Outline:
1st
The problem
2nd
Conflict between security and freedom
3rd
Threat to both goals differs again and again
4th
The uncertainty character of decisions
5th
The role of learning
1st
The problem
Politicians
repeatedly emphasize that there could be no absolute security, that even if all
possible precautions have been taken to ward off terrorist attacks, terrorist
acts can still take place.
But
whenever terrorist attacks have actually occurred, the first thing people do is
to look for the guilty authorities who did not prevent this attack and they
loudly proclaim that security precautions must be improved. After these
attacks, it is then repeatedly insinuated that this act could have been
prevented if only the responsible authorities had done their duty.
In
reality, however, this attitude does not correspond to the conditions. A sober
analysis should very often have come to the conclusion that the current
legislation would be quite sufficient to ward off terrorist acts in the best
possible way, that there are furthermore precisely such cases in which
terrorist acts can nevertheless take place and succeed despite careful and
correct procedures by the responsible authorities, or that often the contexts
underlying these attacks have developed in such a way that one must first
develop new concepts for defence against terrorist acts.
However,
in a first act, this requires a fundamental analysis of the causes and this
takes time, a lot of time. It does not lead us to a better result if we think
that the additional necessary measures must be taken immediately after a
terrorist act, actionism remains mostly unsuccessful
on the one side and reduces the civil liberties of citizens unnecessarily strongly
on the other.
Basically,
there is a conflict between the goals of personal freedom of citizens and
security in the sense that the closer you get to one goal, the further you move
away from the other. Thus, there is always a need for compromise, it is by no
means the case that moving closer to one of these two goals always represents
progress. The macroeconomic benefit that arises from the realisation of one
goal is always bought by the fact that this increase in benefit for one goal
almost always corresponds to a decrease in benefit, i.e. damage, for the other
goal.
And
since it cannot be assumed that the optimum between the two goals always lies
in the same place, but rather requires a different compromise depending on the
initial situation, it will be important that a review takes place again and
again in relatively short periods of time in order to determine which
compromise currently achieves the optimum.
The
threat of terrorism is certainly one of the most important and dangerous
threats to security today, but it is important to draw attention to the fact
that the security of individuals can also be threatened due to completely
different circumstances.
Thus,
the accident at the nuclear power plant in Fukushima also posed a threat to the
safety of citizens, just as traffic in general poses a decisive threat to the
safety of citizens every year. UN statistics show that even today, several
million people worldwide are killed in traffic accidents every year. Thus, it
is not only terrorist acts that threaten human lives; security is a very
central, widespread issue in the society of today.
In
essence, insecurity is always a consequence of the freedom of the individual.
Being free means being able to determine one's own activities to a large extent,
and everyone who can exercise this freedom also has the possibility to go
against the generally applicable laws. Without freedom, there would be a
significantly lower threat to security, but the quality of life of each
individual would also be enormously restricted if the omnipotent state were to
decree all the activities of individuals.
2nd
Conflict between security and freedom
Let
us first take a closer look at the relationship between the goal of freedom and
the goal of security. The goal of freedom is that individuals can determine
their own personal affairs, that no one else, not even the state, determines
these goals, even if the state acts with meritorious intent and mistakenly
assumes that the decisions of individuals are mostly wrong.
However,
granting freedom does not mean that no limitations of any kind may be imposed
on the actions of the individual. The very concept of freedom for everybody
results in necessary limitations, since there is always the danger that the
individual, in the pursuit of his or her goals of freedom, will cause harm to
another and restrict the freedom of the other. If one understands the demand
for individual freedom as freedom for all and not only for the stronger in each
case, freedom always finds its limitation where it hinders the freedom of
another.
This
means that the freedom of the individual must be limited wherever there is a
danger that precisely in the exercise of individual freedom, the freedom of
others will be threatened. But a limitation has a completely different
character, depending on whether limits are given to individual actions only
because they would otherwise unjustifiably restrict the freedom of another, or
whether the individual is denied the right to determine for himself what is
good or less good for him. Only in the latter case freedom would be threatened
in an essential way.
