On its face the idea seems reasonable. I can imagine hiring a firm to look after some aspect of my security. To do its job the firm may need some information about me that I don’t readily give out. It’s up to me to decide if I like the trade-off. Nothing wrong there. In a freed market, firms would compete for my business, and competition would pressure firms to ask only for information required for  their services. As a result, a minimum amount of information would be requested. If I thought even that was too much, I would be free to choose to look after my security myself. If I did business with a firm that violated the terms of our contract, I would have recourse. At the very least I could terminate the relationship and strike up another or none at all.

In other words, in the freed market I would find the right “balance” for myself, and you would do the same. One size wouldn’t be deemed to fit all. The market would cater to people with a range of security/privacy concerns, striking the “balance” differently for different people. That’s as it should be.

Actually, we can say that there would be no trade-off between privacy and security at all, because the information would be voluntarily disclosed by each individual on mutually acceptable terms. Under those circumstances, it wouldn’t be right to call what the firm does an “intrusion.”

But that sort of situation is not what Barack Obama, Mike Rogers, Peter King, and their ilk mean when they tell us that “we” need to find the right balance between security and privacy. They mean they will dictate to us what the alleged balance will be. We will have no real say in the matter, and they can be counted on to find the balance on the “security” side of the spectrum as suits their interests. That’s how these things work. (See “NSA broke privacy rules thousands of times per year, audit finds.”) Unlike in a freed market, what the government does is intrusive, because it is done without our consent and often without our knowledge. (I hope no one will say that voting or continuing to live in the United States constitutes consent to invasions of privacy.)

Of course, our rulers can’t really set things to the security side of the spectrum because the game is rigged. When we give up privacy — or, rather, when our rulers take it — we don’t get security in return; we get a more intrusive state, which means we get more insecurity. Roderick Long made a similar point on his blog, The Austro-Athenian Empire:

In the wake of the recent NSA revelations, there’s increased talk about the need to “balance” freedom against security. I even see people recycling Larry Niven’s law that freedom + security = a constant.

Nonsense. What we want is not to be attacked or coercively interfered with — by anyone, be they our own government, other nations’ governments, or private actors. Would you call that freedom? or would you call it security?

You can’t trade off freedom against security because they’re exactly the same thing.

Likewise, where the state is concerned, you can’t trade off privacy against security becausethey’re exactly the same thing. Anyone who reads dystopian novels knows that government access to personal information about people serves to inhibit and control them. That’s insecurity.

Now it will no doubt be said that while in one respect we are more insecure when “our” government spies on us (the scare quotes are to indicate that I think the U.S. government is an occupying power), in return we gain security against threats from others, say, al-Qaeda. But I see no prima facie case for favoring official domestic threats over freelance foreign threats. I’m reminded of what Mel Gibson’s character, Benjamin Martin, says in The Patriot: “Would you tell me please, Mr. Howard, why should I trade one tyrant three thousand miles away for three thousand tyrants one mile away? An elected legislature can trample a man’s rights as easily as a king can.”

Some foreigners might want to come here and kill Americans, but the U.S. government has been no slouch in that department. How many Americans who were sent by “their” government to fight in foreign wars never came back? How many came back with their lives shattered? The number dwarfs the number of casualties from terrorism.

Throw in the fact that some foreigners want to kill Americans only because Obama’s government (like George W. Bush’s and others before it) is killing them, and the phony nature of this alleged protection is clear.

Obama & Co. say they welcome a public debate about calibrating the trade-off between security and privacy. No, they don’t. They wouldn’t even be going through the motions had it not been for the heroic whistleblower Edward Snowden, whom they are determined to lock away for life — if they catch him. A true debate is the last thing they want. What they want is a simulated debate in order to quiet public concern about spying.

As Conor Friedersdorf of the Atlantic points out, Obama’s new directive creating the Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies is charged with “accounting for other policy considerations, such as the risk of unauthorized disclosure and our need to maintain the public trust.” Unlike his public statement, the official directive says nothing about preventing violations of privacy and related abuses.

