The Price of Freedom: Privacy vs. Security
“The price of freedom is eternal vigilance,” Thomas Jefferson said. Conversely, the reverse is true: The price of eternal vigilance is freedom. To make the nation more secure from threats both external and internal, federal, state and local authorities have from time to time restricted some freedoms. When it comes to the need for security versus the right to privacy, the pendulum does sometimes swing too far to one side or the other. Thanks to the balance of powers outlined in the U.S. Constitution, this pendulum has so far found equilibrium once the threat to security has passed.
With its story, Terror Suspect List Yields Few Arrests, the Washington Post brought this balancing act to the fore over the weekend. WaPo staff writer Ellen Nakashima’s lead says it all:
“The government’s terrorist screening database flagged Americans and foreigners as suspected terrorists almost 20,000 times last year. But only a small fraction of those questioned were arrested or denied entry into the United States, raising concerns among critics about privacy and the list’s effectiveness.”
The criticisms are numerous.
The director of the Federation of American Scientists’ Project on Government Secrecy, Steven Aftergood, said, “There needs to be a reliable way to correct bad information and protect the innocent.”
People could be listed with only casual contact with a suspect, complained Harvey Grossman with the ACLU. “What you eventually get is a worthless list of people.”
Over on a UPI story, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s David Sobel comments, “This really confirms the longstanding fear that this list is inaccurate and ultimately ineffective as an anti-terrorism tool.”
But the federal government maintains that its terrorist database is indeed an effective tool. The number of arrests last year was small — the Border Patrol said out of 20,000 encounters last year, only 550 people were refused entry in the U.S. or arrested. But the database did stop Omar Ahmed Ali from entering the country, though he tried many times. In 2005, this gentleman killed a U.K. citizen and injured 12 others with a suicide bomb in Qatar.
And if the database had been in place before 9/11, one of the hijackers would have been on the list. Two days before the attacks, Ziad Samir Jarrah got a ticket in Maryland for going 95 miles per hour. WaPo quotes Jim McMahon with the International Association of Chiefs of Police as saying, “Today, chances are he would have been on the list.”
To balance the need for heightened security, the federal government has elevated its redress response time. Reports WaPo, the agency in charge of the database, the Terrorist Screening Center has “created a redress unit that ensures that watch-list and source information is accurate, officials said. Since 2005, the unit has resolved more than 90 percent of the several hundred complaints it has received, including by deleting names or adjusting data.”
If the terrorist watch-list helps to keep suicide bombers out of the U.S., for the ten percent of the public still on the watch-list, one can only hope that this eternal vigilance is an acceptable price of freedom.
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