What
means the second goal to be addressed here, the goal of security? Reasonable
action presupposes that the individual - before he makes his decision - is
clear about what goal he is pursuing and by what means he can realise this goal
in the best possible way, i.e. within the given possibilities.
In
order to be able to answer this question, the individual has to start from a
hypothesis that determines the way in which a certain goal can be achieved.
Now, our knowledge of empirical relationships is never complete and this means
that we can never be sure whether the theoretically assumed connection has
actually been correctly recognised and this further means that we can never
know whether we are therefore actually approaching our goal.
We
therefore observe with our senses that a certain event x is always followed by
a certain other event y, and with the help of our mind we form the hypothesis
that y would be caused by x.
However,
the empirical correlations are almost never such simple that a certain event x
triggers another event y in every case. Most of the time, the correlations are
somewhat more complicated, namely that x only causes y if further conditions
are fulfilled on one side and if, under certain circumstances, another set of
circumstances is just not present on the other side.
Now,
we can never be sure whether we have really recognised all these additional
conditions already; there is no flawless method to clearly determine whether
all additional conditions have already been recognised. We can only recognise,
more or less purely by chance, by empirically testing a hypothesis again and
again, that the correlation we are investigating also depends on one or more
further additional conditions.
In
reality, it happens time and again that a hypothesis was initially assumed to
be confirmed and that it then had to be recognised much later that this
correlation does not apply generally at all, as initially assumed, but only if
further conditions are present.
Furthermore,
we have to take into account that we do not live in a closed world, but in an
open one, and this means that new variables always appear from the outside,
which can have the consequence that the previously assumed correlations do not
apply any longer. This applies to social changes, which can occur, for example,
because our own economy has entered into relations with other economies.
On
the other hand, our Earth is also changing due to cosmic changes in the
universe, e.g. crops are being destroyed more frequently than before due to the
destruction of the ozone layer.
This
means that here on earth, with all our decisions, we can never be absolutely sure
that the intended effects will always actually occur (question of the
efficiency of our actions) and that additional undesirable and previously
unknown side effects (question of the secondary effects of our actions) will
occur.
Security
is thus a very general, recurring problem of all our actions, it does not only
occur when our lives are threatened by terrorists. The danger that arises, for
example, in the event of a nuclear power plant meltdown or the danger of being
injured in traffic or at work are equally uncertainties to which we are exposed
on a daily basis.
The
extent of this risk can vary in two ways. On the one hand, the damage can be
enormous if this event occurs, but on the other hand it is also a question of
how often such an unexpected event occurs. A nuclear power plant accident, for
example, is certainly a relatively rare event, at least if all known safety
precautions had been taken, but if an accident does occur, which can never be
completely avoided, the damage is enormous.
The
uncertainties that arise in traffic, on the other hand, are characterised by
the fact that they occur very frequently; the UN report speaks of several
million deaths a year due to road traffic worldwide. Seen for the whole, it is
even relatively certain that we have to expect this large number of fatalities
in traffic, only for the individual road user this event is very uncertain.
What
is decisive in our context is that the extent of the uncertainty that always
arises depends decisively on how much freedom is left to the individual. If we
allow each individual not only to determine for himself how he uses his income,
but also give him the right to correct his decisions at any time, then this
necessarily leads to the fact that the supplier of the individual goods can
never be completely sure how many goods he can also sell.
It
may be true that in a numerically large group of customers the individual
decisions can balance each other out to a large extent. If one person may
suddenly limit the consumption of a certain good, there may be another who
demands more of this good. Nevertheless, there is always the danger that in
certain periods the demand will fall decisively short of the supply of an
entrepreneur.
Quite
different would be the security situation if a state administrative authority
were to determine which goods the individual citizens should receive. Here, the
state is both consumer and producer in one. As a consumer, it determines which
goods are demanded; as a producer, it decides which goods are produced. If it
makes rational decisions, it cannot be surprised by arbitrary changes in
consumption, since it is the state itself that determines demand.