Friedersdorf comments,

What happened to those goals? The closest the Monday directive comes to them is an instruction to remember “our need to maintain the public trust” as one of many policy considerations.

Forget whether abuses are happening, or whether privacy rights are in fact being protected. [Director of National Intelligence James] Clapper need only probe the perception of trust. Remember, this is a man with a demonstrated willingness to tell lies under oath when he decides doing so serves the greater good.

We should reject the phony debate, the phony trade-off, and the phony “balance” that will be struck. There is a fundamental conflict of interest between the American people and the U.S. government. The sooner we learn that, the safer we’ll be.

We did receive a couple of comments and questions about the Tor Project, what is it and how it works.

Wendy Seltzer – what is the tor project?

How governments have tried to block Tor.

Thank you again for your support. The state is damage, we will find a route around it.

Daremblum, after praising Senators Lugar and Dodd for their promotion of “national security and democracy” in Latin America over the years, warned of the threat of “radical populism, which has taken root in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Nicaragua.” Perhaps most alarmingly, Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez has formed an alliance with Iran, “the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism.” The Nicaraguan government, having “returned to its old ways,” occupies a Costa Rican river island in defiance of an OAS resolution.

Chavez’s alliance with Iran, in particular, is “the biggest threat to hemispheric stability since the Cold War.” The Chavez regime poses a “serious threat to U.S. security interests.”

Wow! Sounds like a lot of bizarro-world gibberish, right? But if we break it down and translate it a bit at a time, we can actually distill some sense from it.

First, we have to remember that in Securityspeak, “democracy” doesn’t mean what it does in English. You probably think of democracy as meaningful control by ordinary people of the decisions that affect their daily lives. The false cognate Securityspeak term “democracy” sounds the same, but can cause great confusion. It actually refers to a society in which the system of power is disguised by the existence of periodic electoral rituals in which the public chooses between a number of candidates, all selected from the same ruling class. These candidates may argue a lot, but it’s all about the 20% or so of secondary issues on which the different factions of the ruling class are divided among themselves. The 80% of primary issues, on which the ruling class agrees — issues that define the basic structure of power — never come up for debate.

When the structure of power itself comes up for debate — when people start talking about, say, the concentrated ownership of land, or export-oriented development policy — it’s a sign that “democracy” is in danger of being replaced by “radical populism.” That’s a matter for the CIA or Marines to deal with. The whole point of Securityspeak’s version of “democracy” is to safeguard the fundamental structure of power by distracting the population with the illusion of choice.

It’s also important to keep in mind that in Securityspeak, the label “state sponsor of terrorism” — by definition — cannot include the United States. That’s because actions by the Sole Superpower and Hegemon to promote “democracy” cannot — by definition — be terroristic. Actions to promote “radical populism,” on the other hand, can.

As in Newspeak, actions that are considered laudable when practiced by one side are reprehensible when practiced by the other. Take, for example, the Nicaraguan action of occupying Costa Rican territory in defiance of an OAS resolution. That same action — defying an OAS resolution — was entirely commendable when practised by the U.S. (i.e., the mining of Managua harbor as a means of combating “radical populists” thirty years ago).

Consider labeling the Iran-Venezuela alliance the “biggest threat to hemispheric stability since the Cold War.” You’re probably thinking he put that qualifier in there so U.S. actions during the Cold War wouldn’t count. After all the U.S. overthrew Guatemala’s democratic government in 1954, installing a military regime that terrorized the country for decades. It backed Central American death squads that killed hundreds of thousands of people, and (starting with the overthrow of Brazil’s government in the 1960s and proceeding with Kissinger’s Operation Condor in the 1970s) put military dictators in power in most of South America.

