[mrweasel]

Individual privacy rights isn't actually dangerous. It's neither a person secrets or even their beliefs that are dangerous, it's their actions.

Focusing on solving a murder and being willing to scarifies the privacy of everyone, even the people that are in no real danger is foolish. The billions of dollars spend on spying on regular people are mostly wasted. Taking the same money and directing them towards prevention may yield better results. I'm not talking about the kind of prevention where the FBI pick up some terrorist just before he's about to bomb something. I'm talking about the kind where we avoid that people become terrorists.

If companies and individuals make it impossible for the governments to spy on people infeasible we might get more focus on prevention.

Also, strip away the privacy of the murderer and you strip away the privacy for all of us, including those who fight oppressive regimes and dictatorships. That might not be a sensible tradeoff.

[XorNot]

Here's the problem: you can't prevent everything. So at the end of the day you still have to actually catch and stop some terrorists, and even in a perfect world it's likely you have to still catch and stop some who just won't be dissuaded.

It's notable that more elaborate terrorist attacks are not carried out by idiots - these are people who have gone to college, gotten degrees etc.