Kurzweil: The nature of these terrorist attacks and the organization behind it puts civil liberties in general at odds with legitimate state interests in surveillance and control. The entire basis of our law-enforcement system, and indeed much of our thinking about security, is based on an assumption that people are motivated to preserve their own lives and well-being. That is the logic behind all of our strategies from law enforcement on the local level to mutual assured destruction on the world stage. But a foe that values the destruction of both its enemy and itself is not amenable to this line of attack.
Lessig: This is a critically important insight. The real problem we face is not slowness in technological innovation. The real problem is slowness in legal and civil rights innovation in response to the technological change. It was not until the late 1960s that the Supreme Court finally held that wiretapping was regulated by the Fourth Amendment.
The reason for this failing has lots to do with the way lawyers think. We are reactive traditionalists. It is hard to think creatively. But if we used the same kind of innovative creativity that our framers used in crafting our government, we could craft creative balances between technological capabilities and human weakness. Technologies can't be guaranteed to be used only for the good. But technologies placed within well-crafted institutional structures can be made more likely safe than not.
Diffie: [Disclosure: I am in the protection business.]
In my view the natural trade-off is a broad public right to inquire [ie, listen to the radio, point infrared sensors around, make video recordings, analyze the data from the sensors with computers, etc.] and the right of the individual to employ protection from surveillance [cryptography, insulated walls, wearing a mask, using pseudonyms, etc.]. This presumes a commercial right to make and sell products that support the individual's desire for privacy.
I read in the documents of the revolutionary era a recognition of a broad right of the individual to act on self-perceived interest and generally not to be required to cooperate with someone else's view of those interests. This seems to me roughly what freedom means. The trends in contemporary society that most bother me are not so much government use of wiretaps or video cameras but such things as the requirement that cash transactions over US$10,000 be reported to the IRS, that I must show identification to travel, etc.
Severo Ornstein: I think there is a genuine tension between the desire for security and for privacy/individual freedom. This is just an instance of the more general conflict between the needs and desires of the individual and those of the larger society.
Today's technology permits small numbers of people to wreak a disproportionate amount of havoc. [Without jet airplanes, the hijackers couldn't have done much damage with their box cutters.] I suspect the debate about where to draw the security line will probably be ongoing and will depend on how much damage occurs in the future: The more damage, the tighter we'll circle the wagons.
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