Safer? If you care to peruse the statistics, you'll find you have a better chance of being struck by lightning, dying in a fire or drowning in a bathtub than being killed in a terrorist attack.
But actuarial tables are of little comfort to the families of the victims of the San Bernardino attacks or to the grieving parents of the high school student who was struck and killed this month by a city-owned truck in Los Angeles after the LA Unified School District shut down in response to a bogus terrorist threat.
Safer? We've learned in the past two weeks that Homeland Security doesn't look at the social media activity of foreigners applying for visas as a matter of policy. But DHS will routinely examine the Facebook and Twitter activity of Americans.
Think about that. The gargantuan bureaucracy established to pre-empt terrorist threats against the country deliberately avoids looking at information that foreigners share publicly on their Facebook timelines. According to ABC News, “Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson refused in early 2014 to end the secret U.S. policy that prohibited immigration officials from reviewing the social media messages of all foreign citizens applying for U.S. visas, according to a former senior department official.”
Why in the world would they do that? Johnson reportedly feared a “civil liberties backlash” and “bad public relations” for the Obama administration.
Mind you, these are the same people who assure us that the Syrian refugees will be thoroughly vetted.
Safer? China and Russia have made Swiss cheese of federal and state government databases. Beijing hackers “compromised” (read: stole) the files of more than 22.1 million current and former federal employees, including people with top-secret security clearances.
Apparently, that had been going on for years before the geniuses at the Office of Personnel Management noticed the breach. You don't suppose the Chinese only plan to mess with their credit scores, do you?
We are probably about as safe as we ever were in a world full of uncertainty. But it's tough to feel safe when public-relations worries trump national security.
Ben Boychuk is associate editor of the Manhattan Institute's City Journal.
