'modest encroachments'

[Danzig]

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_a...overnment.html

“The people who set up this program didn’t intend to be malevolent,” he said. “It’s capacity-driven. We have this enormous capacity to collect and sort data. We do this because we can, and because it’s the one area where the government can really overmatch its terrorist adversaries.”

The problem is what happens incrementally. “What now seems extraordinary is soon accepted as normal, and becomes the baseline for the future,” Jenkins said. “Over a period of time, this baseline shifts, and these new intrusions accumulate and reinforce one another—and that fundamentally changes things.”

This dynamic has taken hold in many liberal democracies during crises and wars. “In the past, at the end of the emergency, the balance has shifted back and a lot of those powers were ended,” he said. “But we’re in a situation now that doesn’t have a finite ending. If there isn’t an end, then these powers accumulate and accumulate and accumulate. This is a fundamental difference. What we put in place becomes a permanent part of the landscape.

“We are driven,” he continued, “by fears of what might happen, not by things that have happened.” He noted that since Sept. 11, 2001, there have been 42 terrorist plots in the United States. All but four of them were halted. Three of those succeeded and killed a total of 17 people. “Not that this isn’t a tragedy,” he said, “but, really, in a society that has 15–16,000 homicides every year, it isn’t a lot.