Can anyone imagine that happening here, in the country where flag burning is constitutionally protected?
Well, that feels sort of disingenuous. From the POV of a scheming politician in power, harmless gestures would certainly seem much less important than agents of your potential downfall communicating in ways that you can't penetrate. In most cases, those loudmouths are the devils you know.
I think a lot of this is ignorance about how modern counter terrorism works. The most effective tool we have is social network analysis. Find a terrorist and see who calls them, then see who calls those people and out and out. Look at the vertices and edges and dependencies networks and we can learn a lot about complex organizations without risking any lives.
I believe that's exactly happened half a year before 9/11. Then, someone thought, "what an interesting scenario, let's file it into our record system".
If you want to know why government agency's are engaging in this wildly unpopular behavior, here's the answer: On 9/11 a lot of people swore to god that it would never happen again.
OK, I'll bite: Didn't lousy healthcare kill more people in the US in the last decade (certainly, possibly even in a year) than 9/11 ever did? Do people swear to god that this must never happen again? I don't think so. It's the salami slicing effect, only with people. As long as it's not visible, nobody cares (or extremely few are actually bothered by it to any extent).
Didn't lousy healthcare kill more people in the US in the last decade (certainly, possibly even in a year) than 9/11 ever did? Do people swear to god that this must never happen again?
We're getting very far off-topic, but don't you remember the huge political battle over Obamacare?
Don't be obtuse. States wage regular campaigns to promote road safety and punish careless driving, within the limits of the resources available to them - besides which, traffic accidents are distributed among a large population of road users, rather than orchestrated through a chain of command.
> Do they spend billions of dollars, spy on American citizens, molest them before getting in their cars, and erode other rights?
Moreover, this is completely wrong reaction to the terrorism threat. The right reaction is to ignore it completely. Terrorism is not about blowing stuff up, it's about scaring people into changing their society and politics. By overreacting like this, America (and others) pretty much did exactly what the attacks were supposed to achieve.
By that logic, disbanding the police and court systems should bring crime to a swift and sudden end, because everyone knows that there was no crime before the creation of institutional policing.
> Terrorism is not about blowing stuff up, it's about scaring people into changing their society and politics.
Organized terrorism has a particular goal in mind, and killing people is only a particular way to achieve it. If you won't let acts of terror influence your policy, they will have to chose another way to pursue their goals.
It's a grown-up, serious version of school bullies problem; the best way to get rid of them is to either ignore them 'till they get bored, or hit them by surprise in hope they'll be so shocked to never think of attacking you again. What you don't want to do is to walk around scared and yield all the time, as this only invites more attacks.
You're mistaken. The victims of terrorism are not going to be ignored by their own government, nor should they. Further, countries that have adopted the approach you mention, such as the UK, eventually ended up negotiating with their antagonists as part of a managed settlement. While I certainly do not think there is much value in running about with one's hair on fire (so to speak) the notion that any country could or would ignore an event like 9-11 as you suggest is just laughably unrealistic. It seems not to have occurred o you that the Us had repeatedly been the target of lower level terrorism from the same source over the previous decade and made minimal responses to it, yet Al Qaeda actually escalated the intensity of its attacks instead. According to you, they should have given up in frustration and chosen another way to pursue their goals, so I'd say your theory doesn't match up very well with events in the real world.
> You're mistaken. The victims of terrorism are not going to be ignored by their own government, nor should they.
No one said ignore the victims. The point is don't make everyone a victim by a cure worse than the attacks. 9-11 killed a few thousand. We've lost thousands by entering Iraq and Afghanistan.
We've spent a trillion dollars that if spent on heart disease treatment and research, or cancer research, or even just reducing the number of automobile related fatalities, would have saved more lives each year than we lost in 9-11.
> so I'd say your theory doesn't match up very well with events in the real world.
How can you say it doesn't match up? The terrorists changed US politics. They've made our country less free and they've drained us of a TRILLION dollars (1,000 Billion). Our country is turning into a hollywood caricature of the U.S.S.R circa 1985 -- secret police spying on citizens. These are self-inflicted wounds. We have shown there are huge rewards for terrorist action.
Lots of people would say yes to that question. Add up the cost of traffic enforcement and rule promulgation; consider the role of red light cameras, radar guns, in-car breathalysers, and various other tools, and the economic imposition of both fines and things like license suspensions and mandatory declarations. I think the majority of traffic laws are pretty reasonable, but they do impose a significant and measurable burden on auto users at both the individual and collective level. Why? Because the potential dangers of driving heavy vehicles at high speed are significant enough that a majority of people demand regulation.
It's an uncomfortable but unavoidable fact that most people expect the government to protect them from things like terrorist attacks too, which is why government oaths office include a clause about protecting the United States from enemies 'both foreign and domestic.'
Wait a second. You see no distinction between a death from a random vehicle accident and a death at the hands of an organization that is trying to kill as many citizens as possible?
Now who is missing the point. If we completely ignored 9-11 and spent all of that money on traffic fatality prevention, we'd have saved thousands and thousands of more lives without molesting everyone that gets onto a plane.
Deaths are deaths. And if the former kills thousand of times more people than the latter, I'd say the former is much worse. And the response to the terrorism threat so far was hugely irrational and mostly achieved exactly what they planned to.
Remember, for terrorists bombing and killing are only means to the end. The goal is political/social change; deaths are only collateral damage.
Basically, in this case one should shut up and multiply [0]. And [1], since we like Schneier around here.
but don't you remember the huge political battle over Obamacare?
Well, I do, but only very vaguely; after all, it took place thousands of kilometers from where I happen to live and it's not like we don't have enough of our local issues to take care of.
Well, that feels sort of disingenuous. From the POV of a scheming politician in power, harmless gestures would certainly seem much less important than agents of your potential downfall communicating in ways that you can't penetrate. In most cases, those loudmouths are the devils you know.
I think a lot of this is ignorance about how modern counter terrorism works. The most effective tool we have is social network analysis. Find a terrorist and see who calls them, then see who calls those people and out and out. Look at the vertices and edges and dependencies networks and we can learn a lot about complex organizations without risking any lives.
I believe that's exactly happened half a year before 9/11. Then, someone thought, "what an interesting scenario, let's file it into our record system".
If you want to know why government agency's are engaging in this wildly unpopular behavior, here's the answer: On 9/11 a lot of people swore to god that it would never happen again.
OK, I'll bite: Didn't lousy healthcare kill more people in the US in the last decade (certainly, possibly even in a year) than 9/11 ever did? Do people swear to god that this must never happen again? I don't think so. It's the salami slicing effect, only with people. As long as it's not visible, nobody cares (or extremely few are actually bothered by it to any extent).
Ditto for people killed by burning all that coal.