If You Still Think Terrorist Laws Are Used Responsibly, Here’s Your Chance To Reconsider

Terrorist laws are ridiculous. They are unnecessary, disproportionate, and ineffective – and in practice, they’re only used to abuse the law in both spirit and letter. The latest example of a high-schooler being charged with terrorism for silly restroom scribbles takes the cake.

For the past decade, the trigger word “terrorism” has been used to erode our privacy in all sorts of ways: our privacy of territory, of correspondence, of data, of body, of location. It’s kind of how “communism” was used in the 1950s. Or “jazz music” before then, for that matter. It’s as ridiculous now as it was then.

Various government officials have insisted that laws aimed at reducing due process and presumption of innocence for “terrorist crimes” are necessary to protect… pretty much anything, actually… and that they will never ever be used irresponsibly.

Of course they have been, and are being, used irresponsibly. If you haven’t seen examples of that before, here’s your cue. Look at this silly and poorly drawn doodle from a restroom in a Brownsboro High School, as reported on Techdirt:

(Published under fair use for political commentary.)

Do these restroom scribbles look like terrorism to you? Are they the same thing as airliners exploding, bombs going off in shopping malls or wanton violence? No, of course they’re not. It’s a poorly drawn symbol by somebody who didn’t even know what they were drawing (if they were trying to doodle about Christianity’s antagonist in some sign of teenage rebellion in a highly religious community, they even managed to turn the pentagram the wrong way).

This doesn’t even qualify as art. It’s basically just some random teenager vandalism with a cheap Sharpie, as can be trivially observed.

This didn’t stop school officials and then law enforcement officials from going collectively insane and calling this an act of terrorism.

So this silly bathroom scribble by a minor is now an act of terrorism. And the person is going to be charged as an adult for it. For an act of terrorism. Does that sound reasonable to you, or does it sound more like completely out-of-this-world insane? So far out it doesn’t even reflect sunlight?

These are the laws that justify wanton, warrantless, and bulk invasions into our privacy, correspondence, and homes. If you think they’ll only be used against people who use some kind of violence for political gain, here’s your cue for evidence to the opposite.

There aren’t any special laws necessary for catching so-called terrorists (by which I do not mean high-schoolers scribbling bad art in the restroom). Our ordinary laws are – were – perfectly adequate. There are already stiff penalties for crimes like “reckless destruction” and “multiple counts of manslaughter”. In fact, some of the stiffest penalties in the book. What these “terrorist laws” do isn’t to catch terrorists – they’re used to erode, reduce, and eliminate due process and presumption of innocence.

We also know that the mass surveillance has caught exactly zero terrorists for this reason: preparing reckless destruction is a very serious crime, and our courts are (still) public. Yet, there has been no such charges of “preparing reckless destruction” or similar, but instead, those laws are used against ordinary people because they eliminate obstacles to law enforcement. Obstacles such as presumption of innocence and right to privacy.

Privacy remains your own responsibility.