9/11 Made Us Safer, Says Bruce Schneier

richi writes "Security guru and BT CTO Bruce Schneier discusses terrorist attacks. In fact, Bruce seems to be saying that 9/11 actually made us safer from terrorists, which seems like a curious argument. While Bruce's blog post is interesting and no doubt insightful, I'm not sure I really buy it. And what's the deal with the new rules for searching the TSA No Fly List? Why is it, in 2010, we're still mucking about with publishing database extracts and waiting hours for them to be searched? How about checking within seconds of an update? Couldn't someone volunteer to show them how to implement a reliable, scalable, NoSQL setup? Instead, the TSA plan to fix this is a classic 'big government' solution."

Blog posts about blog posts make me cry...

[Squeeself]

No, Richi Jennings who wrote a blog post linking to Bruce Schneier's blog post said that Bruce said that 9/11 made us safer from terrorists. Bruce's claims are insightful, Richi is just stirring up controversy...

Re:BRUCE NEVER SAID THAT

[phantomfive]

He didn't use those exact words, but he did say:

Even 9/11, which was planned before the climate of fear that event engendered, just barely succeeded. Today, it's much harder to pull something like that off without slipping up and getting arrested.

Which essentially implies that 9/11 made us safer. It made us safer mainly because people are watching out for that kind of thing, not because of weird airline regulations, like the OP suggests. And frankly, I think he is right.

Re:I buy it

[mikael_j]

It used to be you played real friendly with hijackers in a hostage situation. Now we know better.

Well, pre-9/11 the reason everyone just went along with what the hijackers wanted was because in general the hijackers wanted money, to make a political statement while getting themselves dropped off somewhere where they wouldn't get arrested or simply make a statement by landing the plane somewhere safe, taking all the passengers off and blowing up the empty plane. Basically if you just played along you'd be a lot safer than if you tried to take down the guy carrying a submachine gun and a hand grenade...

Re:BRUCE NEVER SAID THAT

[_Sprocket_]

He didn't literally say "The US is safer because of 9/11", but he did make the comments that post-9/11 terrorism is all about scale, and that it's harder to pull off a large scale terrorist act because of the threat of being caught.

Yes... that's the premise of Jennings' article. But is that the same thing as being safer?

First - you have to look at context. Schneier wasn't talking about a factor of safety. He was answering the self-imposed question "Why Aren't There More Terrorist Attacks?" [schneier.com] From Schneier's article:

As the details of the Times Square car bomb attempt emerge in the wake of Faisal Shahzad's arrest Monday night, one thing has already been made clear: Terrorism is fairly easy. All you need is a gun or a bomb, and a crowded target. Guns are easy to buy. Bombs are easy to make. Crowded targets -- not only in New York, but all over the country -- are easy to come by. If you're willing to die in the aftermath of your attack, you could launch a pretty effective terrorist attack with a few days of planning, maybe less.

But if it's so easy, why aren't there more terrorist attacks like the failed car bomb in New York's Times Square? Or the terrorist shootings in Mumbai? Or the Moscow subway bombings? After the enormous horror and tragedy of 9/11, why have the past eight years been so safe in the U.S.?

Note that he's saying these attacks are easy (arguably no less difficult than before 9/11 - though that's my conjecture, not his). And, in fact, he even lists attacks that happened after 9/11.

The kicker to Jennings' article is that it imposes a conclusion on someone else's work that was never made. If you go back and look at a lot of Schneier's writing, he often notes that terrorism is not and has never been a major threat. And certainly not the threat that the current crop of fear-mongers make it out to be. To take Scheier's article and conclude that there has been a drastic change in the environment is a step away from claiming that everything done in the name of combating terrorism has been effective. Something else that Scheier is constantly critical of in his writings.

This is like a game of telephone/Chinese whispers

[The Archon V2.0]

Bruce Schneier: Terrorism is hard, and 'topping' 9/11 in order to really impress their backers is harder.
Columnist: Bruce Schneier says 9/11 made us safer! But not really, that's how I interpret it!
Slashdot: Bruce Schneier says 9/11 made us safer! That's what he said!
Next iteration: Bruce Schneier is AN EVIL MUSLIM NAZI!

Re:LOL

[Daniel_Staal]

Actually, no, that's not what he's saying.