Even
if the state is by no means in a position to eliminate all uncertainties - even
in a state planned economy there are still technically induced production
losses - one can nevertheless say that in a state planned economy the level of
uncertainty is significantly lower than in a market economy.
However,
this reduction in uncertainty in a state planned economy comes at a high price.
It reduces the freedom of citizens and, since individuals differ in which
consumer goods bring them the greatest possible benefit for a given income, the
reduction in the degree of freedom also results in a reduction in the welfare
of citizens.
The
terrorist danger also has to do with the degree of freedom of citizens. Of
course, it can be assumed that if citizens are under total surveillance, the
danger of terrorist actions will be somewhat lower. Thus, here too, there is a
conflict between the freedom of the individual and the security that is to be
realised. But it would be wrong to think that a state of absolute security
could ever be achieved by means of more surveillance.
3rd Threat
to both goals differs again and again
Let
us now take a closer look at the conflict of goals between freedom and
security. Since both goals, individual freedom and the need for security, are
essential goals without which no satisfactory overall result can be achieved,
it is always necessary to aim for a compromise between these two goals; it can
never be the goal to realise one of these two goals as far as possible.
Where
exactly this compromise lies, i.e. to what extent a certain degree of
uncertainty must remain in order to preserve individual freedom and to what
extent, on the other hand, a certain restriction of individual freedom is
indispensable in order to safeguard people, is now not at all a foregone
conclusion; above all, it is true that a compromise that was found in the past
and was considered quite fair at the time is by no means still desirable today
to the same extent and in every case.
The
threat posed by terrorists, for example, is not always given; there are
peaceful times and also peaceful areas in which there is almost no threat at
all from terrorists, and there are other times and geographical areas in which
terrorist acts are committed on a large scale almost every day, or at least
must be feared.
Since
every decision in favour of general pacification means at the same time a
renouncement of the realisation of individual freedom, a correction of the
respective bundle of measures is always indispensable over and over again. It
cannot be justified that a particularly high restriction of individual freedom
rights, which may have been deemed necessary in the immediate past, is now - in
case the extent of the terrorist threat has diminished - maintained.
Now
it must be realised that the enforcement of this generally valid and actually
self-evident principle causes great difficulties in reality. Laws and
regulations are enacted in a very lengthy and demanding process and their
effect is based precisely on the fact that they apply for a longer period of
time.
Normally,
they do not expire by themselves one day and it is therefore not to be expected
that these laws and regulations will disappear again by themselves when the
danger, for the sake of which they were introduced in the past, has passed or
at least is significantly reduced.
This
demand, that laws- restricting individual freedom- only remain valid as long as
there is a manifest threat to individual security, can only be fulfilled if
these laws are limited in time already when they are passed, or if they are
reviewed at regular intervals for their continued justification. Such a
procedure is necessary because no one can know in advance how long a concrete
threat from terrorists will last.
But
what about technically induced uncertainties? Here, too, we have to assume that
we can never know the technical correlations by 100 per cent. We make
observations with our senses and draw conclusions from these observations with
the help of our intellect.
However,
as shown above, these relationships are almost never such simple as that a
certain event x is followed by another event y. Rather, a set of further
conditions is required for this event to occur also and there is no
scientifically impeccable procedure that tells us whether we already know all
of these secondary conditions.
Even
if we succeeded in knowing all the constraints that are valid today, we would
always have to fear that new constraints will appear in the future, since we do
not live in a closed but in an open world in which we must always reckon with
new variables appearing from outside that change the correlation between two
variables.
Thus,
also here, it must always be reckoned with the fact that the conflict between
liberty rights and the preservation of security described above changes in such
a way that an optimum is reached with a different compromise.
If,
for example, suddenly a not disarmed time detonator from the Second World War
is found in the vicinity of a heavily populated district, it is necessary to
evacuate the residents, as safety in this district can no longer be guaranteed.
