Liberty vs. Security: a False Dichotomy

By Robin Koerner

Guest Writer for Wake Up World

There is really only one argument in support of mass surveillance by the State: that increased security can be bought with reduced privacy. But that claim begs the question: “how much liberty buys how much security?”

It is almost impossible to imagine how two completely different abstractions – security and liberty – could be compared, when idiomatically we can’t even compare apples and oranges. So we should be very uneasy that an entire political age has been built on just that comparison.

But, since our ‘leaders’ insist on making it, and it is the only one they ever make for extinguishing our civil rights and in particular our privacy, let’s run with it….

To the defenders of the surveillance state, security means “saving American lives”. That is why Senator Dianne Feinstein and her ilk justify governmental surveillance with statements like, “the NSA’s bulk collection of metadata might have prevented 9/11”. That only makes sense as a justification if the privacy of all Americans is of less value than 2996 innocent American lives.

Of course, it’s not just our privacy that has been sacrificed: our freedom of speech and our right to due process have been sacrificed by the same laws, and with the same justification, that paved the way to systematic and secret violation of privacy. So what the likes of Feinstein are really saying is that the American way of life has less value than 2996 innocent lives.

Moreover, most of the same people in government who advocate sacrificing the American way of life (liberty) to save American lives (security) support the sacrificing of American lives to save the American way of life.

This inconsistency goes beyond the moral: it verges on the mathematical.

To date, the American government has, in the War of on Terror, sacrificed nearly 7000 American livesand somewhere between a hundred thousand and a million non-American lives to protect (we are told) the American way of life.

Our way of life, of which our privacy is an important part, cannot simultaneously be worth fewer than the 2996 American lives lost on 9/11 and more than the approx. 7000 American service personnel andhundreds of thousands of innocents we have killed abroad.

Assuming Feinstein and friends are not being deliberately disingenuous, what she must really mean is that the surveillance state, and the War on Terror of which it is a part, would not just have saved 2996 Americans on 9-11, but that they are saving more American lives than:

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