He's got several points, but the one the second article mangles is a two-parter: (A) A big attack like 9/11 is hard to organize and pull together successfully, without getting caught along the way. (Mostly due to old-fashioned police work, or just the fact that one of you suicide-attackers-in-training might come to the realization that they can actually live this life usefully. And that's assuming you managed to find enough of them in the first place.) (B) No smaller attack is likely to make an impression on the people you need to impress.

So, basically, he's saying is that terrorism has become an all-or-nothing proposition: Either you pull of something spectacular, or you fail. And the more spectacular you try to be, the more likely you are to fail before you get to the point where you pull anything off.

Re:Just under three thousand people would disagree

[toastar]

I think Germany after WW1 is a better example, Tell me again why we invaded Iraq/afganastan/pakistan? then maybe i could tell you why a native pakistani/american decide to attack us.

Re:Just under three thousand people would disagree

[kdemetter]

Well , in both cases ( WW I and WW II ) , they German people suffered heavily after the wars :

After WW I , there was an enormous inflation , and general poverty . That's actually one of the reason WW II started : the people had nothing , so they were easy to manipulate.

After WW II , the country was split up in two , with Western Germany leading a relatively acceptable life , but for Eastern Germany , it was centuries of suffer .

Re:LOL

[sumdumass]

I think you might be conflating several things into one and then scratching your head when you can't see the connections.

Umm, Iraq wasn't involved in 9/11 nor was there any credible evidence that Saddam was able to attack us in the US. Perhaps you might explain to the rest of us how that makes us safer. And while you're at it, you might consider explaining how the mission in Afghanistan is protecting us more than the alternative of cruise missiles to training camps would.

First, these are completely separate issues at hand. 9/11 was orchestrated by a group that was gaining safe harbor in Afghanistan. When we demanded the safe harbor to stop, we were told to go take a hike. This is pretty much an official support doctrine of the acts surrounding 9/11 which is why it was more then just training grounds. It meant that the government of Afghanistan was actively supporting Al Qeada and therefore supporting it's actions. In diplomacy, that is almost the same things as sending your military to destroy the twin towers except it carries an element of separation which can be attempted to be used as Plausible deniability to the ignorant. So any actions towards AQ would need to involve changing the leadership of Afghanistan to one that wouldn't sponsor terrorism or terrorist even if they remained unfriendly with the US. You mentioned Vietnam and one of the lessons learned there was how hostile support within the leadership can defeat the most valiant efforts. Another lesson which can be connected was that a defense only strategy doesn't work when it doesn't hit the enemy hard enough. Korea has a few different lessons which would have eventually played in too.

On the other hand, Iraq was in response to 9/11 in a more indirect way. At the time, all of the world believed Iraq had WMDs in defiance of the UN sanctions and armistice agreements that ended the first gulf war. This is pretty much undisputed until after the invasion when it turned out that Saddam was (he admitted it) making it appear that he still had WMDs because he was afraid his neighbors would invade if they saw him as being too week. So the indirect connection is that with a stock pile of WMDs, groups of people wanting to gain access to them to use against the US and it's allies, then his simple defiance had them became a major threat. In case you are still in the dark or purposely ignoring the threat, it was that he would give the weapons to people wanting to harm us or our allies and given the sanctuary that Afghanistan gave AQ which enabled and promoted their efforts for 9/11, allowing what we thought we knew to exist would result in another 9/11 to either US or our allies except with WMDs instead of jet airliners. Saddam has already at this time promised the families of Hammas suicide bombers a pension of $15 or $25k US after they blew themselves up. So it was not a stretch at all to believe he would aid them in other ways.

So it wasn't because Iraq had a part in 9/11, it was because after 9/11, we saw what doing nothing lead to. And yes, we had already been in diplomatic relations with Afghanistan before 9/11 to the tun of several billion dollars a year in aid and they still supported AQ before and after 9/11.

What we have done is dedicated a huge amount of resources to nebulous goals in parts of the world of little strategic value, without defining the victory conditions or making credible back up plans for the instance where we need to engage in combat elsewhere in the world. There may be something I'm missing here, but Sun Tzu was right on when he indicated that fighting wars far away for prolonged periods is a serious indicator of failure.

You cannot apply the art of war here in a literal sense. The problem is that the type of war is not expected to be won quickly in the first place. And yes, victory conditions have been defined, you simply do not want to accept them. The conditions are (for Iraq) when the Iraqi government is elected

Re:Just under three thousand people would disagree

[sumdumass]

You talked to him? Before or after?

