Just watched The Bourne Ultimatum with my sister and my bro-in-law. Cool movie, very well done! Of course, amidst the excellent action, its philosophical point wasn’t wasted on me. I don’t know if the original book was really about this, but it was a timely statement on the tension between security and liberty.

A Tale of Two Extremisms

One of the great challenges of our time is the defense of liberty against extremist threats, while balancing abuses resulting from too many resources and too little oversight in the instruments created or adapted for that fight. Or rather, the challenge is to defend liberty against multiple threats, multiple extremisms:

1. extremism abroad (external risk) such as radical Islam that seeks to destroy our precious free institutions by means of terrorism and other subversive methods
2. extremism at home (internal risk) in the form of overzealousness in battling the first form of extremism.

The Nature of the Evils of Internal and External Risks to Liberty

A useful assertion to make and then analyze is that likelihood or severity of external risks to liberty is inversely proportional to the amount of resources employed in their prevention and directly proportional to the amount of oversight committed to this resources. External risks are greatest when oversight is burdensome and resources are inadequate:

Likewise, the likelihood or severity of internal risks to liberty could be said to be directly proportional to the quantity of resources employed in prevention of external risks, and inversely proportional to the degree of oversight committed to those resources. Internal risks are greatest when too many resources are in the hands of people whose activities are insufficiently monitored:

Internal and external risks can be combined to create a hybrid pseudo-metric:

The obvious story of this chart is that too great of an imbalance of resources or oversight in either direction creates a risk that liberties will be lost. (Note that in all of these charts, the colored section is equal to the log of the corresponding value in the non-colored scale. This was to make it easy to apply a color scheme.)

Summary

I’m in favor of normalizing the civil liberties regime during this conflict against external extremism. That means no holding of prisoners without trials. The key reason this is critical now when it wasn’t necessarily so during the civil war, for example, is that terrorism will never go away. If we let it, it will become the perpetual wars from 1984 or the state of emergency of Caesar and Emperor Palpatine alike: a constant justification for shafting liberty.

We clearly can’t abandon intelligence-gathering efforts. These must be effective. But at the moment our oversight of those efforts is probably too low. We need to devise a system by which a significant number of eyes outside of the intelligence community knows what those folks are up to and has a reasonable means of lodging complaints against abuses.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?