Stallman's 2001 Warning: Post-9/11 Surveillance Is the Real Secondary Damage

Writing days after the September 11 attacks, Richard Stallman argues that the gravest long-term harm may not come from the attacks themselves but from the reflexive legislative response. He draws an analogy to nerve trauma, where much of the eventual damage occurs in the hours afterward as the body’s own reaction destroys additional cells — a metaphor for how a panicked Congress could dismantle civil liberties in the name of prevention.

Stallman distinguishes narrow, weapons-focused airport searches, which he considers a tolerable inconvenience, from the sweeping monitoring of phone calls, email, and physical movement that he sees agencies eager to expand. He is skeptical that such measures would even work: since human screeners at check-in failed to stop the hijackers, he sees no reason to believe computerized face recognition would have, yet vendors and lawmakers were already promoting it. He flags an early proposal to mandate government backdoors in encryption as especially alarming.

He also criticizes Congress for rushing to grant the president open-ended authority to use military force, comparing it to the blank check that drew the U.S. into Vietnam. His closing appeal is to constituents: contact your representatives before the bills — already being drafted — become law, so that civil liberties do not end up as the attackers’ next casualty.