Tag: crime and freedom

I haven’t commented at all on the de Menezes affair. From the very beginning, I felt it wasn’t worth discussing it, because 50% of what we read about it would turn out not to be true. It now looks as if that was a massive underestimate, but that just makes it all the more sensible to wait until the whole thing hits the courts and we can start to separate the facts from rumour and misinformation.

I am raising it now, because of the philosophical link with my earlier post on the activities of Neil Herron. What is at issue in Sunderland is the attitude of government to the law. When I read on Neil’s blog today:

Sunderland Council had had a meeting with NCP regarding the fact that there were no traffic orders in place for the city’s taxi ranks. This meant that issued tickets were unlawful, but rather than admitting this, they covered it up. They knew in October 2003.

It just sounded so much like the Evening Standard’s account of the cover-up of the CCTV footage from Stockwell station:

The row over the death of Jean Charles de Menezes took a dramatic turn today.

Senior tube sources have challenged police claims that there was no video footage of his final moments on the platform at Stockwell station.

They told the Evening Standard that three CCTV cameras trained on the platform were in full working order. …

The Tube sources spoke out after it emerged that police had returned tapes taken from the cameras saying: “These are no good to us. They are blank.”

The attitude that tries to cover up illegal issuing of parking tickets is the same attitude that tries to cover up murder. That’s why the parking tickets matter.

This kind of thing is what really drives me nuts.

“Mobiles are believed to have been used by the 7/7 bombers as timers in their rucksack bombs” – well, if you want to use them as timers you can buy them second hand from a car boot sale, you don’t need a network.

I would like to know what is being done about shoes. All the London terrorists wore shoes, and without shoes they would probably not have been anything like as effective. Yet one can walk into a shop in any town in Britain, and buy a pair of shoes, cash down; no ID, no questions. Don’t these people realise we’re AT WAR???

In the same way that stuff which appears in the newspapers a lot is stuff which is newsworthy, and therefore rare, human rights which get a lot of publicity are those which are argued about, and therefore marginal. The really really basic human rights, like the right to buy a pair of shoes or a telephone without being required by the government to register yourself as the owner, are so obvious that we don’t even think about them as human rights, which is a shame, because we let government get away with taking them away far more readily than we do the marginal cases.

The other element here is a kind of “aquis communitaire” of police powers. As an implementation detail of the telecoms industry, there used to be a practical necessity to provide a name and address to get use of a telephone. With the technological innovation of call rating on the switch, pay as you go became possible and therefore anonymous access to telephones. (I recall with embarrassment that when I went to a meeting with Ericsson sales-people pushing this new technology, I didn’t see what the big deal was). The police, having got used to the convenience of access to telephone records, feel that some obvious, essential police tool (which in fact would never have been given to them in the first place except by accident) has been taken away from them, and that the law must be changed to give it back. Again, because people are used to the idea that police can find out who made a phone call, they are more sympathetic to it than they would be out of the blue.

There is an obvious parallel to the attitude of copyright owners.

From time to time we hear criticism of the “crime-fighting” approach to counter-terrorism: the line is that the terrorists aren’t restrained by law, and we cannot afford to disadvantage ourselves against them.

As I mentioned previously, the flaw is that I as a civilian am at least as concerned not to be wrongly convicted of terrorism as of crime – removing the protection of the law for any action removes my certainty of not being punished without a chance to defend myself in court.

In any case, criminals aren’t restrained by law either, so what’s the difference?

Well, terrorism is a much bigger problem than crime, isn’t it? Um, isn’t it?

No, it isn’t. Check this out:

Violent death rate in Baghdad, from March 2003 to March 2005, from Iraq Body Count: 20.1 per 10,000 population. That’s 100 per 100,000 per year, and it includes the invasion itself. I can’t get accurate figures for the period after the invasion, but from the feel of the report, I would knock about a third off for “peacetime” Baghdad: say 70 per 100,000 per year

Murder rate in Washington, D.C. 69.3 per 100,000 per year.

That’s it – the capital of Iraq, the epicentre of world terrorist activity, has, as close as I can measure it, the same violent death rate as the capital of the USA with no terrorists.

OK, admittedly, Washington D.C has by far the worst murder rate of any “peaceful” city in the entire world, but compare any other city in the world to Baghdad, and terrorism is negligible.

Maybe, since car drivers kill more people than terrorists, we should suspend basic freedoms for drivers, as well.

Oh yeah, we did that.

Update: Apparently Scrivener discovered this back in January

The normally reliable Bruce Schneier weighed in on security camers on 12 July

Surveillance cameras didn’t deter the terrorist attacks in London. They didn’t stop the courthouse killing spree in Atlanta. But they’re prone to abuse. And at the end of they day they don’t reduce crime.

In New York, the authorities are doing random searches to look for explosives.

Yesterday, the London transport system was flooded with police, many of them armed.

All these policing measures are controversial – how to evaluate them?

The exceptional density of CCTV in Britain, and especially London, is a legacy of previous terrorist campaigns. I am surprised to see Schneier dismiss them so totally, as they are a cheap way of getting substantial benefit. Cheap both in money and in “social cost” – when you are out in public you can be seen, but with cameras you can be seen by people who weren’t actually there at the time. You can disguise or hide yourself, at the price of looking a bit suspicious. The images (unlike, say, number plate recognition cameras on motorways) can’t be used for broad sweeps to track people over months or check everyone for a particular behaviour. (note also many of them are in private hands – the police have to ask for them, and they need support from the public to get them). I’m absolutely opposed to compulsory ID, large-scale telecoms interception, etc., but not CCTV.