But here again, safety is restored after the bomb has been defused and of
course the restrictions can and must then again be removed.
4th The
uncertainty character of decisions
Let
us now turn to the problem of insecurity in terrorist attacks in particular.
Irrespective of the fact that almost every attempt to increase security entails
a restriction of individual freedom, additional insecurity arises in connection
with the defence against terrorist acts.
In
a concrete individual case, we can in fact never assume that we or the security
authorities (above all the police and the secret services) are aware of the
concrete danger in all its details. There are several reasons for this.
The
security authorities learn about imminent terrorist acts through information
from domestic and foreign intelligence services, possibly also from private
individuals. It is by no means certain that all threats are known to these
authorities or that the data known to the foreign authorities is also passed on
correctly. Nobody is perfect, so that even with the good will of the relevant
authorities, the data to be passed on is by no means always recognised
correctly or completely.
In
the case of hints from security services of states that are hostile to our
state, it must even be feared that false information is deliberately passed on
in order to harm our country.
Even
more important, however, is the fact that terrorist acts are planned by people who
have free will and can therefore decide at any time not to carry out the
planned terrorist act or to carry it out at a different time or place.
In
this context, there is even the danger that the terrorists also deliberately
disseminate false information in order to put the security services on the
wrong track and thus increase the probability of success of their own actions.
But
precisely this fact has the consequence that one cannot assume that the
terrorist danger would be averted, as long as only everyone from the security
authorities would fulfil their task correctly and that therefore, even with
completely correct behaviour on the part of the public servants, every danger
could be recognised in time and therefore also be prevented.
Such
a view is wrong already from the outset for a variety of reasons. Firstly, we
had already pointed out that at the time before the terrorist act, the
information - reaching the security authorities - is uncertain, the truth of
this information is unknown for the reasons mentioned above.
The
number of information is still so large that it is not even possible to follow
up all the clues for capacity reasons, one has to select and there is no
criterion as to which of this information is correct and which is false.
It
also corresponds to human nature that no human being always does one hundred
percent of what he or she should actually do. Take the example of traffic
again. If all road users did the right thing every second and if, in addition,
clear right-of-way guidelines were issued by the state, no accidents should
actually occur.
The
reason why there are still accidents again and again is that no human being
does what he or she should do every second. A car driver may observe the road
ahead 99.99% of the time and therefore be ready to meet a danger that arises,
but one second of inattention can be enough for the car driver to fail to
recognise in time, for example, a deer suddenly bursting out of the forest, and
this in turn can result in him neither being able to brake in time nor being
able to swerve in such a way as to avoid an accident.
Whether
the security authorities will be successful in warding off the terrorists
depends not only on how capable they themselves are and what information they
have received, but also on the skills of the individual terrorists.
If
you like, you can compare the relations between terrorists and security
agencies to a game, of course not a harmless one, but a highly bloody one, and
this means that the question of which of the two groups emerges victorious is
always a question of the relative skills of both groups.
No
matter how competent the individual security officials may be and how
conscientiously they perform their duties, if the terrorists are even more
competent than the security officials in the technical sense of the word, then
the terrorists will still win this game.
It
would be completely wrong and naive to think that the distribution of technical
abilities is regulated in such a way that the most able people are located with
the state authorities and the least able with the criminals. If we only pick
out one arbitrarily created group of people, then we must always assume that
among this group there are also - in the technical sense - people who are less
talented.
Of
course, the state can try to attract the most talented people. But since we
live in a free society, the state is dependent on these best people also being
willing to work for the state. And since this willingness also depends on the
rewards that are offered, one must fear that the terrorist groups often have
the better rewards at their disposal.
However,
it is not only the superiority in these technical skills that determines the
success of the terrorists; the moral level of both groups often plays an even
greater role. Those who act more ruthlessly and recognise fewer moral
limitations clearly have the better cards here.
