By Alex Marthews, National Chair
This morning’s horrifying, criminal attacks in Brussels are already leading US politicians to call for “patrols in Muslim neighborhoods”, “torture”, and further efforts to undermine encryption.
Attacks like this are intended to provoke a government backlash. The only thing that can persuade ordinary Muslims that a group of criminal murderers does in fact have their interests at heart, is the government stepping up its persecution of ordinary Muslims.
The truth is, you can’t solve criminal attacks like this by stepping up surveillance. Belgium was already in a state resembling martial law. France, before the Paris attacks, had already implemented mass Internet surveillance. It simply doesn’t work to thwart attacks; it floods law enforcement with false leads, when they’d be more effective if they focused on the ones with actual evidence of criminality to back them up.
This is the wisdom of the Fourth Amendment: It forces law enforcement to focus its investigations on cold hard facts, not on hot air. Warrants and probable cause are there for a reason, and have served us well.
Fear is easy; overcoming fear is harder. We mourn those attacked, and we refuse to let fear dictate our actions. We truly believe that the best way to keep this country safe is to defend the principles of the Bill of Rights, against cheap hucksters trying again and again to exploit tragedies to grab power. We should all trust our neighbors, however few or many Gods they believe in, far more than we should trust the defenders of the deep state.