But those things wouldn’t count anyway. When the United States overthrows government after government, with domino chains of military coups putting pro-U.S. dictatorships in power throughout most of the hemisphere, that’s protecting stability, not threatening it. It’s all for the sake of defeating that “radical populism,” which is by definition a threat to stability.

And in Securityspeak, saying a Venezuela-Iran military alliance is a “threat” doesn’t mean they might attack the U.S. and invade its territory. It means they might be able to fight back when the U.S. attacks them — that the U.S. might not be able to defeat them and put a stop to the treat of “radical populism.” In other words, they might get away with taking land away from oligarchs and patrons and distributing it to the people who actually work it, and their economies might start serving the interests of the people who live there instead of Norteamericano corporations. And that would be bad.

Similarly, “national security” refers not, as you might expect in English, to the security of the American people. It refers to the security of the American state and the coalition of class interests that controls it. Economic populism is indeed a threat to “national security” in this sense. American economic elites are the heart of one of the opposing sides in the age-old conflict between those who own the world, and those whose blood and sweat enriches those who own the world. When a functionary of the American state like Daremblum refers to a “threat to national security,” he means a threat to the ability of the hemisphere’s owning classes to extract wealth from the blood and sweat of the rest of us.

There — that wasn’t so hard, was it?

El código de colores de “nivel de amenaza” que publica el Departamento de Seguridad Interna, y que fue introducido tras los atentados del 11 de septiembre, se ajusta a la definición de Mencken como un guante: de hecho, su introducción fue contestada en muchos casos a través de esa cita. Ergo, no debería sorprender a nadie que en las elecciones de 2004, la Administración Bush presionara al secretario general de “Seguridad Interna”, el señor Tom Ridge, para usar el sistema de “nivel de amenaza” para influir en el resultado electoral.

Ridge ha publicado en sus memorias que logró resistir esa presión, pero existe cierta evidencia de que el sistema fue usado indebidamente: el “nivel de amenaza” subió inmediatamente después de la convención nacional del Partido Demócrata, solapando así la cobertura que podría habersele dado a esa convención. Más tarde se “descubrió” que la subida se basaba en informes de “inteligencia” desfasados.

Aunque este sistema particular y sus abusos son un tema de actualidad, en verdad son parte de una regla general, una norma que se ha aplicado a través de nuestra historia. La clase política, aunque tiene la fuerza bruta y la coacción como sus recursos definitivos, prefiere lograr apoyos en sus gobernados… para lo cual el miedo es su principal herramienta. Es mucho más fácil “liderar” a un pueblo que “pida protección” que machacar una resistencia masiva por la fuerza. La resistencia en el primer caso será mucho menor, y el bulto de la mayoría traerá al rebaño a los resistentes potenciales.

En verdad, tendríamos que ir hasta los proyectos de caminos y canales, o la compra de Luisiana, para encontrar un gran proyecto estadounidense que no haya sido justificado a través del miedo. La elección de Panamá como el sitio de localización de un canal que conectara el Pacífico y el Atlántico (una vieja idea del Imperio Español, que temía la competencia portuguesa en el “Nuevo Mundo”) se basó en una campaña de terror, usando como coartada falsos informes sobre un volcán que había entrado en erupción, y podría volver a hacerlo, en Nicaragua, una de las alternativas propuestas.

Todo cambia para volver a ser lo mismo. Fíjense en cualquier iniciativa política importante, y verán que la retórica de partidarios y detractores, estén dentro o fuera de la clase política, rezuma miedo. La reforma sanitaria propuesta por la administración actual se vende como la respuesta a “la crisis”, no como una oportunidad de mejorar la atención sanitaria. Por su parte, la oposición al proyecto se centra en sus aspectos más amenazadores (los “comités de muerte” y el racionamiento) en vez de en las propuestas alternativas para mejorar la sanidad.

Si la fuerza es el último recurso del gobierno, el miedo es su principal justificación, y lo ha sido por lo menos desde la época de Hobbes, que justificaba al Estado como una fuerza pacificadora, puesto que él creía, contra la evidencia que proclamaba lo contrario, que su ausencia llevaría a la bellum omnium contra omnes (“guerra de todos contra todos”).

