MichaelJ on Refuse to be terrorized

The purpose of terrorism is to terrorize. To sow chaos and discord and confusion -- the people they actually kill are just means to end. When we change our ways of life, post armed guards with arbitrary powers at airports, start arbitrarily confiscating laptops at the border, ask telecom companies to eavesdrop on every single call, e-mail, and Internet packet that passes through their equipment, and freak out at everything out of the ordinary, then the terrorists are getting what they want.

It's easy for politicians to call for these measures in the name of security -- who wants to make "putting the American people in danger" part of their platform? But we're doing a disservice to our traditions and ideals of liberty when we go along with this. Yes, terrorism is real, but we cannot destroy what has made us great to combat this.

We don't need to be spying on phone calls and e-mails outside of judicial oversight. We don't need an invisible, non-transparent, completely secret no-fly list for our planes. We don't need, as Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell has suggested, universal records of all Internet traffic -- that's all Internet traffic -- that passes through this country.

The United States of America is too big and too strong to suffer any real damage from terrorists. The only way that will happen is if we destroy ourselves.

Further reading:
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/08/what_the_terror.html
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2006/08/17/airport_futility/
http://action.downsizedc.org/wyc.php?cid=77 (Libertarians, whom I don't usually like, but a good point if I've ever heard one)