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Pavlovian Politics: Leaders Line Up To Call For Increased Surveillance In Aftermath of Boston Bombing

220px-2013_Boston_Marathon_aftermath_peopleBelow is my column today in USA Today on the Boston bombing and the call for new security laws and expanded surveillance. I have been doing interviews trying to caution against these calls for immediate action — a mantra that we hear after every attack no matter the cause. I am in Chicago today and was struck by how quickly Chicago Mayor Rahm Emmanuel called for more surveillance cameras in a city with one of the largest surveillance systems in the United States.

For civil libertarians, all terrorist attacks come in two equally predictable parts.

First, there is the terrorist attack itself — a sad reality of our modern life. Second, comes the inevitable explosion of politicians calling for new security measures and surveillance. We brace ourselves for this secondary blow, which generally comes before we even fully know what occurred in an attack or how it was allowed to occur.

Politicians need to be seen as actively protecting public safety and the easiest way is to add surveillance, reduce privacy and expand the security state. What they are not willing to discuss is the impossibility of detecting and deterring all attacks. The suggestion is that more security measures translate to more public safety. The fact is that even the most repressive nations with the most abusive security services, places such as China and Iran, have not been able to stop terrorist acts.

While police were still combing through the wreckage from the Boston Marathon, politicians ran to cameras to pledge more security measures and surveillance. Indeed, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel demanded more cameras in response to the Boston attack. Chicago already is one of the most surveilled cities in the United States. Emanuel’s solution: add some more. It is a perfectly Pavlovian response of politicians eager to appear as champions of public safety.

We need to resist the calls for a greater security state and put this attack into perspective. These two brothers built homemade bombs with over-the-counter pressure cookers. They placed the devices in one of the most surveilled areas of Boston with an abundance of police and cameras. There is only so much that a free nation can do to avoid such an attack. Two men walked in a crowd and put two bags down on the ground shortly before detonation.

No one is seriously questioning the value of having increased surveillance and police at major events. That was already the case with the Boston Marathon. However, privacy is dying in the United States by a thousand papercuts from countless new laws and surveillance systems. Before we plunge ahead in creating a fishbowl society of surveillance, we might want to ask whether such new measures or devices will actually make us safer or just make us appear safer.

Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro Professor of Public Interest Law at George Washington University and a member of USA TODAY’s board of contributors.

 

95 thoughts on “Pavlovian Politics: Leaders Line Up To Call For Increased Surveillance In Aftermath of Boston Bombing”

  1. Professor, we don’t really know that these two brothers committed these acts. You’re reinforcing the idea of their guilt. I don’t know how you can trust such reports, particularly being so well versed in the corruption and media manipulation rampant in our “policing” entities.

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  4. “I am not saying this is what happened here, but blow back is a hard brick in the face when it happens.” -Bruce E. Woych

    Agreed.

    ——

    “How FBI Entrapment Is Inventing ‘Terrorists’ – and Letting Bad Guys Off the Hook”

    POSTED: May 15, 2012
    By Rick Perlstein

    http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/national-affairs/how-fbi-entrapment-is-inventing-terrorists-and-letting-bad-guys-off-the-hook-20120515

    Excerpt:

    “Not a single “terrorism” indictment has been thrown out for entrapment since 9/11 – not the Liberty City goofballs supposedly planning to blow up the Sears Tower who had no weapons and refused them with offered; not the Newburgh, New York outfit whose numbers included a schizophrenic who saved his own urine in bottles. (Even the judge who sentenced them said “the government made them terrorists.”)” -Rick Perlstein

    ——-

    Let’s repeat that: “Even the judge who sentenced them said “the government made them terrorists.”

  6. anonymously posted 1, April 20, 2013 at 11:24 am

    “FBI agents interviewed bombing suspect in 2011″

    http://www.ktvq.com/news/fbi-agents-interviewed-bombing-suspect-in-2011/

    The FBI has been known to recruit, from Police Departments, Arab-American Officers to entice, as Al Quaida does, selective morons like this kid to act out terrorist crimes. The Newburgh 4, for example couldn’t spell Manhattan, much less find it. Nor could they build a bomb without mucho guidance. A similar case was just tried under great controversy in Portland OR. and there is a track record of such entanglements if not entrapments. Was these kid “predisposed” to bombing by outside agency? That’s going to be a pivotal question. Unfortunately, we can not even rule out the FBI in that regard based upon real cases in the last decade where they literally guided suspects into and through the motions of terrorism by bombing (seemingly to substantiate National Security funding and infiltration strategies in Police Forces across the country). I am not saying this is what happened here, but blow back is a hard brick in the face when it happens.

