Dialogue: Personal freedoms should be enhanced after attack

The terrorist raid on the United States should trigger greater freedom, not more controls, if we respond to it smartly, writes OWEN McSHANE*.

Commentators tell us that the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center has changed the way our world will be. We instinctively agree.

Sadly, many assume that the inevitable outcome will create further inroads into our civil liberties, our freedom of movement, and our right to privacy. If we accept this, the terrorists have won a further victory.

We should not accept such an outcome. Indeed, the result can well be greater freedoms, rather than more control.

For thousands of years cities have been places of safety, protecting us from the barbarians outside the gates.

No longer. Those terrible images of collapsing infernos, repeated time and time again in fine detail and full colour, are now burned indelibly in our minds and in our culture. One commentator described the New Yorkers fleeing the city for the safety of the suburbs. We saw them on the bridges.

We can be sure that any new towers built on the site will be average New York height at best. We have seen the end of the contest for the world's tallest office tower. Who wants to own, or work in, the best target in town?

Our cities have been decentralising for most of this century. No new central business district has been built since the advent of the low-cost motor car.

The decentralising of existing commercial and industrial activities has speeded up since the Second World War. The communications revolution of the past few decades drives this process even faster. In North Shore City, more residents work from home than use public transport to get to the city centre.

Many future boards of directors will elect to move their headquarters to the safety of the suburbs; not necessarily because of any risk analysis but because of the power of those images burned deep into their minds.

All around the world, the near-retired are moving from the cities to the countryside. The contra-migration of the young urbanites to downtown is more obvious and tends to disguise this greater outward movement.

But the memory of collapsing infernos will mean the end of major commercial development in city centres everywhere, and even more employment will migrate out of town. The sun-belt regions will prosper.

The planners continue to pretend it is not happening. Our so-called Growth Forum pretends to have a formula to turn the tide. They have to, of course, to justify their train sets.

Their battle is lost. Those images of collapsing towers in New York's city centre mean that the hundreds of millions of dollars which our planners want to spend on rail schemes and central terminals will be written off as surely as Air New Zealand's investment in Ansett.

America's tragedy means that Aucklanders may gain more freedom to live where they like, to plant their gardens or develop small farms. These terrorists may help us to disempower those who insist we should huddle behind metropolitan limits and live near railway stations, and abandon our hugely efficient cars in favour of hopelessly inefficient trains.

Aucklanders may retain and regain some important freedoms.

However, many commentators have accepted, even if with some air of resignation, that the demand for increased security will lead to further inroads on our rights to travel freely without hindrance and delay.

Our own authorities responded to the New York disaster with increased security checks at our airports. One has to ask why?

No luggage check would have hindered the terrorists who flew the planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

The attack on Pearl Harbor was delivered by the best weaponry and delivery systems of the time. The attack on New York and Washington was delivered by civilian aircraft manned by terrorists using Stanley knives.

And yet the attack on America killed far more people and destroyed far more property.

These terrorists had no need to carry bombs on to the plane. The plane was the bomb, and the fuel was the explosive. They had no need of guns or other discoverable weaponry.

Their paper knives and box-cutters would pass through any detection system. If we go down this search and detection route, we will all have to fly nude.

Again, the sad outcome would be that the terrorists would have diminished our freedoms while handing more powers to the state.

Instead, we have to think smarter, and use the high technology now available, to thwart any future copycats.

Modern aircraft fly on auto-pilot from their origin to destination. The flight path is predetermined to optimise fuel, passenger comfort and overall safety. A pilot needs some skill to disconnect the auto-pilot and there are times when the pilot must be able to do so.

However, we must have all been surprised when all four of the hijacked planes were able to reverse their direction without generating any urgent response from ground control.

In one plane the terrorists turned off the transponder so that ground control could no longer track the flight path.

Surely we can introduce two new security controls into the flight control system.

First, make it impossible to turn off the transponder. Why would any legitimate pilot ever want to? That's the easy bit.

Second, we could introduce a new system which would make it impossible for any pilot, legitimate or not, to make any major long-term deviation from the flight plan without activating a once-only confirmable code.

Without such instructions, a ground control computer would reactivate the auto-pilot and redirect the aircraft to its original destination and to nowhere else. The plane could even land on auto-pilot, if the genuine pilots were dead.

Making unauthorised deviations from the flight path impossible would make all hijacking pointless. What is the point of seizing an aircraft if you cannot change its destination?

Hijacking would become a thing of the past. Our right to fly would be more secure.

Curbing our freedoms fulfils the terrorists goals. They were not attacking those buildings - they were attacking our civilisation.

We need to outsmart them rather than diminish the freedoms we should be determined to protect.

If we do it right, we might look back on this terrible time as one which triggered new freedoms and closed off major threats to our personal safety and to the institutions of our civilisation.

And Aucklanders might be allowed to live and work where they like.

* Owen McShane, of Kaiwaka, is a research consultant.

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