That Posner leaned this was seemed noticeable here when he guest-blogged on Lessig’s blog (I should note that it was my comment Posner was replying to)

Well, the British government managed to keep secret the fact that they ran a torture chamber for thousands of Nazis after WWII for fifty years. But hey, it came out in the end, so that’s OK!

I think what might’ve happened post-9/11 is that many of these folks like Mr. Posner – folks living in a bubble, shielded from all normal dangers of life – they got scared. See, an airplane ramming into judge’s or newspaper publisher’s or $10 million/year corporate manager’s corner office – that’s just unacceptable. No effort is too excessive to protect the best and the brightest among us. To worry about the proles losing some privacy is ridiculous.

Whoops! Wrong red-herring. They hide behind so many it’s hard to keep track sometimes.

He’s talking about Abdul Rahman Yasin, the FBI’s “most wanted” terrorist … that they released. Yep. There’s a reason to butcher thousands in the middle of nowhere for nothing. And here I was thinking of Zarqawi, “the man Bush left alive.” He was “reason,” too.

In the trailer park, that is.

Next!
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If, by “deal with,” you mean “began to promote vigorously, um: yeah.

“the perpetrators of the 93 WTC bombing were successfully prosecuted.”

Not entirely. At least one was safely in Iraq for years.

Wait, I think I know that guy. Only “Iraq” is putting is loosely.

The only reason a military response was supposed to work better than a legal response (despite no historical examples and despite the miserable failure of the military response to date) was because certain people needed to sell a conventional invasion of Iraq in order to punish a few terrorists in Afghanistan.

Now we know who was dumb enough to believe it.

Fool.
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An accusation of racism goes too far, in my view. Posner’s slapdown of the BIA, after all, protects the interests of a large number of nonwhite people.

judge george w. bush:

Arlington, Va.: Your conclusion that scrutiny of a neighbor’s phone call shouldn’t worry most people illustrates the problem with the 4th amendment today.

This creates a downward spiral with regards to what a reasonable expectation of privacy is. People that are less concerned with privacy provide the government more opportunity to conduct warrantless searches. Is it truly a good thing that you are not concerned? Wouldn’t it be better if we were all more concerned about our privacy?

Richard Posner: Why are you more concerned with your privacy than with your safety? Maybe you don’t think the nation is at serious risk of further terrorist attacks. I disagree.

empiricism? for chumps:

Washington, D.C.: You ask “Why are you more concerned with your privacy than with your safety?”

The 4th Amendment provides a guarantee of privacy (at least against unreasonable governement searches). Nothing in the Constitution does (or could) provide a guarantee of safety.

I suspect that I am statistically much more at risk of being run over by a car than of being killed by a terrorist (even though I live within five miles of the White House). Should the government ban all automobiles to protect me?

Richard Posner: If your premise were correct, your conclusion would follow. But how do you know you’re at less risk of being killed by a terrorist than being run down by a car? The risk in the sense of probability of being killed by a nuclear bomb attack on Washington, a dirty-bomb attack, an attack using bioengineered smallpox virus, a sarin attack on the Washington Metro (do you ever take the metro?), etc., etc., cannot be quantified. That doesn’t mean it’s small. For all we know, it’s great.

judge, judge, judge, you don’t even—you’re glib:

Gaithersburg, Md.: Fear-mongering. That’s what I’m reading in this.

You asked “Why are you more concerned with your privacy than with your safety?”

Looking at the headlines and the stories concerning identity theft, I’d say that protecting my privacy IS the protection of my safety. What’s to say that information garnered by the government in this manner will be so well protected that it won’t end up in the hands of people looking to use it in other ways?

We have to strike a healthy balance between our privacy and protection, and from what I’m gathering, you’d prefer the government collect every bit of data it can to protect against any and all conceivable threats.

Richard Posner: There is fear mongering on both sides. Only the fears differ. Your fear of government’s facilitating identity theft could be thought mongering.

although i can’t solve this problem, i will advocate for government programs which are more likely to bring it about:

Sunnyvale, Calif.: You say there is no civil liberties threat because of pervasive government leaks. But the President has threatened prosecution for those who leak and those who publish leaks. Secrecy would neatly sidestep the non-statute use of surveillance and allow widespread use outside the needs of national security.

Richard Posner: You’ve raised a good point. On the one hand, secrecy is important in intelligence and counterterrorism work. On the other hand, secrecy obstructs congressional and media oversight. I don’t know a good solution to this problem.

abuses? oh, there will be abuses, but why should we worry?

Boston, Mass.: The issue is the fundamental trust of the government once you give them unchecked powers. The idea that data mining will start off harmless, then the key words will become civil rights organizations, anti war organizations, and anyone that doens’t agree with what the administration is doing at the time. Then using this information to discredit such organizations or individuals. Its happened before and our sieve like government didn’t stop it then. We only know about it now decades after the face thanks to things like the Freedom of Information Act, something this administration opposes regularly.

Richard Posner: Yes, it happened before—and we survived.

I think we’re saying that there ought to be checks and balances, in order to make sure that the original mission doesn’t “creep” as these things have a tendency to do. I think that there was a special court that was created for this particular purpose; if there are technical reasons why it can’t be used any more then maybe fair enough but I am not heartened to hear that the proposed replacement is “trust me”.

Posner’s mind is terabytes of RAM and a 5 gig hard drive

If the neighbor is talking about you, and you are not a terrorist, what he is saying is not of interest to the intelligence services and will not be flagged by the search engines for human scrutiny. But suppose his phone number is on a list of terrorists’ phone numbers; then the conversation will be scrutinized in an effort to find out the terrorist’s address, or other pertinent information. Does this level of scrutiny worry you? It doesn’t worry me.

From later in the session, Posner seems to be utterly panicked about terrorist attacks. He apparently disagrees with one questioner’s suggestion that he’s more likely to die from being hit by a car than from a terrorist attack.