9/11 Made Us Safer, Says Bruce Schneier 280
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."
Just under three thousand people would disagree... (Score:4, Insightful)
LOL (Score:4, Insightful)
Safer? How?
Shoe bomber... underwear dude... the recent SUV failure?
So much for the TSA... homeland security and all other billion dollar agencies created.
All it did was make ordinary people more aware.....
After the 9/11 attack... I don't think any plane will be hijacked and flown into a building as easily as before.
They have a new problem: the passengers.
I don't think we need these agencies when we have an aware public.
The terrorists attacked a way of life, and won.
BRUCE NEVER SAID THAT (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:BRUCE NEVER SAID THAT (Score:2, Insightful)
Exactly, he never said that, stupid journalist.
No, just more paranoid (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:LOL (Score:5, Insightful)
Did you even read the article? I know this is something despised around here, but you could at least pretend you tried. You even assert that we are more safer in your own post, after you say that we aren't. I'm not aware of any successful major terrorist attack after 9/11, if you do, will you please share it with us?
911 exposed one thing though (Score:1, Insightful)
Americans are not the strong cowboys we watch in the films but a bunch of cowards who cower and panic as soon as a middle eastern man says boo
Re:LOL (Score:4, Insightful)
I guess it made us safer in the same way y2k made our software date handling better. It prompted us to finally close some of the biggest holes We certainly are still getting it wrong much of the time though and in many instances the best cure we have managed to implement is much worse than the disease.
Re:Just under three thousand people would disagree (Score:5, Insightful)
9/11 also seemed to flare up a lot of deep-seeded racial profiling urges in a lot of people. Honestly I think we may be in a self-fulfilling prophecy scenario here.
Extremist groups of terrorists attack the country ->
The US gets very hard nosed to these terrorist groups creating an extremist backlash ->
Extremists groups of the US start treating anyone from a "threat country" as a second-class citizen ->
More citizens of that country at large become hostile towards the US in response ->
Extremist terrorist groups abroad grow in response.
Would you be particularly friendly to a foreign nation coming in and telling you how to run your government? Just curious.
Re:BRUCE NEVER SAID THAT (Score:1, Insightful)
Why NoSQL? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:BRUCE NEVER SAID THAT (Score:5, Insightful)
"If you're a representative of al-Qaida trying to make a statement in the U.S., it's much harder. You just don't have the people, and you're probably going to slip up and get caught."
If you actually read his words, he said that it's much harder to make a big statement terrorist-wise, because the longer it takes you to do it the more likely you are to get caught. 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.
NoSQL? Waittaminute (Score:5, Insightful)
If you don't have A.C.I.D., then you are in political hot-water if one slips away. It's one thing to lose a random face-book image, but a terrorism flag is another. A big-ass Oracle or IBM-DB2 can do the job if you pay enough for tuning.
Scalable NoSQL (Score:1, Insightful)
> Couldn't someone volunteer to show them how to implement a reliable, scalable, NoSQL setup?
First such a thing would need to exist.
Re:BRUCE NEVER SAID THAT (Score:2, Insightful)
That was one of several possibilities he proposed in response to the original question (why no attacks?)
There, he's basically saying that 9/11 changed the equation, which is a statement we can discuss rationally. But instead we get a bunch of responses to the emotion-laden headline.
Re:NoSQL? Waittaminute (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Just under three thousand people would disagree (Score:5, Insightful)
We've lost sight of the fact that the money we're flushing down the toilet on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and TSA bullshit could be much better spent on other things. Such as crime prevention programs, education and making various corporations live up to necessary safety standards. More people have died in the last 9 years in non-terrorist plane crashes than in terrorist cause plane crashes. While that doesn't suggest that we can rest on our laurels, what it does suggest is that perhaps the money would be better spent in other ways. Fixing real problems rather than pushing them elsewhere. Especially efforts that blatantly violate the US constitution.
Re:LOL (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
This is largely the same problem we had in Vietnam and Korea, where there was a secondary war going on, which we weren't particularly involved in, which kept our troops in the crossfire. Such wars rarely if ever go well, and the lack of interest in the higher levels of the DoD and Federal government to commit resources we don't have to the mission at hand does not indicate that we're likely to make a meaningful positive difference.
Huh? (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't see what's curious about it.
Did the Japanese attack on pearl Harbor make the US less vulnerable to surprise attack by carrier-borne aircraft? Of course it did - from that point onwards.
Perhaps the submitter thinks the attacks should have somehow prevented themselves, which as far as I'm aware violates causality.
Re:Just under three thousand people would disagree (Score:2, Insightful)
While I agree entirely with your Iraq/Afghanistan points, I'm compelled to point out the fallacy of one of your logical conclusions regarding the statistic "More people have died in Non-Terrorist plane crashes, than terrorist ones." Doesn't that imply that, perhaps, those safety measures HAVE worked? Consider this: Imagine that a year prior to September 11, 2001, there was a sweeping measure to bolt lock all of cockpit doors. September 11 comes, and goes. 9 years later we hear you opine that "Spending billions of dollars over the past decade on bolting doors on airplanes has been a waste of money." Citing the fact that there have been 0 terrorist attacks, and impacting the point by saying more people died in accidents. Your fallacy, sir, is failure to consider the affects of the UNSEEN.
