[pbhjpbhj]

>Terrorism is merely the justification. //

You've lost sight of any balance when you start claiming that terrorism is just an idea used to justify state oversight and not an actual problem of organised harm/killing of peaceful civilians.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_July_2005_London_bombings - presumably you think that's just a huge fiction created so the government can get hold of your holiday snaps.

[gambiting]

I think one can acknowledge that terrorists and terrorist attacks are definitely a real thing that exist, and at the same time one can think that the current reaction is completely out of proportion, where the whole society is giving away its freedoms to prevent a really minor threat?

[uabstraction]

I'd happily live with the lightning strike probability of being involved in a terrorist attack than the certainty that the government will abuse this data to subvert opposition.

Trading the rights of millions of people to combat terrorism hurts more people than the terrorists could ever hope to touch.

This doesn't even factor in solutions terrorists can use to avoid surveillance, or answer the question of if all this surveillance even reduces terrorism in the first place.

[jodrellblank]

52 people killed in those bombings, eleven years ago.

More people than that died in 1 week of road accident deaths in the same year, and in 2 weeks of road accident deaths in 2013 [1]

Talking about numbers and causes of deaths in the UK, for comparison:

The UK Office of National Statistics (ONS) published that death registrations increased from 2014 to 2015, saying "There were 24,065 more deaths registered in the first three months of 2015 compared with the same period in 2014, with 11,865 of these extra deaths registered in January alone, when flu was circulating at its highest levels." - totals, 501,424 deaths in 2014 and 529,613 deaths in 2015. [2]

ONS also published: "In 2014, nearly a quarter of all deaths (23%; 116,489 out of 501,424) in England and Wales were from causes considered potentially avoidable through timely and effective healthcare or public health interventions."

and "In 2014, just under a third of deaths (32% or 1,443 out of 4,571) in children and young people aged 0 to 19 years in England and Wales were from causes considered avoidable through good quality healthcare" [3]

In the news today, NHS people are warning that there isn't enough money to provide all the services it needs to, even with the planned budget increases. [4]

There just isn't any comparison in the numbers. Terrorism is not fiction, the hugeness of terrorism is fiction - at least, it appears to be, absent any concrete details of numbers of plots discovered and averted, which we'll never get.

But if 52 dead is one of the biggest attacks in the UK in decades, how likely is it that avoided attacks would even approach 1400 children per year who die of preventable causes, let alone 11,000 people/1 year who apparently died of flu while flu vaccines exist?

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/annual-road-fatal...

[2] https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...

[3] http://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthand...

[4] http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-38019771

[pbhjpbhj]

OK and the highest rate of murders in large countries around the world is something like 30 per 100,000 .. so we should just let people commit [other] murders because they're low incidence compared to cancer say?

How do you think that murder rate will change if you don't seek to address it at all?

[jodrellblank]

We were talking specifically about terrorism in the UK, not murders in the USA.

USA should ban private gun ownership, obviously. This would do a lot for their murder rate, it would do a lot for their "people killed by toddlers" rate, and it would be a lot cheaper and less invasive than ISPs logging 300M internet access records for a year.

Prioritize things which have high impact, are easy to address, and have specific good outcomes. Not "anti terror" metrics which are vague, difficult and expensive to address, and have extremely low impact.

TSA isn't a good system. And it doesn't become a good system just because 'we have to do something about some crimes'. Sure. Do something better, and do it about more important problems.