  8. I think both sides are presenting valid arguments. First, there is no expectation of privacy in a public place. Second, it is true there is a growing surveillance goal of gov’t. Third, it is not totally able to stop crime.

    One aspect I would like to convey is the burden of believing gov’t is watching (and not in the black helicopter paranoid sense) is something that is not healthy for liberty or living in a free society.

    Imagine driving on a vacation and having to constantly worry that if you go even 5 miles over the speed limit, or change lanes without signalling even when nobody is around that suddenly an electronic ticket will be assessed against you by some camera system? IT would be stressfull at the very least. Nobody should have to live with the worry of being absolutely prosecuted for any minor discretion. That is what a surveillance society would offer. IT is not that I am condoning minor traffic violations, but with greater surveillence comes harsher enforcement especially if automated , discretionless systems are created.

    I would rather see 100 ten over the limit speeders get away with it, than having a system where 100% of them are cited every time.

    Freedom must include freedom from unreasonable worry.

  11. As a point of information:

    “The Mother Of The Boston Bombing Suspects Was Arrested For Shoplifting Last Year”

    Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/the-mother-of-the-boston-bombing-suspects-reportedly-arrested-2013-4#ixzz2R13hb2Pd

    http://www.businessinsider.com/the-mother-of-the-boston-bombing-suspects-reportedly-arrested-2013-4

    A woman believed to be the mother of Boston bombing suspects Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev was arrested last year for shoplifting at a Cambridge Lord & Taylor department store, according to a police briefing in the Natick Patch.

    Here’s the June 13, 2012 report from the Natick Police:

    7:42 p.m.: Loss prevention from Lord & Taylor called to report they had detained a shoplifter. Zubeidat K. Tsarnaeva, 45, of 410 Norfolk St., Apt. 3, Cambridge, was arrested and charged with larceny over $250 (women’s clothing valued at $1,624), and two counts of malicious/wanton damage/defacement to property.

    Tsarnaeva shared an address with the two brothers suspected in the Boston Marathon bombings. (end of excerpt)

  12. This may well be the most important critical article for the decade to come: So many laws have been altered and precedents set…one must consider the possibilities: Crisis, Justification and Legitimation has mutated America into a self-induced trance…one that Suharto might have inspired rather than Kennedy!

    Consider: The State has just acquired the operational apparatus to lock citizens into their home (now termed “shelter in place” in the new jargon of Marshall Security forces); and although the political language initially sounded like it was a request, there were many reports where people were ordered into their homes. More interesting, the (consolidated News) media in NYC was interviewing people in the street and the inference involved the question of how New Yorkers should prepare for the same action…as though it were a Fait accompli. Everyone responded on cue as a normative acceptance under the current circumstances…. New Yorkers are no longer New Yorkers in this Brave New World.

    Is it too cynical to wonder how the term SEQUESTER is suddenly the political flavor of the month? No doubt “lock down” will be rephrased in the future to underscore its merits over its implications for dis-empowering citizens and restricting movement under politically pronounced necessity.

    Consider: Unified Quest 2011http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232/?video=1653093678&play=1 [and] http://www.theblaze.com/stories/pentagon-has-been-war-gaming-for-economic-disaster-since-early-09/ ; where “Army officials met outside Washington…. for a thought experiment about the implications of a large-scale economic breakdown that would force the Army to absorb significant funding cuts and prepare the service for an increased role in keeping domestic order amid civil unrest,” InsideDefense.com reported on the recent games.
    The article says officials chose the global financial collapse scenario because “it was deemed a plausible course of events given the current global security environment.”
    “In such a future,” it reports, “the United States would be broke, causing a domino effect that would push economies across the globe into chaos.”

