‘When threatened, people are ready to concede freedom’

May 04, 2015 12:00 am | Updated 07:30 am IST - Kochi

Gary LaFree, criminologist and director of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism in the U.S. Photo: Thulasi Kakkat

Gary LaFree, criminologist and director of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism in the U.S. Photo: Thulasi Kakkat

“When people feel threatened, they are a little more willing to concede some of their freedoms,” observes Gary LaFree, criminologist and director of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) under the University of Maryland in the U.S. on the basis of sample studies done by the research entity on the balance between people’s clamour for security and their equally fervent cry for freedom.

Mr. Lafree, who had a freewheeling chat with The Hindu in the city recently, said the tussle between people’s freedom and privacy and the enforcement of stringent laws (mostly viewed as draconian) to secure people against terrorist acts was a universal phenomenon.

“We have a similar set of issues in the U.S. It’s interesting that the American public really changed their attitude post 9/11. On the one hand, people expect a fair amount of liberty, freedom and privacy but they also expect to be secure and not to be victimised by violence. We’ve been doing very large polls in the U.S. and by accident, we did two random sample surveys in the U.S. right before the Boston Marathon bombings [in 2013] and we did two after the bombings…. And one of the things that we observed was that after the bombings, people’s were a bit more willing to give up some of their freedoms,” he said.

Asked about the rampant misuse and abuse in India of laws to curb terror, Mr. LaFree said the enactment of the U.S. Patriot Act had raised several concerns but after nearly 13 years, it was still binding. 9/11 still seemed to be the watershed.

“At the end of the day, these are decisions that a democracy has to wrestle with.” While there would be failsafe security and unfettered freedom in an ideal situation, there should be oversight to ensure that it did not tip too much in either direction. The ubiquity of terror had blurred the lines between police and paramilitary forces, capable of using lethal force. “There should, therefore, be civilian oversight of police.”

He said if the law enforcement agencies in the U.S. were primarily reactive before 9/11, they, especially the FBI, had all become proactive.

On the question of State infringement on people’s privacy, he said his feelings were mixed about it. As head of a research entity with a humongous database on social media (over three million tweets etc), he would say Internet not only connected people but also facilitated nefarious, terror-spewing, networking. But if there was stringent regulation of social media, as demanded by several governments when Mr. LaFree was on the World Economic Forum’s Committee on terrorism, there would not be the kind of database that could be accessed to make critical inferences.

“You can’t get data from governments, which are poor in collating and updating it. I don’t think we have great alternatives from a social science point of view,” he said.

The 30-member research team, supported by student interns, at START collected data on every individual terror attack in the world by use of special computer algorithms which skim through over 1.6 million articles a day in 72 different languages to zero in on some 5,000 cases a week. The data thus collected and made sense of was being accessed by private individuals, companies and government security agencies.

Terrorism, he said, remained on the move. “It travelled across Western Europe and North America and then to Latin America and the Middle East. It’s heavily in the Middle East and South Asia now. It will further move, so you need to keep a watch,” he said.

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