¿Beneficia a la humanidad el vivir y actuar en un estado perpetuo y permanente de miedo? La respuesta a esa pregunta es la misma sobre si necesitamos, o debemos tolerar la existencia continuada, del Estado.

Artículo original publicado por Thomas L. Knapp el 21 de agosto 2009.

Traducido del inglés por Joaquín Padilla Rivero.

Like anybody else, I want to be as safe as I can reasonably expect. I certainly don’t want my loved ones to suffer a terrorist attack. But I don’t believe that sacrificing liberty makes anyone safer. Compare the TSA-style measures’ effectiveness in thwarting terrorist plots to the effectiveness of good intelligence, thorough investigation, and the initiative of intended victims.

Government priorities mean that security checkpoints are not mainly looking out for bombs or terrorists. Checkpoint personnel are looking for people with immigration violations, drugs the government doesn’t approve of, weapons carried without government approval, and whatever else will boost arrest stats and revenue. The traveler is confronted by militarized authoritarians who aren’t totally focused on passenger safety.

Security could function on an amicable relationship, since the peaceable traveler and security officer should both be concerned with the safety of the transportation system. But police state procedures foster an antagonistic relationship as the traveler worries about what he might have forgotten to take out of his bag and the officer expects total submission from the traveler he’s investigating. The harm done to communication and trust leaves us more vulnerable to attack. Security from unreasonable searches goes hand in hand with security from attackers.

If terrorists want to take away our freedom, the government is certainly helping them get what they want. But terrorism is primarily a (completely immoral) response to government policies. People don’t like the US government telling them what to do, supporting regimes that oppress them, or killing civilians while trying to stamp out resistance. The security state apparatus is a government solution to a problem that government helped create in the first place. Not surprisingly, the government answer is to deploy more force and insist on more control over the public. If you’re a hammer, everyone else looks like nails.

It should be clear that the loss of freedom doesn’t really make us safer. But we pay for the security state in other ways too. People are made late, travel time is increased and inconvenience leads to marginally less travel. As a result the economy becomes less dynamic. If people avoid public transportation there will be more highway traffic and more car accidents. Increased spending on fuel and road repair comes at the expense of things people would otherwise desire more.

But someone benefits. President Eisenhower warned that the influence of the military-industrial complex could be disastrous to liberty if not held in check by an aware and knowledgeable citizenry. Today Americans suffer under that influence, expanded into a broader security-industrial complex. There’s big money in scanners, prisons, and tools for low-level security personnel. Bureaucrats often view expansion of their department as a key for career advancement. Not surprisingly, a company that manufactures body image scanners invested heavily in lobbying efforts. It looks like their investments are paying off, and Americans are footing the bill. This does not stimulate the economy. It instead forcibly shifts spending away from the productive goods and services of the voluntary sector into the pockets of those favored by the state.

When someone asks how much liberty you’re willing to trade for security, you should ask why they assume there is a tradeoff. What we’re purchasing with our liberty, privacy and wealth is not security. It is a society of submission. True security is founded on liberty at home and abroad.

President Obama is going to India with some corporate leaders. And he’s bringing an armada with him.

The Press Trust of India reports that jets, helicopters, more than 40 vehicles, and 34 US Warships, including an aircraft carrier, will be in the hands of the president’s guard force (“34 warships sent from US for Obama visit,” November 4). Over 800 hotel rooms have been booked for the occasion. American security personnel will number in the hundreds and Indian forces will be certainly be involved as well.

From the state’s point of view Obama ought to have protection on his visit. He’s the commander in chief of the most powerful military on the planet and, perhaps more importantly, a high-profile symbol of state power. But is it really a good thing for any person to have this kind of status in the first place?