I didn't need to. [jihadwatch.org]

All you have to do is pay attention to the news coverage over the issue and less attention to the talking heads putting out words to suit their agendas. Sure, the link was from an Agenda driven sight, but it's a quote from a NYT article.

Re:Just under three thousand people would disagree

[mindstrm]

Actually most of the world was behind the US when it came to going into Afghanistan and going after the Taliban & Osama after 9/11. People had no objections there, going after the people that attacked you and helped the attackers.

Iraq was a completely different, unrelated matter that had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11.

Re:Just under three thousand people would disagree

[Diantre]

Well the American companies who became pretty powerful thanks to an enforced monopoly on Europe were quite happy, I think. You have to remember that the Marshall plan wasn't just fun and games. Just a quick example: French cinema struggled after the war, since the Marshall plan demanded that at least 70% (I'm pulling this number from my memory, but it's in that range) of movies shown in France (this also applied to most of Europe) be American movies.

Re:No, just more paranoid

[HalAtWork]

Dude, there's crazy people out to cause destruction to get noticed for Reason X all the time. That's not something you can control. It's a fact you're going to have to live with.

Re:LOL - WMDs

[sumdumass]

The problem is the term "WMDs". It is a vague, political term that was introduced on purpose. The idea was to lump together nuclear weapons, which generate lots of fear and concern, with biological and chemical, which aren't in the same class.

Actually, no it wasn't a vague political term introduced on purpose. It may have been turned into that now when dealing with other nations but with concern to Iraq, it originated out of the list of prohibited weapons in the 1991 armistice agreement that brought the UN into jurisdiction. The term weapons of mass destruction was a technical terms that defined all of the prohibited weapons and weapons systems that Iraq agreed to not possess in order to stop the advancement of coalition forces after they invaded Kuwait.

Now I will agree that it has been used as a blank political terms when dealing with other nations who do not/did not have such agreements but with Iraq. For Clinton, Bush, and all of the rhetoric spewed over Iraq between them, allied nations, and their subordinates, it has a very specific and legally binding meaning. That's specifically why dual use items like aluminum tubes that could be used for commercial use or weapons use was considered a WMD.

We KNEW Iraq had chemical weapons because they used them publicly against the Kurds and Iranians. It was common knowledge, and WE DIDN'T CARE. They were little to no threat to the U.S. with those.

And as I said before, before 9/11, we saw things differently, after 9/11 we took a proactive approach instead of waiting until after something happened to point fingers. Let me ask you something, do you think it's not OK to change your mind or be concerned about some things after other events happen? I mean would you be out of line if you let your kids climb a tree in your back yard then forbid them from doing that after one of them falls out and seriously injures himself? The mark of humanity is learning from our past to make life better for us. Not climbing a rotting tree after someone is injured in it is the same as taking notice to Saddam's forbidden WMDs and the possibility of them getting into the hands of terrorists who pushed your kid out of the tree.

In other words, after some events happen, it's perfectly natural to care about shit that didn't bother you before.
And it's not like we didn't care at all, the Armistice wouldn't have banned their possesion of the weapons if we didn't care. We just didn't care enough to do much about it.

We KNEW they were working on biological weapons, but again they weren't much of a threat to the U.S. Certainly not enough to justify an invasion. Both chemical and biological have short shelf-lives and are fairly difficult to use effectively except on a battlefield.

See above, I think you are missing most of the history surrounding Iraq. It's convenient for you to do so because once the history is revealed, your argument loses a lot of ground. You are also missing the point where Saddam admitted to making it appear as if he had the WMDs and programs to produce the WMDs specifically because he was afraid that the neighboring countries he didn't treat too well would invade if they thought he was defenseless. So short shelf life or not, it's only an after the fact armchair reaction that can allow you to make those claims. Hans Blix, the UN weapons inspector cheif that claimed after the invasion that Iraq didn't have WMDs certainly presented it completely different in his reports to the UN the months before. Those reports are available if your interested in not remaining ignorant.

Nuclear we had NO credible intelligence that Iraq had any capability. What little we had was suspect, cherry picked, and refuted by several other, more credible sources.

