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Bruce Schneier Blasts Politicians, Media
An anonymous reader writes, "In his latest newsletter, security author Bruce Schneier delivered a scathing critique of politicians and the media for promoting fear and ultimately doing exactly what the terrorists want. Citing several cases of false alarms, Schneier writes: 'Our politicians help the terrorists every time they use fear as a campaign tactic. The press helps every time it writes scare stories about the plot and the threat... Our job is to think critically and rationally, and to ignore the cacophony of other interests trying to use terrorism to advance
political careers or increase a television show's viewership.' Are the terrorists laughing at us?"
Dissent gets stifled using anti-terror legislation... government fuck-ups get buried beneath terror headlines... people are given an enemy, and a reason to be obedient. Terrorism makes it easy for politicians to get their own way. Considering the mind-bogglingly small impact of terrorism, why wouldn't they want to encourage it?
I mean, remember the ban on LIQUIDS and GELS on US aircraft? Despite all the improvised explosives experts stating how freakin' hard it would be to succssfully hide and then deploy explosives packaged in a tube of hair gel or other consumer packing?
Yeah, they're probably laughing. As we slowly give up our freedoms and rights bit by bit for some safety that nobody can prove we actually have.
I can quantify the infringements on my rights and freedom...can you quantify how much safer we are?
Blar.
The surest defense against terrorism is to refuse to be terrorized. Our job is to recognize that terrorism is just one of the risks we face, and not a particularly common one at that. And our job is to fight those politicians who use fear as an excuse to take away our liberties and promote security theater that wastes money and doesn't make us any safer.
I'm more afraid of the politicians than I am of the terrorists. I can't refuse to be terrorized by them, however.
Your sig(k) has been stolen. There is a puff of smoke!
He's naive if he thinks that the politicians don't realize that. Fear mongering serves politicians' interests as well -- especially if you'd like to exert more control over the public.
The owls are not what they seem
Here's what the terrorists care about:
1) they don't want the US to have such economic and political power over their countries
2) they are pretty miffed that the US supports Israel
3) some of them want Islam to be the dominant religion all over the world
4) they don't like the US propping up regimes that suppress their brand of religion
5) they don't like the US propping up regimes that treat their citizens inhumanely
6) they want to be taken seriously
7) they want to act on equal terms with the West
They don't care whether or not we are squandering our freedoms. That is a cop-out and jingoism that makes it seem like there are all these external forces that are causing us to give up our freedoms. It's a way of appealing to our nationalist nature instead of our patriotic nature.
We are losing our freedoms because we are letting it happen. Period. This has nothing to do with terrorism or terrorist wishes except that politicians on both sides use appeals to our emotions to take those freedoms away on the one hand and to lamely protest their usurpation on the other.
I have no analogy for this. It doesn't need one. So why do all these pundits keep spouting these hackneyed bad analogies? Because they don't think you're any smarter than that.
I think you're smart enough to see through it. It is my fervent hope that we (the true intellectual elite) can move this country forward without jingoism and without nationalism, racism, and religious intolerance.
What surprises me is that more people aren't speaking up like Schneier. It seems to me that the role of the press and politicians in promoting terror is very much like that of oxygen and fuel in promoting fire.
If you don't feed the spark, it goes out.
If you doubt this, look at other, more important issues (affecting much more than a few thousand people) that routinely die out in the press because they're ignored.
Not to hijack the thread, I'll give a tiny sample, and ask politely that you don't reply to the examples, just to the general principle
* Voting machine irregularities and bad faith at Diebold
* Retraction of whistleblower protections in the US Federal Government
* Increasing exemptions to the US FOIA
* FCC regulation changes making it possible for 2 media giants to completely control any given local market.
The impact of these little stories is far more interesting than which 10 or 100 people will be killed by a terrorist attack someday. As someone just recently put it, more people are killed every year by peanut allergies than by global terrorism.
The War on Peanuts awaits.
Those who would give up freedom in exchange for security, deserve neither.
Spoken like someone who doesn't fly internationally for a living.
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We have followed this advice in USENET for quite some time. Don't feed the troll, it's what they want. (Terrorists are just real world trolls if you think about it)
Those who would give up freedom in exchange for security, deserve neither.
Yet it's amazing how often those of us who think this way get called "pussies" or worse by conservatives who themselves are hiding under their beds trembling in fear, begging Daddy Government to please take all of our rights and liberties if that's what it takes to keep the Boogie Man at bay for one more night.