Actually,
one must assume that state officials are always at a disadvantage, since they
are required to strictly observe the law, while the terrorists distinguish
themselves by recognising almost no moral boundaries.
For
example, it is known that terrorists often deliberately entrench themselves in
hospitals and residential areas, counting on the state authorities to avoid an
immediate attack on these areas, since they are required to spare the sick
staying in hospitals and the residents, especially women and children.
The
aim of the terrorists, at least nowadays, is also to deliberately attack the population,
especially the weakest, namely women and children. In complete contrast to
this, the Bader-Meinhof gang usually directed their
attacks against the representatives of this state, e.g. against the Federal
Prosecutor General Siegfried Buback or against the
President of the Employers' Association Hanns Martin Schleyer.
The
aim of the terrorists acting today, on the other hand, is not so much to hit
the powerful of this society, but the population, in order to spread fear and
insecurity among the population in this way and thus force the politicians to
restrict the freedom of the citizens more and more and thus to give up the free
state.
And
since we thus cannot assume that the state authorities are in every case
superior to the opponents of a free society, it must unfortunately be expected
that terrorist acts will always succeed because of the superiority of these
groups, even when the officials of the security authorities do everything
conceivable to avert the terrorist dangers.
But
if this is the case, it is also wrong to attack the officials of these
authorities in general for their failure. In this context, it is often
forgotten that the assessment of a terrorist act after it has been committed
can be completely different from the assessment before the act.
It
should be emphasised once again that state officials often neither have
sufficient information nor are they aware of the truthfulness of this
information. Often, due to the lack of resources, the officials cannot take all
the necessary measures, they have to choose and due to the general uncertainty
about the success of the individual measures, they sometimes take measures that
in retrospect, after the truth of the individual information is known, prove to
be wrong.
Finally,
it is also true for civil servants that no human being is perfect, that it is
in the nature of humans to make mistakes and this means that these enumerated
shortcomings must of course be taken into account when assessing civil
servants.
Indeed,
if one bases the assessment after the act on the information that is known only
then, there is a danger that the acting officials will not only be unjustly
attacked, but that the civil service will be weakened in the long run, firstly
because the most capable candidates for these posts will turn to other
professional fields, leaving the less capable. On the other hand, the unjustly
attacked civil servants will naturally try to avoid these accusations and it is
then not surprising if one or the other of these civil servants tries to
conceal the true events.
This
situation does not mean, of course, that for these reasons the behaviour of the
authorities following the thwarting terrorist acts should not be critically
examined and that misconduct by state actors should not be denounced and, if
necessary, prosecuted, but only that this assessment should be factual and that
only actual, grossly negligent misconduct should be denounced.
Here,
there is less danger of wrong judgements being made on a formal level, i.e. in
courts and in parliamentary committees of enquiry, but there is very much a
danger in public, especially in social media, but also in some public media,
that unjustified prejudgements take place.
5th The
role of learning
The
success of surveillance measures is often questionable for another reason. We
do not live in a stationary but in a dynamic world and this means that measures
that were considered efficient at a certain point in time are no longer
successful in the future due to the social changes that have occurred in the
meantime, so that a large part of the measures introduced only improve the
security situation for a short period of time.
And
the terrorists also learn from their mistakes, and also the terrorists can
continue to develop and try out new technologies which once again improve the
success of their actions. We compared the relations between state security
agencies and terrorists to a game, and in a game the move of one partner can
indeed get the other partner into trouble. However, the latter will look for
new, previously unknown ways out, so that his situation is sometimes worsened
only temporarily.
Let
us take an example. Let us assume that the government passes a law allowing
state security agencies to wiretap mobile phones. Surely one can assume that
immediately afterwards activities of terrorists can be tracked better, that
under certain circumstances suspicious actions and agreements among terrorists
become known and that also when certain persons are to be checked, the habits
of these persons are known to the state security authorities and that therefore
these suspicious persons can also be confronted and arrested more quickly.
