Security & Liberty: a thought experiment

I really like this image.  It neatly sums up my feelings about the current political climate with a minimalist, visceral approach.  But at the same time there’s an implicit premise here which can be used to justify the current regime.  It’s best summed up by one Ed Giorgio:

“We have a saying in this business: ‘Privacy and security are a zero-sum game.’”

[Sources indicate that after the interview Giorgio proceeded to savagely rape a howler monkey before defecating on the Bill of Rights.]

With monsters like this in government, we’re lucky to have clear thinkers like security expert Bruce Schneier out there spreading the gospel.  As he has frequently said:

Security and privacy are not opposite ends of a seesaw; you don’t have to accept less of one to get more of the other… Too many wrongly characterize the debate as “security versus privacy.” The real choice is liberty versus control… If privacy and security really were a zero-sum game, we would have seen mass immigration into the former East Germany and modern-day China. While it’s true that police states like those have less street crime, no one argues that their citizens are fundamentally more secure.

Most people won’t just accept a radical statement like that.  After all, the government’s told us that it’s a dichotomous choice, and why would they lie to us?  So with that in mind I’ve designed a little thought experiment to demonstrate why liberty is positively correlated with security, it’s not the inverse.

I seem to remember reading a while back about how Great Britain was going to mandate GPS trackers in your car so that the police could monitor you, and send out automated tickets any time you exceeded the speed limit (I believe there was even talk of installing throttle-governors connected to the GPS).  I can’t seem to find anything confirming that, but with the way things are already going over in Oceania, it wouldn’t be out of place.

So for sake of argument let’s just posit some form of draconian speed-limit enforcement, rather than any specific mechanism.

The immediate effect of this would be fewer speeders; this will probably make the roads safer, and at the very least it won’t make them more dangerous.  So far so good.

But what about the secondary effects of all of this?  Right off the bat the number of violations is going to skyrocket.  A subset of the people fined will no longer be able to afford their increased insurance rates, and this in turn will lead to a greater portion of drivers without insurance…

And then you have the people who will figure out how to avoid being noticed; whether they do it by cutting the GPS out of their car, or by installing some sort of electronic box under the dashboard is irrelevent.  As Ian Malcolm once said, “Nature finds a way.” Now, of course this process of avoiding detection will be made illegal, so these drivers, just like the uninsured, will be Riding Dirty.

With the current system most people speed, but they almost always take responsibility when they get into an accident; even ignoring the moral motivations, it’s generally wiser to take a hit to your insurance premiums than risking a charge of “Fleeing the Scene of a Crime.” But if you’re riding dirty – if a simple fender bender can result in criminal charges – your moral principles are going to suffer some extraordinary pressures.

Thanks to these laws you’re neither safe, nor secure.

Now let’s consider things in the opposite direction.  Here in North America we’re used to being ambushed; speed traps, holiday blitzes, and artificially-low speed limits are the norm – you don’t often get patrol cars pulling you over, its the predations of the traffic cops you have to worry about.  Their measure of success is quantity, not quality of tickets issued.

So let’s say that, instead, the police looked at how safe driving conditions were throughout the city. “There have been a lot of speed-related accidents on Route 9,” or “I was driving along Highway 2, and it seemed to be a little to chaotic to me.” Then, instead of setting up secret ambushes, the cops openly announce where they’re going to ticket, and why.  Allow the drivers to understand what’s going on, and make them an active participant; an ally, not an enemy.  After all, aren’t we all invested in road safety?

When you take away freedoms, when your country goes from being Governed to being Ruled, you wind up alienating a segment of the population.  Censor Hate Speech and you drive it underground, turning its advocates into martyrs; ban drugs and the producers/distributors become criminals, who resort to violence instead of the courts; outlaw guns and only outlaws will have them.  By signing a bill into law, you turn ordinary moral, gainfully employed citizens into anti-state rebels.

Minimum wage proponents love to hold up examples of low-income people, now able to afford X, as proof that their law worked; economists are hard pressed to list all the jobs that weren’t created because the owners couldn’t afford to pay so much for employees.  The Security/Liberty equation is similarly difficult, since the anti-Freedom advocates only look at the easily quantifiable side of the equation – the number of tickets and violations recorded.  But in this case the devil isn’t in the details – it’s in the statistics: “Look at how many drunk drivers our Checkstops have pulled over – what do you mean their net effect has been to increase drunk driving deaths?  Do you seriously expect me to believe that banning guns increases violent crime?”

Not to mention that I’ve only covered the immediate side effects of these laws – who knows what the cops’ll do with this power five years down the road?  You know that the old saying “Give them an inch, and they’ll take a mile”?  It goes double for government.