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Terrorism will cast a continuing shadow over future generations and government electronic surveillance is a small price to pay to combat it, a leading historian said Wednesday, a day after the carnage in Brussels.
British author and journalist Max Hastings gave a robust defence of electronic intelligence-gathering in what he called a new world that would never know absolute security.
"Our tolerance of electronic surveillance, subject to legal and parliamentary oversight, seems a small price to pay for some measure of security against threats that nobody—today of all days—can doubt are real," Hastings told Hong Kong's Foreign Correspondents' Club.
Twin attacks by Islamic State jihadists killed around 35 people in the Belgian capital Tuesday.
Hastings, a former war correspondent and newspaper editor, is author of 26 books mostly on military history.
His latest, "The Secret War", tells the story of behind-the-scenes intelligence operations in World War II.
Future wars "will almost certainly" be fought on similar turf.
The expert named did not explain how the current total surveillance did not prevent the Brussels attacks. In other news, he taped a "Dox me and SWAT me" sign to his own back.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 25 2016, @05:13PM
Security and safety are illusions. You will never be free from the possibility of things going wrong. The safest bet is to stop pissing people off on different parts of the planet. That will pay off in the long run, and it doesn't cost billions to do so.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by AndyTheAbsurd on Friday March 25 2016, @05:58PM
Sadly, there is a large group of people for whom the only way to "stop pissing [them] off" is to convert to their religion. And I don't just mean Muslims, although some of them do seem to be the most extreme about it at the moment. And there's the people who really do just want to watch the world burn.
Please note my username before responding. You may have been trolled.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by julian on Friday March 25 2016, @08:08PM
Exactly right. There is no grievance we can rectify that will satisfy them, they just have a theologically-motivated love for self-inflicted death in defense of their faith. And by their definition if we continue to exist as non-Muslims we are a threat. This represents, of course, an incredibly small number of people. But even a single person, sufficiently motivated and unable to be deterred because he *intends* to die, is enough to kill scores of people.
From, The End of Faith, (emphasis mine)
One failed Palestinian suicide bomber described being “pushed” to attack Israelis by “the love of martyrdom.” He added, “I didn’t want revenge for anything. I just wanted to be a martyr.” Mr. Zaydan, the would-be martyr, conceded that his Jewish captors were “better than many, many Arabs.” With regard to the suffering that his death would have inflicted upon his family, he reminded his interviewer that a martyr gets to pick seventy people to join him in paradise. He would have been sure to invite his family along.
(Score: 2) by shortscreen on Friday March 25 2016, @09:53PM
We should publicly identify those who practice and promote such beliefs, and stop doing business with them. Stop selling them weapons, stop buying their oil.
We had a decades-long cold war to contain Communism. (And for better or worse, it appears to have worked!) Now that we're faced with the arguably more destructive and violent ideology of Islamo-fascism, the only ideas that politicans can come up with are mass surveillance and internet censorship? Something is very wrong here.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 25 2016, @07:05PM
The safest bet is to stop pissing people off on different parts of the planet.
I'm sorry, but my ideology only allows for me to piss them off, conquer them or kill them. Conquering them is far too much of a commitment so I guess killing them it is.