Fighting Terrorism with Technology

Similarly, there is an optimal level of street crime, and it is not zero. Flood enough cops on the streets, eliminate civil liberties, exile anyone who commits a street crime to a barren, arctic penal camps, and street crime would virtually disappear.

It works. The streets of soviet Moscow were safer than the streets of Toronto or New York– but at what cost.

In today’s world, terrorist plots are inevitable – and not just from the Middle East but also from aggrieved groups around the world. Both Canada and the United States have suffered terrorist attacks from domestic groups, as has every major advanced nation.

Yet, successful terrorist attacks could be shut down to close to zero. It would be relatively easy. We think of the micro-electronic communication/computing revolution as liberating, and it was. The west, powered by the great economic engine of free thought, left communism behind.

But the communication revolution has a dark side. It created the very tools – and more – that George Orwell imagined in his nightmare totalitarian world of “1984.” The technology was not ready in 1984, but it is now.

In Orwell’s world, an all-seeing, all-hearing inter-active television brought Big Brother into every home. It was the central device of absolute totalitarianism. That technological is a piece of cake today.

Monitoring millions of listening and seeing devices would be labour intensive. But, technology could again help out. Scientists are just a small step away from developing artificial intelligence machines that would dramatically reduce the labour cost of electronic spying. Police could put a device in every home and every street corner, and monitor all of them in a cost effective manner.

That’s not the end of the technological possibilities. We could be tracked wherever we go by signals generated by mandatory ID cards, or even implanted chips.

A more immediate threat comes from Java-enhanced ID cards – smart cards – which could be required for certain purchases and for travel, just as internal passports were once required in the Soviet Union. Imagine the impact of being able to effectively bar someone from travel by denying them the privilege of buying tickets or vehicles.

Technology allows an even darker vision. Authorities could “outlaw” people, in the ancient sense of “outlaw” – excluded by everyone in society – by making all purchases dependent on approval from an ID card. Without such approval, someone could be effectively excluded from society.

None of this will happen overnight, but we need to be wary of any erosion of civil rights. New technology could quickly place extraordinary power, information, and the ability to analyze this information in the hands of government authorities.

Such power and knowledge is ripe with conflicts of interest, opportunities for abuse, and openings for further expansion of state powers behind the scenes, unseen by those outside the “know.” People enjoy power and, given the chance, they will expand their own. For the first time in history, governments can boast: “We have the technology – for an Orwellian state.”

Even under worst-case scenarios, terrorism will never kill as many people – or even close to as many people – as are killed driving every year. We haven’t given up the automobile because of that. We shouldn’t give up our far more important civil liberties for the far less deadly threat of terrorism.

Terrorism can be made a rare event without going to extremes, but it cannot be eliminated without going to extremes. Eliminating terrorism is no more an optimum than eliminating street crime by hiring every third citizen as a police officer or informant.

These are dangerous times, and some of that danger comes from within – not today, not tomorrow but in the long run. We must understand our great technological power, and how easy it would be to turn it against ourselves.