The type of terrorism on display in Berlin leaves societies with three choices: 1) Try to secure public spaces by heavily fortifying them, thus transforming people’s way of life; 2) Try to stop would-be attackers by dramatically expanding the government’s surveillance and investigatory powers, thus increasing the state’s intrusions into people’s lives; or 3) Try to minimize the frequency and lethality of terrorism, while learning to live with the threat of attacks and to be resilient when they inevitably occur.
Those choices are lurking behind debates in Germany right now about how to better protect public places (there are a variety of design and technological solutions); control immigration (far-right politicians have been quick to blame the country’s generous asylum policy for the attack, even before the identity of the assailant was known); and broaden the use of security cameras (state surveillance is a touchy subject in the country, owing to the legacies of the Nazis and the Stasi). They are the subtext of Merkel’s refusal to be paralyzed by the fear of evil. [...]
“There is nothing new about terror strikes against soft targets; what is new is that the baseline threat is now so high in so many countries,” the Soufan Group noted in another brief earlier this year:
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