This week, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani – who is serving as a national security adviser to Donald Trump – spoke favorably of requiring all Muslims on the federal government’s terrorist watch-list to wear electronic tracking devices. ”I would think that’s an excellent idea. If you’re on the terror watch list, I should you know you’re on the terror watch list. You’re on there for a reason.”
Giuliani drew inspiration for this idea from France, which has instituted such a tracking policy in the wake of increased violent terrorism in their country over the past few years. Just one issue: the man who attacked and killed a priest in Normandy earlier this week – having been suspected of terrorist ties by the French government – was wearing such a device. Whoops.
Of course, this is not the first time that the terrorist watch-list has been in the news in recent months. After a terrorist attacked a gay nightclub in Orlando in early June, congressional Democrats “demanded” action to curb gun violence, going even so far as to eat Chik-fil-A on the House floor in order to fulfill their moral imperative. One of the main policy proposals: banning people on the terrorist watch-list from purchasing firearms. In doing so, they argued, we would prevent “potential terrorists” (a label which…includes everyone?) from acquiring dangerous weapons. Never mind that such a ban would not have prevented Omar Mateen – who had already been removed from the watch list at the time of his purchase – from buying the guns used in the attack. Whoops, again.
But the real problem with the terrorist watch-list is not just that it’s deficient as a tool for policy-making: the problem is that it’s used as a tool at all.
The terrorist watch-list is bloated, inaccurate, and arbitrary. You can end up on it for having an identical or similar name to an actual terrorist; the process for getting removed from the rolls is protracted and gnarly; and the list itself is cloaked in secrecy more dense than the swarm of balloons that enveloped Hillary at the DNC. It not only demonstrates an unparalleled work of Washington bureaucracy, but also pretends to occupy an unassailable perch on the moral high ground in the name of national security. You don’t like the watch-list? Then you must want another 9/11.
It is for this last reason, above all, that the system is so dangerous. In an age in which elections can be little more than competitions over which party gets to control the federal Leviathan, the terror watch-list is just another tool to turn political bias into public policy — at the expense of liberty and individual freedom. When we have knee-jerk progressive crusadership on the Left and nationalist fear-mongering on the Right, access to — and control of — a secret list of “potential terrorists” lends itself too easily to governmental overreach.
With his comments this week — which were effectively an extension of the Trump campaign’s — Rudy Giuliani demonstrated why the terror watch-list is dangerous to people across the political spectrum. What could be going my way today may go yours tomorrow, and when it does we will all lose. Perhaps it’s time for gun rights activists and those fighting racial profiling to climb into bed together; after all, those who are seeking to curtail your rights seem to have already done so.