- Most of the administration's paper grandly
proclaiming a "National Strategy for Homeland Security" is the kind of
innocuous bureaucratic blather one finds in a report on waste
management or wetlands maintenance. I'm not sure whether it's alarming
or reassuring to be confronted by such soporific sentences as "This is
an exceedingly complex mission that requires coordinated and focused
effort from our entire society ñ the federal government, state and
local governments, the private sector, and the American people." Or to
be told that "the challenge is to develop interconnected and
complementary systems that are reinforcing rather than duplicative and
that ensure essential requirements are met."
-
- Despite the bland bureaucratese, there is much in
the document to worry those who still cherish traditional American
liberties. And despite the fact that the House, under direction from
Majority Leader Dick Armey (is he feeling able to express whatever
quasi-libertarian impulses he has only now that he has announced his
retirement?) the re-creation of the Cuban block committee system and a
nationalized drivers license/ID card, much of what is left is even
more worrisome.
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- TRIPPING OVER TIPS
-
- It is fascinating and seldom predictable what issues
of many that should have the potential to do so will attract the
attention of enough of the great public, or of those in the media who
claim to have their finger on the public pulse, to convert a policy
question into an issue. The Terrorist Information and Prevention
System, or TIPS, announced as being in the early stages of formation
by the Justice Department, managed to make the cut. To be sure, it was
ripe with opportunities not just for snooping but for cartoons and
wise remarks about cable guys as spies and the like. And the House
under Dick Armey has announced that it is opposed to such a
systematic, federally supervised use of people who are ordinarily in
neighborhoods to spy on Americans.
-
- That doesn't mean that the issue might not
resurface, or that the system might not be quietly implemented with
less fanfare and attention. It was set to be put in place by the
Justice Department without any new legislation being required, after
all. And to some people, including some in the media, the reaction was
a tempest in a teapot. This wasn't Sovietism in America, but kind of a
glorified Neighborhood Watch program, a community-oriented kind of
thing. Opposition to it, in some eyes, was simply a sign that
knee-jerk ACLUism is still all too prevalent in the United States,
despite the obvious fact that wartime demands some attitude
adjustment.
-
- In fact, if I were the FBI, I would at least make
arrangements to talk to mail delivery people on a fairly regular
basis, preceded by an informal discussion about the kinds of things to
look for ñ and the time-wasters to avoid. Mail carriers generally know
a good deal about who is in a neighborhood on a regular, who has
relatives living with them, who is seeing big changes in the kind of
mail they get, what addresses have mail sent to pseudonyms and the
like. There might be one person on every 10 or 50 carriers' route
legitimately deserving of attention because of patterns a carrier
might notice.
-
- But it's of no concern to those genuinely seeking
intelligence on potential terrorist acts who is getting pornography,
or even who is getting magazines or mailings from wiggy political
outfits. And that's the weakness of such a program. You know that
amateur surveillers would find something suspicious in numerous
instances of harmless eccentricity.
-
- They would want to feel as if they were
contributing, so they would redouble their efforts to find something
on which they could report. An "informer" mentality would become
predominant in some of them. They would find a way to find something
suspicious about increasing numbers of people. They would begin to
look at people from the assumption that they are probably doing
something that bears watching rather than from the assumption that
they are probably ordinary, innocent Americans who are supposed to get
protection rather than harassment from government.
-
- All this would not only have a chilling effect on
freedom, it would be a tremendous waste of time and resources. By
concentrating attention on something other than legitimate threats it
might even make the success of the next terrorist attack attempt more
likely.
-
- DRIVING OVER THE CLIFF
-
- The idea of a national drivers' license or some form
of national ID, of course, has been around for a while, long enough
for a constituency opposed to the idea to have developed. (In fact,
one of the more striking aspects of the plan is how much of it has
been seen and rejected before, but has been waiting on the shelf,
ready to put forward again with a few tweaks in the language and a
different justification.) So it's not surprising that a national
drivers' license bit the dust.
-
- However, as Jefferson knew, the natural way of
things is for government to advance and liberty to retreat. However,
it's not exactly a "natural" or inexorable process built into the way
things are. Government advances because ñ as "public choice" theorists
have demonstrated rather convincingly and most non-academics know as a
matter of simple common sense ñ people in bureaucracies tend to assume
for themselves the institutional interests of the bureaucracies in
which they are ensconced, which include growing and having control of
more money and more power.