Re:Just under three thousand people would disagree (Score:1, Insightful)
Your fallacy, sir, is failure to consider the affects of the UNSEEN.
Hah! I'm lucky I did not fall into this trap and my anti-raptor perfume that I bought of the net has kept me safe from the unseen but grave threat of genetically-engineered dinosaurs invading my home!
Re:I buy it (Score:1, Insightful)
Well, skipping from the 10th to the 12th would probably be more helpful in that regard :)
Re:Just under three thousand people would disagree (Score:4, Insightful)
Can we please try to avoid making emotional appeals in place of logical arguments? Letting emotions win over logic in a casino makes you lose money, letting emotions win over logic when lives are at stake makes you lose lives. Maybe if we had some cold hard rationality in the government we wouldn't have sent any soldiers over to the Middle East at all.
Re:LOL (Score:3, Insightful)
In the 10 years BEFORE 9/11, there was only one in the US (Oklahoma City), so the sample is too small to make any conclusions.
(outside the US there have been plenty of successful terrorist attacks since 9/11, including the London and Madrid train bombings)
Re:Just under three thousand people would disagree (Score:2, Insightful)
This most recent "Times Square Bomber" is a good example of this. In the part of Pakistan where he's from and has been visiting (so I understand), there has been a lot of civilian death due to Predator drones. The US military so loves to use these drones, which while preventing US casualties often kill a lot of people that they don't even bother finding out the names of the people they are targeting. At first, they'd have a list of high-value targets and then send in the drones. Now, they're finding houses where terrorists are said to live and send down a drone without even knowing anything specific about the people in the house (or in the houses next door).
The extremists (and even some not-so-extremists) in Pakistan are getting a lot of attention by showing video of the carnage from the Predators on Pakistani television, which of course creates a lot more extremists. The guy who tried to blow up the truck in Times Square didn't fit any of the current profiles used for this kind of bomber. He was educated, from a well-off family and had a good career in the US. His political extremism developed in a relatively short time, coinciding with a trip back to Pakistan that was supposed to be a short visit and then became something else.
No matter how well-balanced and mentally healthy you are, images of innocent people getting creamed from an unmanned drone operated by someone maybe thousands of miles away, can send you over the edge. I'm not sure a lot of Americans wouldn't react differently. Look at what constant bombardment with images of dead fetuses can do to someone whose religious beliefs make them anti-abortion. You can go from wearing a pro-life button to pulling a trigger on an OB-GYN doctor pretty quickly.
Regardless of my feelings about President Obama, I give him credit for toning down the "War on Terror" rhetoric. Even though some Americans would love to hear him talking about the "Axis of Evil" and "Muslim Terror", etc, that stuff's not just for consumption at home. Some young muslim male seeing some US general talking about how "my god is bigger than your god" and how we ought to just nuke Iran might get the impression that his life, his family, his faith is being threatened by the US. I'm not saying that killing civilians with a car bomb is justified, just that it doesn't hurt to understand where it comes from. It's a very complicated problem, and success on our part might require doing the opposite of what would satisfy the human desire for revenge.
Whatever the effect of the less bellicose tone from the White House, something is being done right since we're not seeing planes smashing into skyscrapers or big chunks of the Pentagon being blown up. It seems that the terrorists who do get through aren't all that good at what they do. If at the end of 8 years we've seen dozens of failed bombing attempts, that seems to be preferable to three successful attempts that kill thousands. Further success is going to take very cool heads thinking very carefully about the consequences of continuing the deadly cycle of attack/reaction/blowback.
Re:Hah! (Score:3, Insightful)
Not to mention that terrorists are the least of our worries. Wall Street and the government printing presses are going to accomplish what the terrorists haven't yet been able to.
Safer? What are these people smoking????? (Score:3, Insightful)
So how, pray tell, are we any "safer" by any measure any rational human being would entertain?
Is this yet again another fine example of how government wishes to manipulate us by fear of the paper lion? When car travel comes anywhere close to being as safe as air travel, then we might entertain these stats again.
The sad fact is, even if there were a 9/11-level incident every year, driving would still be far more dangerous.
Oh, but our friendly little government will seize upon any chance to yank more freedom away from us. Bush, Obama -- makes no difference. Remember that when they have all of those T-ray body scanners in every airport that will render you, your wife, and your kids nude to some pervert in a room nearby.
But I guess idiots love a false sense of security, I suppose.
Thank you Bush and Obama!
Re:Just under three thousand people would disagree (Score:5, Insightful)
Doesn't that imply that, perhaps, those safety measures HAVE worked?
