The attacks in America on September 11th ignited an era of extreme reaction, still reverberating today.

Not only was the American public sold on extremes like attacking the wrong enemy in Iraq costing an estimated half million lives, but each citizen of our own country became a terror suspect via the extreme policy measures adopted in the wake of the attacks.

It took almost fifteen years to reveal the National Security Agency’s unlimited surveillance of innocent Americans, and to begin the process of rolling it back toward transparency and conformance with our Constitutional guarantees. It took roughly the same length of time for the 6,000 page Senate Intelligence Committee Report on Torture to appear on the scene, condemning the Enhanced Interrogation program as ineffective, counter-productive, and dangerous to our national security.

Knee-jerk policy reaction is not sober action. It mimics the extremes of its enemy and misses the mark. We will never defeat the enemy by mirroring the enemy.

In this talk about defeating online extremist propaganda, Rebecca MacKinnon warns us and other countries fighting terrorism, that in the effort to eliminate poisonous online accounts, credible voices countering terrorist propaganda are also being eliminated.

Once again, we are called to discern, among our own actions, the dangers of extremes.
 

 
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See Multimedia Content below for the TED version of this talk.

Check out this Action link for Global Voices, an organization that MacKinnon co-founded.

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What you do think is most effective against extremist ideology?

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