From where I sit, it looks like CCTV has been the key tool in breaking up the terrorist organisation behind the London bombings; tracing the 7th July team back to Luton and Leeds, identifying the 21st July team, and following both leads back to contacts and resources.

To be fair to Schneier, all these developments happened after he made the quotes above, but they are consistent with previous terrorist campaigns. Possibly we in Britain see counter-terrorism differently — Schneier, like Arnold Kling, is thinking in terms of preventing a one-off attack like 9/11 (which is almost impossible), while we naturally think in terms of winning an extended campaign, in which we take hits but use intelligence gathered to disrupt the enemy organisation. Even a suicide bomber, who is very hard to deter and who can’t be captured afterwards, is part of an organisation – large or small – which is more vulnerable if he is identified and traced.

Random bag-searches, on the other hand, score very badly on price-performance. The expense and social cost of searching commuters’ bags are very high, and the likelihood of them having any effect at all is quite low.

The large police presence yesterday was expensive (I would guess it cost on the order of a million pounds), and slightly unnerving.

Both of the last two are not cost-effective over a longer period, but each might make sense as a one-off or very occasional measure when the threat is judged to be high. I don’t know whether that is the plan in NY, but it probably was the plan yesterday; if two of the 21st July bombers were arrested today, then yesterday was the day they were most dangerous. It’s easy to imagine a suicide bomber succeeding in a mission under the noses of all those police, but there’s a distinct chance that they would have been able to interfere with the mission. Estimate say 2% chance of an attack on that day, 20% chance of foiling it, a million pounds is fairly reasonable.

Ian Blair – disagreeing with me among others – says the 21st July team were not the B-team or amateurs. This is a relative question, and I would not expect or wish those with the job of catching them to be as blase about them as I am, but I stick to my guns:

Any fool can kill people; the chief attribute of these guys is not skill but bloodthirstiness – but even killing a few hundred people a year would only really affect our way of life if we let it.

This lot are much less sophisticated and professional than the IRA, and most importantly, don’t have the community support the IRA had (how may IRA bombers were ever grassed up by their mothers?)

Sir Ian needs to take this as seriously as a football manager facing a lower-league team in a cup game, but for the rest of us we ought to be confident that we can beat these scum, without losing our sense of perspective.

Related entries:

• Really Suicide
• Death Throes
• B Team
• Terrorist Motivation
• 7th July Narrative
• Suicide Bombs
• Early Reflections

Tim Worstall publishes a quick email from a correspondent:

Let us assume that when people such as George Galloway say that Tony Blair is responsible for the London bombings they are correct. This must mean that the bombers were not moral agents for their actions, but simply acting in response to British and American policy. But then, let’s turn that around. For that surely means that, following 9/11, George Bush was not responsible for his actions but was simply reacting in a natural way to the attacks on America. As the scholastics said, reductio ad absurdum.

Fair point as far as it goes, but I consider it worthwhile to ask to what extent it is useful to evaluate the morality of people in other cultures. Within a culture, or perhaps more relevantly a society, there can be a common morality to which it is always useful to hold everyone — morality needs to be reliably applied, and disregarding it in some cases will weaken the society.

It is not normally practical to judge the morality of actions outside your own society, except where they are extraordinarily visible, or impinge on you. But that very selectivity takes away the main reason for applying morality, rather than expediency, as a judge of actions.

The conclusion I come to is that there are concentric spheres of morality — I hold my friends and associates to a very intrusive and detailed (“high”) standard of morality, my countrymen to a slightly lower one, foreigners inside our broader international culture, lower still, and so on.

To me, by the time you get to the alien societies that these terrorists come from (or choose to identify with), morality has become totally irrelevant. It’s not that I consider murders committed by them not to be immoral, it’s that I don’t care whether they’re moral or not — I want to stop them anyway. The level of morality, as far as I can see, that is shared across the whole world, and can be applied across the whole world, is zero. People that remote from my society, I can only influence with cruder tools than by making and setting examples — bribery and deterrence pretty much cover it.

So, from the Arab point of view, Blair in invading Iraq may have just been responding to “root causes” among their own society’s actions, but, as he is part of our society, it is necessary for us to hold his policy to moral scrutiny. And for the terrorists, vice versa.

Therefore, I don’t have a problem with Galloway et al concentrating their moral judgements (whether or not I share them) on Blair. I would be happier if they would echo my sentiments that what matters regarding very foreign cultures is to what actions we manipulate them, rather than how moral they are.

Revealingly, in our society, as well as the error of treating foreigners as moral agents, we also frequently see the error of treating our countrymen as things to manipulate. While I am satisfied at least with the form of the argument “We should not invade Iraq because that will cause Arabs to bomb us”, I reject utterly any argument of the form “We should not allow drinking after 11pm because there will be more crime”. If our countrymen commit vandalism after drinking until 3am, they should be held responsible under our shared moral code, not clumsily appeased or deterred as if they were foreign potential terrorists.

There may one day be a time when Socrates would have been correct — where people everywhere share a moral code, and we should consider an offence in Kirkuk in the same category as one in Kirkcaldy. But that is not yet.