Not really. It wasn't refuted, it was questioned which is completely different. I hope you arne't speaking of the Joe

Re:revisionist bullshit

[sumdumass]

You mean the same France who forwarded the fake nuclear report to the US? Or the France who was making secrete oil deals with Iraq that Violated UN Sanctions and stood to lose out on billions if we went to war with Iraq?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niger_uranium_forgeries [wikipedia.org]
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/11/AR2005101101384.html [washingtonpost.com]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil-for-Food_Programme#Criminal_investigation_in_France [wikipedia.org]

By the way, the conditions for victory for the "Iraq war" were to have the oil fields pumping for the profit of someone other than the corrupt iragis at the top of the stack - which has been recently accomplished with the assignment of contracts for a large majority of the larger Iraqi oilfields, Basra in particular.

That is something completely made up in your mind with absolutely no evidence to support it. Where do you think we are, in your preschool class with no access to the internet or anything?

Re:LOL

[sumdumass]

This is certainly cogent analysis, however I think you are missing two things in re Iraq. It's all well to say that Saddam "was making it appear that he had WMDs", but the fact that our intelligence community completely failed to pierce this deception stinks to high heavens. Intelligence is difficult but it's not impossible. What really get my hackles twitching is my perception not that we failed so much as that we gave it a very weak effort. Sort of a damned by faint praise situation. In other words, if we *really* wanted to know the truth, we could have. So why didn't we???

While I agree with your sentiment, I'm not sure it was as easy as you might think. We relied a lot on foreign inteligence sources because most all connections to the US would simply turn into a funnel of misinformation or roadblocks for the information. Remember the fiasco surrounding UN weapons inspectors and how many times they were removed from the country or locked down? Saddam was openly hostile to the US and we trusted a lot of our foreign intelligence sources. Perhaps we could have invested more money and effort but you have to realize the assumed need for that wasn't there until after the intelligence turned out to be sour. In other words, we didn't really see the need to get our guys more involved until "after" we found out what we know wasn't what was happening.

The other thing is that its all very smooth sounding and knowledgeable to claim to know all the dirty things Saddam was going to do, or had said he would do, etc., etc. And, sure, if you're going to throw dirt, it's always a good bet to throw it at a hated asshole like Saddam. But I say that looking at the history of Iraq, if I was Saddam, I might well feel pretty damn betrayed by the US, so why shouldn't I talk trash. We did betray him after all! Of course it's not "us" the people of the United States who betrayed him, but the United States Federal Government, a rogue entity that has as about as much to do with us as Kim Jong Il!

Please enlighten me on how we betrayed Saddam. Our support for him in the Iraq-Iran war was at the request of Kuwait and didn't amount to much as Iraq favored Soviet weapons.

Anyways, I wasn't attempting to justify the actions in Iraq, simply separating the two wars from each other and explain why they were connected to 9/11 but not necessarily because of involvement in 9/11.

Personally, I believe we should have gone in Iraq back in 1994-5 when the UN inspectors were first kicked out and they shot at our planes patrolling the no fly zone. I also believe that given the customs in the middle east where if someone is perceived as a pussy, they get disrespected all over the place verses when someone is perceived as strong, less risked are taken to piss them off, that if we wouldn't have presented ourselves as being week in our dealings with Iraq, 9/11 wouldn't have happened. It's interesting that when we captured the number two Al Qeada officer who played a large role in planning and executing 9/11, he said he had no idea that the US would retaliate the way they did. This is also backed up by former associates of Al Qaeda [nypost.com] and various other terrorist captured.

Re:Just under three thousand people would disagree

[WNight]

I hate when people think that both are for the same reason.

Of course. Afghanistan was wild flailing after 9/11 to appear useful and Iraq was a failed frame-up to take out a personal enemy. The reason many people confuse the two is that they were both started by GW Bush around the same time, in the same general area, and under false pretenses. It's an easy mistake, but they are distinct wars.

Back in the 70s and 80s, The leaders of iraq made and tested many weapons of mass destruction, including gases like mustard gas, tabun, botulin toxin and mycotoxin(wikipedia)

Sweet jesus, they tested wikipedia in the 80s?

And like, four or five decades after WW2 they were experimenting with the same toxic weapons we have. Wow, scary shit.

We knew Saddam was killing the Kurds (and others) by the tens of thousands and never cared, regardless of the weapon he used. Then suddenly and conveniently we did. Hmmm.

most of the people that live there still support osama bin laden.

I doubt that seriously, do you think they care more about politics than we do?

But if they did, wouldn't it make sense? From their perspective GW Bush flies in the marines and kidnaps half their family, who they next hear about in the context of Guantanamo Bay gulag. Osama's the one standing up to Bush so yeah, who would they support?

After all, they don't have Fox news telling them the truth!