While business executives often take serious security measures, the president is one person who is too important to mix among the people. The president is not quite an emperor residing in the Forbidden City, but his surroundings of armed forces and sanitized environments further separate him from society, leaving him mainly the company of elites he does business with.

But the Obama Armada is also a projection of state power. Just as a teleconference would not enable the same involvement with foreign leaders as a physical visit, a more modest security arrangement would send a different signal than the forces actually used. The world must know that America is a nation at war, and while the country is going through hard times the armed wing of the government can still make its presence felt in a big way. The president’s security will not be left to foreigners.

Who foots the bill for this political overkill? The taxpayers of the US and India will of course pay for a celebrated gathering of elites who are supposed to make decisions for the rest of us. The government will protect the important people by taking from you. And maybe we little people can make up for the environmental impact of 34 warships by living in the dark and driving less.

And how are Americans protected? Isn’t Obama in charge of the military that keeps us safe? The problem here is that the government is made of people who naturally protect their own interests first, and this does not always match the interests of the public in general. For example, aggressive foreign policies or occupations help breed resentment that sometimes explodes as terrorist attacks against innocent civilians. But in order to secure a position of global political leadership (i.e. protect the global influence of successful political leaders), the occupations must continue and deals must be cut with oppressive regimes. Those making the decisions command armored vehicles and warships, and those who are ordered to live by the decisions are allowed to support whichever faction of the elite seems to have the most in common with them.

Obama’s celebrity visit to India brings political power, military power, economic power, and cultural power. While contests among the powerful may vary in their friendliness or hostility, a frequently overriding belief is that it is better to share power than to lose it. Naturally power relations must remain in place, and if we little people knew our place we wouldn’t complain about how the powerful secure their place.

Yet another example is enforcement of so-called “intellectual property” law (which is not a legitimate form of property at all and is in fact utterly repugnant to the principles of a genuinely freed market).

As before, we take the scholarship of USAF Col. Jennifer Hesterman as a paradigmatic case.  Col. Hesterman treats “intellectual property crime” as an important component of the phenomenon she studies:  the intersection of transnational crime with the funding of terror networks.  In her monograph “Transnational Crime and the Criminal-Terrorist Network,” she defines “intellectual property crime” as “the counterfeiting and pirating of goods that are then manufactured and sold for profit without the consent of the patent or trademark holder.”  IPC, she says, “is more lucrative than drug trafficking, is less pursued by law-enforcement agencies, and the penalties if caught and prosecuted are far less severe than those for other criminal activities.”

On her personal blog, Counter Terror Forum, she celebrates the increased dedication of federal law enforcement resources to combating IPC.

“IPC,” she writes, “is a lucrative criminal activity with low initial investment and high financial returns, possibly even higher than drug trafficking. For example, a Nintendo game costs $0.20 to duplicate and is resold for $20 at flea markets on online, thus recognizing enormous profit for the criminals.”  Hence “IPC… generates unbelievable amount of profit.” She quotes figures estimating counterfeit goods trade at $450 billion annually, resulting in US business losses of $200 to $250 billion.

I believe she’s getting it backwards.  As with the drug trade, the main reason “IPC” is so lucrative is IP law itself.  The real “intellectual property crime” is that Nintendo, with the help of coercive enforcement of monopoly privileges by the state, is able to charge an enormous sum of money for a game whose marginal cost of reproduction is twenty cents.  The seller of “pirated” goods or knockoffs makes money by arbitrage:  they compete by eliminating a major portion of Nintendo’s markup, but can still (thanks to competing with Nintendo’s price) charge a significant — if lesser — markup.  As with the drug laws, if copyright law were eliminated, both Nintendo’s markup and the markup on the knockoff goods would evaporate, and the game would sell for marginal production cost.

So if the U.S. national security state really wants to eliminate black market funding of terrorism, all it has to do is repeal the drug laws and “intellectual property” law.  But when it comes to this, the U.S. government, Disney and Al Qaeda are all on the same side.