However,
these are only the short-term consequences. They occur because the terrorists
are surprised by these state measures. Of course, there are other ways for the
terrorists to communicate with each other, they don't have to use the mobile
phone, they can also switch off the mobile phone whenever they go to other
places, so that the location of the persons concerned can no longer be tracked.
Certainly,
terrorists will explore new ways to escape surveillance. While the state, when
it learns of these new ways, can control them, too. But the crucial thing is
that it takes time for the state authorities to learn of these new ways in the
first place, it further takes time for appropriate defensive measures to be
researched, and it finally takes time then for a law to be passed that allows
this new kind of surveillance to the state.
This
means that the state will always lag behind developments, so that there will
always be a certain amount of time left for terrorists to be spared from these
prosecutions. The conditions for terrorist activities do indeed become somewhat
more difficult, they have to incur more costs overall and keep inventing new
methods in order to be able to carry out their attacks with success.
The
chances of success of the terrorists are then primarily a question of what
financial resources the terrorists have at their disposal and this also
indicates the way in which a strategy to fight the terrorists can be
successful: First and foremost, care must be taken to deprive the terrorists of
their financial resources.
There
is also the danger that the terrorists will use the surveillance methods
initiated by the state as an opportunity to steer the surveillance in the wrong
direction, e.g. by deliberately taking the mobile phones of the persons under
surveillance to areas where precisely no activities are planned or will take
place. In this case, state resources are increasingly used for inappropriate
routes of investigation and the state may under certain circumstances even be
weakened in the fight against terrorists.
Furthermore,
there is a danger that a further centralisation of terrorist actions will take place.
This is because the surveillance measures described above weaken the individual
terrorist cells to varying degrees. There are also very different power
relations within the terrorist cells. Extensive interception particularly
affects the smaller cells, which have fewer possibilities to escape
interception. The success of the terrorist groups can then only be ensured if
the terrorists also move together and act in concert.
But
not only the long-term success of further wiretapping measures is questionable.
We must also assume that the leeway of citizens will be further restricted in
this way. It is easy to assume that only terrorists and general criminals are
affected by the surveillance measures and that citizens who are not guilty of
anything remain untouched.
This
idea is only partially correct. A blameless citizen who is not guilty of
anything and has nothing to do with the terrorists in particular, can very well
come under the attention of state investigators only because he was in the
wrong place at the wrong time.
Thus,
for example, investigators may become aware that a random citizen visits an
acquaintance who lives in the same house where the conspiratorial meeting takes
place, but has nothing to do with the terrorists and may not even be aware that
terrorists have also taken up residence in the same house, at the very house
and time when a conspiratorial meeting of some terrorists took place.
The
fact that some people nevertheless come into the field of vision of the
investigators and have to undergo initial prosecution is due to the manner in
which the state authorities can only investigate in the first place. In a first
step, all persons in the environment of a suspected person who had the
opportunity to come into contact with the presumed criminal are checked;
furthermore, it is checked which persons may have had a motive to help the
terrorists due to their previous life history.
It
is clear that with this (only possible) approach, a large number of people are
initially wrongly targeted by the investigators, and only at the end of this
process will a few people remain for whom the suspicion has been substantiated.
Of
course, as a rule, innocent people are not likely to be convicted in this way;
they usually fall outside the grid long before they are charged, or if they are
unjustly charged, they are acquitted for lack of evidence.
Nevertheless,
these individuals have suffered non-material damage due to the initial
investigation. The fact that an individual is visited by the police and the accused
is taken away does not go unnoticed by the public and even if this person is
eventually acquitted, negative accusations remain in the neighbourhood and in
public according to the motto 'where there's smoke, there's fire', which can
cause immense damage in everyday life as well as especially in one's
profession.
Thus,
let us keep in mind: we can neither assume that it will ever be possible to
guarantee absolute security nor will any increase in surveillance always lead
to an improved security situation. Whether an increase in surveillance is
desirable in an individual case always depends on the extent of the damage
caused by the impairment of individual freedom.