Did anyone else feel an increasing sense of paranoia while reading Pasquale’s The Black Box Society? I always viewed privacy “rights” we are granted as citizens as ways we can prevent a tyrannical government. In the simplest sense, I compare these rights to how parents gradually grant their kids more and more freedom. As they are given more freedom, the children are able to develop and maintain their own identities. I felt that these rights are essential to a healthy democracy because then citizens can operate without fear of being oppressed by those in the government. But Pasquale enlightens me on how the government and financial institutions have used the importance of this right as a smokescreen to hide their self-serving agenda. In America, we feel that the right to privacy is so inherent that to question it is ridiculous and destructive. The defense for privacy regarding individuals is justified whereas large corporations hiding behind this same defense seems inappropriate.
The worst aspect about this smokescreen is that as individuals we experience this privacy on an extremely limited basis. Especially in the blooming age of technology, we can and are tracked easier than ever. We are told that we as part of the Fourth Amendment, we are guaranteed certain rights to privacy but the Internet has made it incredibly easy for the government to circumvent the spirit of this amendment. The government constantly monitors millions and millions of people under the guise of searching for terrorists who wish to attack America. While I’m sure that some of the 1.2 billion dollars dedicated to funding counter-terrorism is actually being used to counter terrorism, a considerable amount has been used both intentionally and unintentionally to spy on our own citizens. Only in special and rare instances do these violations of our rights get brought to attention while banks and the government have continued to grow their ability to hide secrets, even after events such as the financial collapse in 2007-2008.
The Black Box Society made me start wondering not only if the funding towards counter-terrorism was worth it, but also if counter-terrorism itself has actually increased terrorism. Quite counter intuitive, I know. But I was thinking that maybe America’s obsession with national defense has painted a larger target on its head which encourages more radical attacks to undermine this sense of safety. It’s important to remember that the most powerful aspect of a terrorist attack usually isn’t the explosion of the bomb; it is the fear that the act produces. So in a way, if the US tries to install every thinkable precaution to prevent attacks and then the terrorists still manage to land a successful attack, that is scarier for us than if our government hadn’t gone through such drastic measures to try and prevent the attack. Anyways, while looking to see if my counter-terrorism leading to an increase in terrorism had any merit, I stumbled across a pretty unsettling article that you should 100% read here. To summarize it, the FBI basically hires informants not to infiltrate terrorist groups so that they can be dismantled, but rather they look for people who have potential to become terrorists and then literally develop them into terrorists and then arrest them once the targets act on the beliefs that the informants have instilled in them. The press focuses massive amounts of coverage on the “victories” of the FBI once they have captured the targets that they had actually developed into terrorists. This makes the people feel safe and that counter-terrorism tactics of the US are effective. In turn, the government leverages these misled sentiments into more power in the form of secrecy and funding for themselves. This is unsettling because this is not just a series of isolated incidents; in the past decade, all but four of domestic terrorist plots that law enforcement agencies thwarted were initiated by an “informant-provocateur” controlled by the FBI. Food for thought.