The attacks in America on September 11th, 2001 ignited an era of extreme reaction, still reverberating today. Not only was the American public convinced to support attacking the wrong enemy in Iraq, costing an estimated half million lives, but in the extreme policy measures adopted in the wake of the attacks, each citizen became a terror suspect. Knee-jerk policy reaction is not sober action. It mimics the extremes of its enemy, misses the mark, and we will never defeat the enemy by mirroring the it. It took until 2013 to reveal the National Security Agency's unlimited surveillance of innocent Americans, and to begin the process of rolling it back toward transparency and closer alignment with our constitutional guarantees. It took until 2014 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. In this talk about defeating online extremist propaganda, Rebecca MacKinnon warns America and other countries 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 knee-jerk extremes.

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