The freedom-safety tradeoff; why we should refuse gaining one at the expense of the other

This post is in response to the content of this article:
http://www.gizmodo.com.au/2015/01/george-brandis-is-using-paris-sydney-terror-attacks-as-a-lightning-rod-for-metadata-laws/

">MFW trying to define metadata" ~ George Brandis

The events of the past number of months have been undeniably shocking. It can be argued that terrorism has not been this prevalent since the watershed attacks of the early-to-mid 2000s. Each time issues of national security are raised, I become despondent as to how ruling authorities of many countries behave. My apprehension is not so much towards the direct military/police action that is taken following an attack (although I am by no means condoning all of these responses as weighted or proportionate); rather, it surrounds how massive sacrifices to freedom are made under the façade of “national security”.

Ultimately, governments seem to believe that they need to be taking part in a constant trade-off situation, between the freedom and liberty of its citizens on the one hand, and the safety of the broader public on the other. Herein lies the hypocrisy of many nations. Western democratic nations constantly and sometimes loudly (*cough* ‘Murica *cough*) espouse the values of individual freedom and relative-libertarianism. While the extent to which this is an actual portrayal of reality is always being debated, it is plain to see that, since the fateful morning when those planes descended upon Lower Manhattan, the collective freedom of individuals right throughout the Western-hemisphere has fallen – this coming despite the onset of the Information Age and all of the extra freedoms that should have come with it.

The “safety-precautions” taken post-9/11 most definitely exceeded their original scope of terror-prevention and detection. This has been most recently confirmed by Edward Snowden’s revelations on the NSA’s PRISM program; a clandestine, electronic mass-surveillance program which treats the entire population as persons of interest, in spite of the lack of the law’s usual requirements of probable cause. This scattershot, blind luck approach is not only largely ineffective, but also highly invasive and restrictive. In spite of this, elements of the US government has remained largely unaccountable for this mass privacy breach due to the consistent playing of the “national security” card- an over-played catch-all trump card used to justify the unjustifiable.

I do not doubt for a second the need for adequate preventative and public safety measures, though. Do I care that I’m unable to take a bottle of water with me on a plane? If it’s going to lessen the risk of me dying aboard a bombed flight, then of course not. Do I still have faith and believe in the necessity of our police and security services (ASIO and ASIS)? Of course I do, since there has, and always will be, hateful people who intend to bring harm upon others.

Instead, what I would advocate for would be measures, proportionate responses to these threats, as opposed to the over-reaching, counter-productive responses that have been taken by many governments around this world. I’m all in favour of surveillance, so long as it is highly-targeted and done in cases of reasonable suspicion. In the same way, I’m all in favour of people having more freedom, just so long as it does not impinge on the ability of others to safely enjoy their own freedom. The current Australian government, with its proposed metadata laws, is acting as if it is offering the golden key to all public safety; an easy-fix for all sorts of crime prevention. In reality, these ineffective metadata laws are thinly-veiled in their attempts to hand more control to the government. I sincerely doubt the passing of these laws would make any sort of noticeable impact upon a crazed individual’s capacity for delusion and hatred.  

It simply doesn’t have to be a contest of picking one over the other. It doesn’t have to be freedom vs. safety; national security vs. individual privacy; over-reaction vs. under-reaction… Just because we aspire to live in a safe society, it doesn’t mean that we have to sacrifice our freedoms in order to achieve this. As a famous little girl from the Old El Paso ads once said...

#J.Nic#