No. The reason it doesn't is because terrorism is fungible. The terrorists aren't going to say, "Damn the cockpits are bolted closed, I'm just going to pray instead!" They will just find some other target. The fact that the only significant attack was the fort hood shootings - when there are hundreds of thousands of other soft targets - suggests that the risk really isn't there.
Re:Just under three thousand people would disagree (Score:3, Insightful)
Good sentiment and nice liberal touch but sadly your accounting doesn't favor reality.
Faisal Shahzad said his reasons for attempting the bombing was because of slew of deaths among leaders of the terror group ehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan. So it isn't the deaths of innocent civilians that took him to evil, it was the deaths of leaders mixed in with the evil that brainwashed him in the first place.
Whether or not this was sparked by a bombardment of images of the enemy dieing is sort of a moot point. In any war, there will be enemies and there will be enemies dieing. The only difference between this and letting them mind their own way is that they would be showing images of us dieing instead of them dieing. Call me conservative or one of those right wing nut jobs, but allowing them to kill us instead of us killing them is simply not acceptable. Allowing them to harbor and promote those not only wanting to but actually killing our citizens is simply not acceptable. Now, I understand that doesn't jibe with the liberal mindset but I'm not sure all that many people care. We cannot all just get along when they do not want to in the first place.
Re:Just under three thousand people would disagree (Score:3, Insightful)
Or the Philippines, or Thailand, or Kashmir, or India, or Indonesia, or Nigeria, or Israel, or Saudi Arabia, or Egypt, or Morocco, or Algeria, or Chechnya, of Dagastan (sp?), or Russia, or Pakistan, or Afghanistan, or Somalia, or Spain, or Britain.
Now, for the big question, what do all these cases have in common? Think hard now? Which well-adjusted, 21st century group of like-minded homicidal maniacs has a problem with the people living in these areas?
Re:I buy it (Score:1, Insightful)
Cooperation and appeasement with criminals was just as idiotic an idea then, as it is now.
No. It wasn't. It was a calculation based on statistics. Few hijackings happened at all - security measures at airports got to the point where it was really damn difficult even pre-9/11 to smuggle a weapon onto the plane. When they did happen the priority became "keeping people alive" - the hijacker was going to be able to kill a hostage faster than the people on the plane could take him down, and doing what he wanted meant that everyone lived. That's a good reason to just go along with him and keep everyone alive.
9/11 changed the statistics. Now doing what the hijackers has a very large probability that everyone on the plane will die anyway, so if he kills a hostage while the rest of the plane is jumping him it's a loss, but better than the alternative where everyone dies. That just wasn't the case with pre-9/11 hijackings and so it made perfect sense from a cost-benefit standpoint to just do what the hijacker wanted.
Your analogy to day-to-day crime is completely specious, BTW - if a criminal broke into my house and had my wife at knifepoint and demanded my wallet in exchange for her life, I'd give it to him. I wouldn't try jumping him because he'd probably kill my wife. But if it became clear he was going to hurt her anyway regardless of what I do, I'd risk it on the chance that I could save her life. If the situation changes you change how you react to it. That's all it is - keeping everyone alive and unharmed is more important than anything else, so you do what you can in that regard and you worry about the rest of it once the danger has passed.
I would feel very safe if (Score:1, Insightful)
I don't have to remove my shoes in public.
I don't have to be body scanned in public.
I don't have to be told how much after shave I can carry in my bag.
I don't have to witness old women and wheelchair bound people put through the ringer at the airport.
I don't have to worry about what I have packed for the next flight out of town to fix a server.
I don't have to worry about setting up a remote server just so I don't have to deal with the hassles of carrying a laptop on the plane.
I don't have to spend two hours before a flight just so security checks can take place at their pace.
I don't have to spend an extra night at the terminal just because one flight attendant miscounted number of passengers on the plane.
I don't have to see yet another news item "terror" and "fear" in the skies.
I don't have to pay extra per ticket to fund these gestapo ideas.
I don't have to show my ID just to go buy coffee in the basement of my office building.
Re:Just under three thousand people would disagree (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:LOL (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Just under three thousand people would disagree (Score:5, Insightful)
Absolutely.
If terrorism was such a threat to the US, there would have been hundreds of minor, soft-target attacks on US soil. There are dozens of ways I can think of, off the top of my head, for a single individual to kill dozens/hundreds of americans without actually putting their life at risk. Why aren't terrorists leaving cars packed with explosives outside of Starbucks, daycare centers, shopping malls, sporting events and any other place where people routinely go? Why haven't suicide bombers run screaming into the HUGE crowds that are waiting to get through the security checkpoints at airports?
I'll tell you why: There simply just isn't an interest in doing that kind of thing. Or, I should say, not much of an interest. Right now, if I wanted to - if I really had a bug up my ass and was willing to do something about it - I could go out and kill dozens to hundreds of people - for less than $200 bucks by renting a car and plowing into a crowd of people on a busy sidewalk in my city. The fact that we don't have people doing this kind of thing *at all (except for maybe Fort Hood)* let alone all the time shows me exactly how much of a threat terrorism isn't.