The price of freedom is the possibility of crime, and if you’re unwilling to pay that price, don’t be surprised when your freedom is taken away from you.
In a free country, it’s impossible to prevent a mad lunatic from getting a knife and stabbing people on a train, you might prevent some lunatics but you can’t prevent them all. The best you can hope for is that rescue comes fast enough before anything serious occurs.
But sometimes that doesn’t happen. People die at the hands of psychos and ISIS supporters, because freedom is applied to everyone, the law-abiding and the criminals, the peace-lovers and loonies, the innocent and the guilty. That’s the price we pay for being able to go out without fear of government intervention, for having the law protect our privacy and property from the government eaves-dropping, for being innocent till proven guilty. That’s the price of freedom.
If you’re unwilling to pay that, then, don’t expect to live in a free country. A
country where the police have absolute rights to search your house, your smart phone and your physical self without a warrant or due cause will make it difficult for terrorist to operate, it also makes us all vulnerable to government bullying. Nobody in North Korea is afraid of ISIS, because the government has such a strangle hold on privacy that no terrorist organization could mount any operation in such a country.
But do you think the people there would rather be safe–or free?
North Korea is a country that prevents you from watching south korean dramas, and I’m sure there’s very little rape and pillaging going on, primarily because the government is doing most of the crime.
Look at East Germany, do you think a country that has lived under the stasi would rather be safe under stasi like surveillance, or free? You can’t have it both ways, if you want freedom you have to tolerate some crime, that is the price you pay.
And for the most part, everyone prefers freedom. Because freedom is worth the price, even if that price is paid in the blood of innocent people.
Everyone knows I’m a fan of the SR-71 blackbird, it’s the worlds fastest and highest flying plane. But do you know why the Soviets never built anything similar?
The Americans had to build the black-bird because they couldn’t operate spies within the Soviet Union the same way the Russians could operate in the US. They had to necessarily build a plane that could perform reconnaissance of Soviet missile installations. The Soviets never needed such missions, because they had boots on the ground, a presumed weakness in the free-ish society that was America.
But even at that disadvantage, who won the cold war?
Freedom always wins, and we can’t pawn our freedom because some pseudo-state assholes in black leotards pose a threat to us. We can’t just draft freedom encroaching laws just because we feel like it. Freedom has to be defended, even from ourselves, and we need to ensure that we give the freedom we inherited from our parents to our children.
The National Security Council act is pawning our freedom to the terrorist. If our senate passes it, the terrorist would have won.