Not all direct impact is physical. By design the effect of terrorism is much greater than its direct impact on a single personal physical well being. Comparing it to bathtub deaths is just not apples to apples.
Terrorism only achieves those non-physical effects because of people's misunderstanding of the risks. If people cared about terrorism to a similar degree to which they care about other stuff of similar deadliness, the terror part of terrorism would disappear.
It's so ironic that people compare terrorist deaths to car accidents and bathtub deaths in the same sentence as they talk about the chilling effects of surveillance.
How is that ironic? The first is a rhetorical device for claiming a threat is inflated. The second is about negative consequences of inflating the threat.
I assume rayiner's point was that, as far as we know, nobody has been killed as a result of NSA surveillance of Americans' communication. Maybe a few people have been killed, but surely it's vastly less than the number of bathtub deaths. So by the logic of this inane post, nobody should get too upset about NSA surveillance.
> nobody has been killed as a result of NSA surveillance of Americans' communication
Maybe. We don't know that. We would have to know beyond any doubt how this information is being used. I can imagine it being a tool to play foreign politics; even affects places like Iraq, Afghanistan, you know, where people do die.
> nobody has been killed as a result of NSA surveillance of Americans' communication
Maybe. But its also ironic that being US citizen and living on US soil you are supposed to be protected by the law of the land. If they vacuum everything for 10 years or so, imagine how many people could be found not guilty of robbery, homicides, drug dealing, etc, only if their attorneys would have access to their clients' NSA files. Who knows? Maybe even there is someone recently executed in this country that their NSA chart would have proven they were innocent. That may be over-stretch but you believe noone innocent is doing a lifetime right now because they couldn't prove that they have not been where prosecution claims they were (don't get me even started on "innocent until proven guilty").
The whole point of terrorism is the chilling effects that result. They create a multiplier effect that increases the impact of a relatively few number of deaths.
It's ironic to talk about chilling effects in the context of NSA surveillance while in the same breath espousing a theory of terrorism that ignores the chilling effects of terrorist acts.
I don't know if "chilling effects" is the right phrase to use either about terrorism or surveillance, or means the same thing in the two cases. The former is about fear. The latter is about encroachment on liberty, or something like that.
The US does not have and never has had recurring terrorist events, which is what is needed to inflict the kind of dread you are talking about as a first-order effect. To the extent Americans fear terrorism, it is self-inflicted fear, stemming from media hype and PR for security theatre. The same amount of hype could have us ripping out bathtubs, or being screened for hammer purchases.
But the mental impact comes from perceiving the direct impact on physical well being, incorrectly or otherwise. In other words, if individuals believe (and alieve) that the risk of physical danger is so infinitesimal small, there would be no mental impact too.
On contrast, the chilling effect of surveillance could be physical, not immediately, granted, but potentially large in the long run.
