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What was your initial reaction when Obama said that “You can’t have 100% security and 100% privacy”?

My reaction is: Look at prisons.

In prisons, they increase security to the point that the people who live there have near zero quality of life. Everyone goes through metal detectors and gets patted down constantly. They give them body cavity searches, they make them get naked against their will. They search people when entering and leaving the facility. They make people use the toilet in full view of everyone else without walls or privacy. It makes the TSA checkpoint at airports seem quaint.

Yet what’s going on in prisons ? People are stabbing each other and dealing hard drugs.

What can be said with certainty is that over the past decade the Middle East, and to some extent the Islamic world, has broken down into two armed camps. On the one side are Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States, backed by the United States and (quietly) Israel. To everyone’s enormous embarrassment, al-Qaeda is very firmly in this camp.

On the other side are Iran, Hizbollah and post-bellum Iraq, strongly backed by Russia and China.