-
- So the uniform drivers' license idea will be back,
probably in the form of uniform "voluntary guidelines" for states in
terms of the kind of proof of identification required, information
collected, electronic encoding and the like. It will be sold so as to
imply that only a covert ally of terrorism could oppose these simple,
sensible, minor reforms. Eternal vigilance and all that.
-
- FUNDAMENTAL PROBLEMS
-
- The fact that the Homeland Security proposal (and it
seems telling to me that they have stuck with an Orwellian formulation
with Mussolinian overtones) is full of half-baked ideas and vague
promises to "integrate information sharing," And "integrate separate
federal response plans into a single all-discipline incident
management plan" is not the worst of it. The bureaucratic language
almost masks the more fundamental problems.
-
- The first is that "terrorism" is not a state, not an
enemy, not an adversary, not a phenomenon that can be eliminated with
proper inoculation and sanitation, like malaria. It is not a new
phenomenon; it was used in ancient times and people have been writing
books about modern terrorism since the 1960s.
-
- Terrorism is a tactic ñ a tactic used by people with
mostly political goals who find themselves at a disadvantage vis-¦-vis
their enemies who seek a dramatic way of announcing themselves or
demoralizing the other side. The Homeland Security paper, aside from a
brief mention of al Qaida and some murmuring about people trying to
acquire nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction, does
not discuss who the enemy is and why the enemy should wish to harm
anybody in the United States.
-
- This seems like more than a minor oversight. It
strikes me more as a way to expand the size, scope and power of the
government using the World Trade Center bombing as a pretext, while
being completely unserious about trying to get to the bottom of why
terrorist incidents occur, which would seem to a normal person like
the first step in trying to minimize them.
-
- Now some would argue that we face a world
revolutionary movement seeking to undermine and destroy Western
civilization, while others would argue that we face a small coterie of
fanatical Islamists who are well outside the mainstream of Islam
generally. Some would argue that the problem is a few psychologically
unbalanced people able to use political pretexts and modern technology
to be the equivalent of playground bullies, while others would argue
that capitalist or statist exploitation or poverty or inequality or
arrogant U.S. interventionism are among the root causes of the
willingness to commit terrorist acts.
-
- It would seem to make a difference, in designing a
strategy, which cause or through a combination of causes promotes the
modern terrorist phenomenon. Especially if terrorism is a tactic, not
a strategy, goal or cause, those who embrace political causes are
likely to use other tactics along the way, and to focus on terrorism
is to be unprepared for other possible tactics.
-
- What is striking about the White House document is
that there is no discussion ñ zip, zero, nada ñ of any of this. There
are terrorist enemies out there who are ruthless, and this is the
extent of official curiosity. The way to defeat them is to give the
government more power to coordinate all aspects of society, to peer
into previously private places, to assume more direct control over
more areas of human endeavor.
-
- FORGETTING THE LESSONS
-
- A huge blind spot in the report is the assumption
that the key to coordination is minutely exercised central control.
The Hayekian insight that real societal coordination arises from
thousands and millions of independent decisions taken with
consideration for but imperfect understanding of what other
independent actors are doing, creating what could be called
"spontaneous order," is completely absent.
-
- The insight is, of course, frightening to those who
have made careers of controlling others. It is also potentially
frightening to people who haven't given the matter much thought,
because freedom doesn't offer ironclad guarantees that nothing bad
will ever happen. The fact that government guarantees of safety
through central control or planning might be delivered but are seldom
valid (see September 11 for an example of government failure to
perform the minimal function even limited-government advocates would
concede as part of its legitimate job on a massive scale) is seldom
stressed or even mentioned.
-
- So our Republican leaders ("the appalling people who
govern us" as Richard Cowan of MarijuanaNews.com is fond of putting
it) use terrorism as a pretext for increasing central government
power, continuing the process of Sovietizing America ñ even
resurrecting the age-old desire to have the military perform more
essentially civilian law enforcement functions, which failed abysmally
when tried in the War on Drugs and which most military people have no
desire to do. Just more than 10 years on, they seem to have missed the
lesson that it was the highly centralized, highly "coordinated,"
highly governed system that failed, while the "chaotic," relatively
free society succeeded and triumphed.
-
- Our leaders, in both parties, not only don't
appreciate but seem downright hostile to the freedom and independence
that has made the United States the leader and sole superpower of the
world. If they have their way, the problem of American hegemony, if it
is a problem, will not trouble the world for very long, at least in
world-historical terms.
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- http://www.antiwar.com/bock/bockcol.html
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