    Take a good careful look at the entire North East Coast and the process that just took place. Granted we need to be ever vigilant and ready to escalate any forces to meet all challenges and threats…but, unless we find out more about the immediate areal threat…this was a man hunt turned into a war zone.

  14. Bettykath, My heart bleeds for the mom. She’s simply wrong. However, she gets a pass from me.

  15. He will be Mirandized. However, the DOJ is invoking the exigent circumstances clause that allows them to question him only about any other bombs or ongoing plots/co-conspirators. That exception seems reasonable to me. Once that questioning is completed, he must be Mirandized. I know many here disgree and I respect that disagreement.

    My wife is a great partner to watch this stuff on tv. CNN brought in the august Jeffrey Toobin in to explain the Federal process after the arrest. He pissed on his leg getting it almost ENTIRELY wrong. Some producer must have even known he was talking out of his ass because Anderson Cooper abruptly cut him off and they didn’t return. We had a good laugh on a serious day.

  17. Timely and Essential caution; The incident was catastrophic and deeply wounds the cultural fabric, but to alter the nature of our constituional democracy would be an historic misappropriation of infinitely greater impact on our Nation and no doubt the future of the world. While it is understandable that we stand and applaud the relentless pursuit of the ruthless and distorted perpetrators of this vicious mass atrocity, we must recognize that crisis drive reactionary opportunism never rests in the arena of power and the political pursuit of evermore control. A structural precedent has been set that has profound ramifications if left unquestioned. Marshall law and rule and the military lock-down of society is something that bleeds history with tragic episodes of politcal abuse of power. The media frenzy that accompanied the massive “swarming” technique was sensationalized and filled with military jargon (“intelligence” has now replaced “information” at the speculatively enhanced news coverage). While the up side of this historic response appears to be all united and glossy in a mass consensus of proud American defiance, a careful review objectively must conclude that given other circumstances of the potential events possible in our future, it was confusion and massive display of para-military (and military) occupation of an entire major city with “Black Hawk” combat helicopters flying overhead, and announcements that the President was sitting in the (war-room) “situation” room conferencing with a committee of appointees and assessing as well as monitoring the situation as if it were a combat zone overseas. One reporter commented that everyone from the Secret Service to volunteer NYC police were on duty in the swarming currents of high tech military-like saturation.

    To my knowledge…there were no drones…. (this time…).

  18. April 16, 2013 was the anniversay of this famous quote that is as relevant today as it was at the time it was written:

    “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

    Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963
    US black civil rights leader & clergyman (1929 – 1968)

  20. Why Should I Care That No One’s Reading Dzhokhar Tsarnaev His Miranda Rights?

    When the law gets bent out of shape for him, it’s easier to bend out of shape for the rest of us.

    By Emily Bazelon|Posted Friday, April 19, 2013, at 11:29 PM

    http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2013/04/dzhokhar_tsarnaev_and_miranda_rights_the_public_safety_exception_and_terrorism.html

    Excerpt:

    Who gets to make this determination? The FBI, in consultation with DoJ, if possible. In other words, the police and the prosecutors, with no one to check their power.

    The New York Times published the Justice Department’s memo in March 2011. The Supreme Court has yet to consider this hole the Obama administration has torn in Miranda. In fact, no court has, as far as I can tell.

    And so the FBI will surely ask 19-year-old Tsarnaev anything it sees fit. Not just what law enforcement needs to know to prevent a terrorist threat and keep the public safe but anything else it deemed related to “valuable and timely intelligence.” Couldn’t that be just about anything about Tsarnaev’s life, or his family, given that his alleged accomplice was his older brother (killed in a shootout with police)? There won’t be a public uproar. Whatever the FBI learns will be secret: We won’t know how far the interrogation went. And besides, no one is crying over the rights of the young man who is accused of killing innocent people, helping his brother set off bombs that were loaded to maim, and terrorizing Boston Thursday night and Friday. But the next time you read about an abusive interrogation, or a wrongful conviction that resulted from a false confession, think about why we have Miranda in the first place. It’s to stop law enforcement authorities from committing abuses. Because when they can make their own rules, sometime, somewhere, they inevitably will.

    ——-

    Carmen Ortiz. Ring any bells?

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