Page 139 - Privacy in a Cyber Age Policy and Practice

BALANCING NATIONAL SECURITY AND INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS 127

thus worried that Syria has become “one of the biggest terrorist threats in
the world today.” 39
Al Qaeda has also staged a series of major prison breaks. In Iraq, mili-
tants used a combination of aggressive mortar fire, suicide bombers, and
40
an assault force to free hundreds of prisoners from two separate prisons.
More than one thousand prisoners, including some terrorist suspects,
41
escaped from a Libyan prison, and in Pakistan more than 250 inmates
42
were freed by some 150 militants. In total, more than two thousand pris-
oners, many al Qaeda-trained militants, were freed in the raids. 43
In September 2013 al Shabaab—an al Qaeda-linked terrorist organiza-
tion based in Somalia—carried out a massive, well-planned, sophisticated
attack in Nairobi, Kenya. In a three-day standoff in a shopping mall, the
group killed more than sixty-five people and left almost two hundred others
44
injured. In February 2015, al-Shabaab released a video threatening attacks
45
on U.S. and European malls. Al Qaeda and its subsidiaries showed that
they are agile and adaptable, as was revealed in their use of ink cartridges as
bombs and of “implanted” explosives that airport scanners could not detect.
Finally, terrorists have been trying to get their hands on nuclear weap-
ons. Both Russia and Pakistan have less-than-fully secured nuclear arms
46
within their borders, and Pakistan has experienced at least six serious
terrorist attempts to penetrate its nuclear facilities. 47
If the disutility of a particular event is very high, some carefully
designed security measures are justified even if the probability that the
event will occur is very low. This point requires some elaboration. People
tend to assume that if it is very unlikely that one will face a given risk,
then it is rational to ignore it. It makes little sense to carry an umbrella if
the likelihood that it will rain is one in a thousand, let alone one in ten
thousand. One reason (other than the charge of racial profiling) that the
New York court ruled that the police procedure of stop-and-frisk should
be discontinued was that the procedure resulted in the apprehension of few
48
wrongdoers. Indeed, the main justification for stop-and-frisk is that it
gets guns off the streets, but illegal guns were seized in only 0.15 percent of
49
all stop-and-frisk searches. However, this rule of thumb ignores the mag-
nitude of a risk. The larger the risk—even if the probability that it will occur
remains unchanged and very low—the more security measures it justifies.
In short, given the level of risk that terrorists pose in general, especially
if they acquire so-called weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) one way
or another, this risk justifies some enhancements to security measures in
accordance with a core element of the liberal communitarian balance. This
is especially true if the security measures are minimally intrusive or not
intrusive at all—that is, if they do not diminish the other core element,
individual rights.