than either Senate bill, although even that is far from an ideal bill. Neither house appears to have seriously considered legislation that simply permitted warrantless surveillance of foreign-to-foreign communications as they passes through the United States, which is ostensibly the reason this legislation was needed in the first place.