Originally Posted by
wiggin
Hazir, you appear to be describing some form of restriction on communication/travel/etc. There are already methods in place by various governments that apply some version of this for certain offenses. The key, though, is that they are applied in a legal process that generally involves the government needing to meet a reasonably high standard of proof. There might be some issues with the 'due process' in national security cases - e.g. some evidence being classified, some options for temporary administrative actions prior to resorting to the courts, etc. - but one would certainly not want to hand the government powers to apply this to just anyone at will based on nebulous 'security' needs. There needs to be a process, and it needs to meet a pretty high bar (IMO) to impose the kind of restrictions you envision - after all, you're proposing some variant of house arrest or parole, and those restrictions typically need a criminal conviction.
There is an interesting discussion that arises from the Ha'aretz article Loki references, though. Let's ignore the West Bank-specific issues of military tribunals and administrative detentions and think about the real question here: if you can correctly identify a population of people who are very likely to perform an attack but don't know it yet, what should you do? Obviously no one is suggesting we're talking about precrime a la Minority Report or thought crime a la 1984, but something more prosaic: the more data we have, the easier it is to spot serious threats (terrorist or otherwise) that arise from distributed and hard-to-identify sources.
But let's say they have not done anything illegal yet - they've become radicalized, perhaps they have posted some inflammatory content online, maybe they have legally obtained some weapons or ingredients for e.g. bombs. What is the scope for action by the government against such threats in the absence of a provable crime? Obviously the solution most people settle on is permitting the state greater powers of domestic surveillance over these threats, backed by some sort of appropriate judicial check on its overuse. But we know that effective surveillance is a costly and manpower intensive endeavor and even when such individuals have been flagged as threats (as many of these lone-wolf or low profile threats have been), their actual attack is often hard to prevent. Others might suggest we engage with social services and civil society, trying to use e.g. community engagement and 'deradicalization' efforts to reduce the threat from identified individuals. This is probably not a bad idea, but I think there are still serious questions about its efficacy. Then there are various punitive measures - having a bunch of relatively minor offenses (like 'incitement' or whatever) that allow for jail time or other forms of restriction which don't directly address the threat, but at least keep the individual off the streets for a while. These are attractive, but they risk being overused or used in a discriminatory manner - and also might make borderline cases into full-out radicals based on their persecution complex and (highly negative) interaction with the state.
I honestly don't think there is a good answer to this problem. Formal networks tend to be bigger threats because they have the discipline, training, tradecraft, and resources to commit far larger atrocities. But they are also much better targets because all of their organization and funding makes them highly susceptible to well-honed tools of police and intelligence organizations to identify and disrupt these organizations. Distributed threats that are, at best, only tangentially related to a central organization (and at worst acting completely alone) are lower impact but much harder to prevent. We have yet to develop good tools to address these challenges, despite some of the approaches outlined above.
As I said before, IMO the key is to recognize that the threat, while ubiquitous, is not existential in nature. At some point we as a society just need to realize that these things happen and there's not much more we can do that we aren't already doing to prevent it from happening again. It doesn't mean we give up - obviously we continue to work to prevent such attacks in the framework our society has accepted as reasonable, and obviously we mourn victims of said attacks. Obviously we should try to minimize the effect this has on how our society functions and views the Other, and part of that IMO is by putting the threat into context - not pooh-poohing it, but perhaps recognizing that it is a distressing but generally inconsequential problem. But I don't see these as fundamentally different as a challenge to society than other much greater threats, such as violent crime. Just as with violent crime in the US, there are all sorts of tactical responses to the problem that try to address the proximate issues through a combination of better police work, changes to legislation, criminal justice reform, civil society efforts, public health efforts, etc. But at some point we need to accept that without much broader strategic changes the level of violence will still remain quite high when compared to other developed societies, and that even if we worked on implementing those changes today it would take a long time to see dramatic results.
Terrorism is likely to be a form of (unacceptable) political expression for the foreseeable future. The specific challenge facing the West today is mostly rooted in a violent global ideology based on Islamist thought, yes, and there are probably some big strategic changes that could be put in place to start reducing this threat in the decades to come (though a lot of it is largely independent of what the West does). But even if we were wildly successful in both a tactical and strategic response to Islamist terrorism, it doesn't mean we would suddenly stop suffering from terrorist attacks. The destructive power available to individuals continues to increase, and there are no shortage of violent political ideologies out there: the Troubles in the UK, various far-left groups during the Cold War (and after), various far-right ideologies (e.g. the McVeighs of the world). Most people don't remember that most of the Palestinian terrorists in previous decades (e.g. back in their Munich and hijacking heyday) were avowedly secular, and often socialist in leaning. This is a continuous challenge facing our societies, albeit one that fluctuates with world events. Throwing out reasonable limits on the government like due process and free speech as a tactical response to a single, relatively low impact threat seems unwise.
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