http://www.lawsocietyblog.com/archives/303 Notes from the intersection of law, society, technology, economics, and culture Tue, 06 Jan 2009 07:52:42 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.2 http://www.lawsocietyblog.com/archives/303#comment-4853 Hanno Kaiser Tue, 17 Oct 2006 19:08:49 +0000 http://www.lawsocietyblog.com/archives/303#comment-4853 Many staunch supporters of the <em>person-centric</em> approach to security are obsessed with the idea that there are <em>essentially</em> bad people, that is people whose very nature it is to <em>be</em> evil. For those essentialists, the real battle is not to prevent certain <em>acts</em> of terror but to identify and incapacitate <em>terrorists</em>. Preventing <em>bad acts</em> from occurring should be at the heart of every rational anti-terrorism policy. Chasing <em>bad people</em> is mostly a waste of time, for one because we simply don't have a model that reliably ties manifestations of <em>essential badness</em> (whatever that might be) to the future commission of <em>bad acts.</em> We don't even have such a model for ordinary run of the mill crimes! How can we expect to have one for acts of terror? But, of course, chasing <em>evil people</em> plays well with a superstitious, frightened audience. Many staunch supporters of the person-centric approach to security are obsessed with the idea that there are essentially bad people, that is people whose very nature it is to be evil. For those essentialists, the real battle is not to prevent certain acts of terror but to identify and incapacitate terrorists. Preventing bad acts from occurring should be at the heart of every rational anti-terrorism policy. Chasing bad people is mostly a waste of time, for one because we simply don’t have a model that reliably ties manifestations of essential badness (whatever that might be) to the future commission of bad acts. We don’t even have such a model for ordinary run of the mill crimes! How can we expect to have one for acts of terror? But, of course, chasing evil people plays well with a superstitious, frightened audience.

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