This is why it is so hard for politicians to go against hawkish positions.
Security is both a feeling and a reality, and they're different. You can feel secure even though you're not, and you can be secure even though you don't feel it. There are two different concepts mapped onto the same word - the English language isn't working very well for us here - and it can be hard to know which one we're talking about when we use the word.
The key here is whether we notice. The feeling and reality of security tend to converge when we take notice, and diverge when we don't. People notice when 1) there are enough positive and negative examples to draw a conclusion, and 2) there isn't too much emotion clouding the issue.
Both elements are important. If someone tries to convince us to spend money on a new type of home burglar alarm, we as society will know pretty quickly if he's got a clever security device or if he's a charlatan; we can monitor crime rates. But if that same person advocates a new national antiterrorism system, and there weren't any terrorist attacks before it was implemented, and there weren't any after it was implemented, how do we know if his system was effective?
...People are more likely to realistically assess these incidents if they don't contradict preconceived notions about how the world works. For example: It's obvious that a wall keeps people out, so arguing against building a wall across America's southern border to keep illegal immigrants out is harder to do.
The other thing that matters is agenda. There are lots of people, politicians, companies and so on who deliberately try to manipulate your feeling of security for their own gain. They try to cause fear. They invent threats. They take minor threats and make them major. And when they talk about rare risks with only a few incidents to base an assessment on - terrorism is the big example here - they are more likely to succeed.
One reason FDR focused on freedom from fear is because fear creates an opening for authoritarian behavior. And while I don't buy the hope message of Obama, I can see a good argument that it is driving at the same concept. Schneier doesn't see any obvious antidote to the problem of security theater and our vulnerability to making good decisions.
I think there are two. One, it is critical to point out that politicians have an incentive to centralize power in the name of security so as to create a general warinesss around anything done by the government in the name of national security. Abuse of this concept is immensely dangerous, and actually cuts across the political spectrum. Two, it is critical that we be situated in community spaces so we can collectively make and discuss security decisions. TV is a fear-based device, the internet allows for more rational conversations. To take a simple example, local broadcasters often do stories about online child predators and rarely discuss global warming. The internet has relatively much more discussion of climate change and much less discussion of child predators, probably because a healthy social context allows better decision-making.
It is quite important, and I don't know how to solve this puzzle, to counter the strategy from elites that anyone who suspects malfeasance on the part of authorities is a conspiracy theorist unless they have clear proof. We place a lot of trust in government and corporate leaders, and they have the resources to keep earning that trust if they choose. As citizens we should move to a situation where we look at hundreds of billions of dollars of unaccountable national security spending or massive paydays for corporate leaders and require justification, rather than the problematic posture we seem to be in right now where every corrupt deed must be proven eighteen different ways before Congress will even choose to do nothing about it.
As we move forward into a governing posture, building a consensus towards openness, with its attending vulnerability from fear-mongering politicians and elites, is going to require a good amount of work. We must change the way we relate to power. The good news is that blogging or creating content to be shared with others is empowering and allows this shift to happen, and more and more people are doing this every day. In some ways, Obama straddles the line and reaches into this community of content-creators, while still retaining a lot of old politics support (hence his acceptance of the war on terror frame). The impetus to change our way of thinking and reclaim our republic from the security theater experts and con men is going to have to come from us. And it is.
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