iWatch
Anti-Terrorism and you
Look around. See anything suspicious? The Los Angeles Police Department’s new “iWatch” initiative would like to know.
The iWatch program is part of an effort by law enforcement officials to use the public itself as an anti-terrorism tool. Police can’t be everywhere, but we can cover missing ground by alerting citizens to the dangers of terrorism and its indicators. What should we look for? According to the iWatch website, we should report suspicious bags or packages left behind, vehicles parked near important buildings, unusual smells, people asking questions about security, building blueprints, or travel schedules, people drawing or measuring important buildings, or people purchasing potentially dangerous supplies.
Among “important places to watch” are government buildings, religious buildings, parks, sports or entertainment venues, tall buildings, mass-gatherings, schools, hotels, theaters, malls, bridges, and public transport.
This advertisement for the program has raised more than a few eyebrows.
Is this, as critics suggest, a state-sanctioned call for mass-paranoia? Are these Orwellian scare tactics? In any open liberal society, most would disapprove of the notion that we must be constantly on guard. You might say, in the spirit of Thomas Hobbes, that this kind of thing brings us worryingly close to a “state of nature,” in which people suspect, avoid, and fight, rather than trust, assimilate, and cooperate. We pay hundreds of billions of dollars to establish police and national security forces so that we may avoid constant vigilance.
But in an age where the stakes are so high, perhaps conventional methods no longer suffice. An iWatch supporter would argue that we are left with few alternatives in the face of briefcase bombs. It might be that random attacks by civilians from within can only be prevented by the collective awareness of random civilians.
We arrive at a familiar set of dilemmas in post-9/11 America. How much of our psychological comfort and individual liberty must we sacrifice in order to secure our safety? Does this kind of public awareness campaign even help to prevent terrorist attacks, or does it merely prompt thousands of false alarms and inflate security measures? And if actually does help, would it be worth the cost of public paranoia?
The iWatch program does not call for racial or religious profiling, nor does it imply the application of unreasonably searches, seizures, or invasions of privacy. Many fear, however, that these kinds of initiatives open the door to abuse. Ordinary citizens are not trained in criminal investigation, surveillance, or anti-terrorism methods, and sometimes asking them to “do their part” when state resources are short can yield messy results (remember the “Minutemen”?).
This particular campaign by the LAPD may make no significant difference in anyone’s life. From the viewpoint of political philosophy, however, each new color-coded alert system, wire-tapping program, or surveillance system is an opportunity to revisit the delicate – and dangerous – role that security plays in our psychology, our community, and our state.
-Colin
Photo by Flickr user sillygwailo under a Creative Commons Attribution license.
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- Does terror have a nationality?
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- Douthat on religious dialogue
- The drone dilemma
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