Anti-terrorism and authoritarianism go hand in hand, that's been clear since 9/11.

The problem is that government us terrorism scaremongering to justify erasing citizens rights. It's completely valid to be anti-terrorist and prefer alternative choices to fight it.

For example, in my country, both polices and tribunals are severely under provisioned. I'd start with imroofijg those budgets before passing surveillance laws.

> It's completely valid to be anti-terrorist and prefer alternative choices to fight it.

What alternative choices? France suffered multiple highly deadly attacks on it's soil, including two with 100+ graphic and violent dead. What alternative choices are there to prevent them outside of mass surveillance, infiltrating potentially radicalising religious institutions and shutting them down, arresting members of outwardly radical groups stockpiling weapons and materials for explosives (all things the French government is doing).

I see two comments in and we're already making excuses for authoritarianism. Never have I before seen people go "But mass surveillance, civil right violating arrests are good actually!"

"We gotta auth because there are no alternatives" has been used time and again in history to commit atrocities.

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Like it or not, People don't just go around committing terrorist attacks everyday. I, for example, and many people I know, have plenty of equipment to do so if I wanted to (multiple firearms, potential explosives etc), but why would I?

How do you stop actual terrorist groups from committing actual terrorist attacks, the like of which france has seen recently, without being "authoritarian"? A terrorist is almost always a normal person. They likely will not have committed a crime until they do the terrorism.

Like, this is paradox of tolerance stuff. How do you prevent bad actors from taking advantage of your permissiveness and liberal laws? I'm not saying france is in the right to detain someone for using a simple app, because they aren't, but that this action is on a spectrum, and everyone from governments to your local forum admin is desperately trying to find the right point on that spectrum. So what do you suggest?

If your answer is "don't try to stop the terrorists", then you should understand that human society really hates random violence that isn't "normal", so unless you have some way to make innocents dying for no reason "normal", people will give up any freedom to fix that. Maslow's hierarchy of needs isn't good science but people's desire for "safety" is a very very strong desire.

there is an inherent social contract w.r.t. freedom and the societal notion of collective liberty -- freedom provides agency to both good and bad actors.

a free society implicitly accepts this as a risk-reward in order to maximize freedom, therefore a social contract.

and the social contract boils down to a government's obligation to secure its citizens (dependent on the boundaries of the implied social contract and what its participants agree to), and whether or not the balance between security and freedom is agreeable for parties involved.

constantly advocating for more security, at all costs, in order to stop "the bad guy", and then presenting a straw man to rhetorically justify it by asking: how else do we stop the bad guys, is authoritarian, anti-freedom, and patronizing.

freedom has an inherent risk of, well, freedom.

law was a construct designed for accountability, not deterrence, nor prevention because its [modern] philosophical (post french revolution) motivation is centered around optimizing for freedom (ie: political liberalism) and recognizing that actors will act -- it just attempts to add the checks and balance idea which attempts to ensure (that is, uphold a social contract), that bad actors are held accountable for their (free) actions.

you'll never be able to magically "legislate" away bad actors, but you can certainly attempt to "control" them, which presents a very, very large slippery slope of positive and negative definitions, and nuances around objective suspicion and other faculties used for discernment w.r.t. bad actors -- all of which directly violate the philosophical (US) notion of innocence until proven guilty, and very much so move away from any kind of scale where freedom is (attempted to be) balanced.

if you want freedom, you can't just erode the social norms built on foundations of trust, agency, and liberty in order to prevent bad actors from acting freely -- what you're calling for is not a free society by definition, because it seeks to mitigate and or prevent agency before it happens (reminds me of Minorty Report), which is restrictive and anti-thetical to freedom.

freedom comes at a price. freedom is (not) slavery, and i have no interest in participating in a social contract that binds me to chains through freedom risk-averse framings of governance.