In any case, the primary focus of U.S. copyright enforcement — and particularly recent increases in enforcement efforts — is against digital “piracy,” on behalf of such parties as the RIAA and MPAA.  Such “piracy” is not lucrative at all — in fact the copyrighted work is downloaded free of charge.  So the claim that crackdowns on file-sharing will result in less money for terror networks just doesn’t meet the smell test.

However transparently self-serving the “counter-terror” rationale, though, the national security state is indeed ramping up its enforcement efforts against (primarily digital) “intellectual property crime.”  Following a “piracy” summit in December at which Joe Biden (formerly Senator from MBNA and now Vice President from Disney) compared digital file-sharing to a “smash-and-grab” at Tiffany’s, in February Attorney General Holder announced a new “IP task force” at the Justice Department.  And last month Biden announced the dedication of fifty FBI agents to anti-piracy enforcement, while Homeland Security boasted (from Disney’s offices!) of raids on nine movie-sharing sites.

Al Qaeda must be shaking in their boots.

By denying everyone the essential liberty to control one’s life independently, by controlling everything and everybody, the Soviet Union did not emancipate the poor from the prevailing oppressive economic structures; it instead turned its whole population into one of proletarians.

The same was true in Hungary. The government of the People’s Republic of Hungary imposed the paternalist Soviet principles upon its people; it terrorized them and drowned them in state propaganda, day and night. The Hungarian economy suffered greatly from state socialist mismanagement. All of this incited bad sentiments toward the government and finally led to the revolt.

Today, we face similar situations all over the world. Countries are invaded for “humanitarian” reasons and people are oppressed “for their own good.” The result is always the same: death and destruction; mental and material poverty.

The civil war in Iraq, the trials of Turkish dissidents, the famines in North Korea, the oppression of the Tibetans, the Chechen Wars — the list seems to be endless. These are all examples of the eternal war between power and liberty. Increases in power and decreases in liberty are too often justified by “the common good”; the results are always devastating.

It does not stop here. Every one of us experiences it every day: more and more laws are forced upon us; more and more aspects of our private lives are regulated and under observation; more and more money is taken from us. All of this is supposed to be “in our own interest”, “for the economy”, or “for our own security.” Yet, such actions never accomplish what they are supposed to, whatever good intentions might have motivated them. Wars breed more wars; laws increase crime; central planning provokes poverty; control creates chaos.

Thus, we have to ask ourselves: if a great decrease in freedom was not what the Hungarians needed and wanted, how can anything that goes against our will be in our interest? How can any decrease in freedom be for our own good? Everyone’s interest is made up by the individual’s values and passions. But how can values be forced upon us; how can our passions be controlled?

It is time to wake up. It is time to realize that anything less than pure liberty is not to be tolerated, that everyone knows best what is good for him- or herself. Everything the State does is not only a danger to our liberty, but also to our prosperity and to peace and security. Liberty is nothing to be exchanged for peace, prosperity and security, it is their precondition. This was true for the Hungarians in 1956 and it is still true today.

Thus, only a truly voluntary society and a completely free market could solve the problems humanity faces today: poverty, war, oppression, and exploitation. It is time to take up the spirit of the Hungarian demonstrators. But not only are foreign powers unworthy of ruling us, nobody should rule anyone. Man is an end in himself and should not be subject to anyone’s decisions.

Such a demand, of course, is not utopian. Liberty is not utopian; it is an attitude, a commitment. It is an expansion of the principle most of us hold dear in our private lives, respecting the other’s right to life and property. We must apply this principle to “our” politicians and the military. The rules that govern our lives should govern theirs as well.

So, everyone who is committed to liberty, who realizes that “liberty is the mother, not the daughter of order”, should join the fight against any expansion of the government and demand the absolute and final abolition of the State and the disempowerment of its “private” allies. Everyone should fight the disastrous idea of aggression through the proxy of government as a legitimate and effective means to achieve ends.