Last week’s terrorist attack in Boston was an emotional play in four acts. First came grief, then anger, then the morbid excitement of a manhunt. The last act was jubilation: When police officers zeroed in on Dzokhar Tsarnaev and took him into custody, they were applauded by a huge cheering Watertown crowd that had gathered to watch. It was essentially an anti-terrorism street party, with the police being celebrated as heroes.
Americans are famously skeptical of the police state: Many Second Amendment advocates even cite the possibility of righteous rebellion as an argument in support of maintaining private paramilitary weapon inventories. But it turns out that all it takes to make this libertarian spirit melt away is a pair of murderous idiots with some pressure cookers.
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The whole episode presents a case study in why the campaign to protect our civil liberties from the surveillance state seems doomed. In times of peace, civil libertarians who oppose ubiquitous closed-circuit TV cameras, Internet snooping and other privacy infringements are lucky to fight for a draw. But even that rearguard battle is lost as soon as bombs start exploding. Britons once fretted over the proliferation of CCTV cameras in their country — but then came the 2005 transit bombings, and the complaints ebbed. In the United States, the same will be true in the aftermath of Boston, where CCTV footage played an important role in identifying the Marathon-bombing suspects. Full story...
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Americans are famously skeptical of the police state: Many Second Amendment advocates even cite the possibility of righteous rebellion as an argument in support of maintaining private paramilitary weapon inventories. But it turns out that all it takes to make this libertarian spirit melt away is a pair of murderous idiots with some pressure cookers.
(...)
The whole episode presents a case study in why the campaign to protect our civil liberties from the surveillance state seems doomed. In times of peace, civil libertarians who oppose ubiquitous closed-circuit TV cameras, Internet snooping and other privacy infringements are lucky to fight for a draw. But even that rearguard battle is lost as soon as bombs start exploding. Britons once fretted over the proliferation of CCTV cameras in their country — but then came the 2005 transit bombings, and the complaints ebbed. In the United States, the same will be true in the aftermath of Boston, where CCTV footage played an important role in identifying the Marathon-bombing suspects. Full story...
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