The job of the courts is to evaluate security measures, to decide whether privacy should be sacrificed for security. However, according to Daniel J. Solove, the courts are not doing their jobs appropriately: whenever the government mentions the word “terrorism”, the courts automatically decided that the security wins. Everyone knows that some security measures are not worthy to sacrifice the privacy, but what if something bad actually happens? The airport security measures are violating everyone’s privacy, but what if someone is trying to hijack a plane? Checking everyone’s luggage indeed violates the privacy of the population, but not checking them allows a small possibility of a great disaster. In mathematical sense, the total harms in both cases are the same. But life is not mathematics; people tend to decrease the possibility of the big disaster as much as they could by sacrificing some smaller issues. Just as what happened in the All Troubles of the World, people sacrifice all their privacy just to eliminate a few crimes with the possibility around 20%. It’s not wrong doing the best to avoid some tremendous trouble, but sometimes, it is also important to evaluate the worthiness of some security measures.
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