Makes you wonder who the real "pussies" are...
To give a more complete answer to your rant, terrorism related, or rather "anti"-terrorism related news has become news for nerds. As technicially competant educated people, with not a small sprinkling of intellectual, Slashdotters are more likely to be aware of and engaged in the civil liberties debate, especially when it concerns technology being used to "save us".
1984 crops up in discussions a lot. That's because a lot of people on these boards have actually read the book. There's not a lot of internet forums you can say that about. Slashdotters are interested in what is happening to free society in the wake of the twin towers' collapse, even if you are not. To cap it all off, Bruce Schneier is a computer security super geek. His words carry weight.
As an aside, I'm willing to bet that a big factor in Slashdotters interest and in general opposition to anti-terrorism legislation, is the fact that many here had a hard time in secondary education and would rather not be stamped on again in the emerging neo-facist society. Once you've tasted the lash, you won't be so eager for flogging as others.
May the Maths Be with you!
- How many Americans died from terrorist attacks in 2001?
- How many Americans died from natural disasters in 2001?
- Where did the government spend more money keeping us safe?
If you want some help answering these questions, see this article.I'm not trying to lessen the seriousness of 9/11. It was a very serious attack that demanded our attention. However, there are lots of other serious issues that also demand our attention.
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Some people are enough losers to deserve a second o, 'cause they invariably lose the first.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I point the responsibility towards the people who are succumbing to these notions of fear and submitting their rights to the government in exchange for peace of mind. I was having dinner with my parents the other night, and my mother, who had MSNBC on in the background, was preaching GWB and how the war on terrorism was going to work and bring democracy to Iraq.
I suggested to my mother that Iraq might very well be the victim of a strong power vaccuum once (or if) the US ever removes its presence completely from the region. My mother countered by saying that wont happen if we set up their democracy correctly. I asked her why we're setting up their democracy for them. She said it was because they deserved it. I said that may be well and true, but you can not lead someone who lacks their own motivation into a battle and then leave. The will and effort to change the government has to come from the people oppressed by that government, not someone else egging them on for change. That is not a true foundation for that people's government.
Also its my mothers belief that democracy will eradicate all terrorist activity. She said once all countries have a democracy that everything would be harmonic and peaceful. I countered by asking about countries with democracies that chose not to go to Iraq with the US and she countered by saying those countries didn't know any better. I then suggested that a government such as ours and a democratic but Muslim-faith-based government may never see eye-to-eye. She retracted to her previous point of democracy being able to eliminate all internal terrorism. I then name-dropped Tim McVeigh as proof of that theory.
My mom is one of many people who believe warrantless wire-tapping is fine. She says she has nothing to hide. I asked her to tell me her current checking account balance. She got angry and told me no. I asked why she would give me that information and she replied it was none of my business. Then I asked her to tell me about all the phone calls she made last month to anyone who wasn't in our family. She told me again it was none of my business. I asked her why it was none of my business yet she had no problem letting the government know all of that information?
She got this nasty look on her face and told me GWB is going to save this country.
Yay.
1 ticket to Canada, please.
Apologies for spelling and grammar.
Those who believe the Internet is private,
find their privates are on the Internet.
You mean those British guys with no plane tickets, no passports, and no workable plan? Thank God we got those bastards!
Then again, even though those guys did not have a way to make a workable bomb, they did manage to get my three year old daughter frisked and her lip gloss confiscated when we flew recently.
Did we win this one?
A few years ago, the US Dept of Homeland Security was advising people to buy plastic sheeting and duct tape to seal their houses against chemical weapons.
I'm a Canadian who works in the US. I'm also a former Regular Force soldier who is now a Reservist. Part of my baliwick at one point was unit Chemical Warfare Officer.
So I come to work the day after that particular announcement was made, and I find a group of my co-workers discussing a plan for the one guy who owns a pickup truck to stop off at Home Depot and stock up on plastic sheeting and duct tape. The plan was to buy in bulk, and they were working out the details for how much to buy, how to deliver it, etc etc.
I wound up delivering a little ad-hoc class on the properties of chemical weapons to about 30 people, the high points of which were:
1) Yes, modern chemical weapons are ludicrously lethal. Exposure to as little as a pinhead-sized drop of certain nerve agents can kill you, which means that a litre of agent has the potential to kill hundreds of thousands of people.
2) The *reason* that these agents are so stupidly toxic is that **DELIVERY** of agent is really serious problem. It is so difficult to arrange exposure of soldiers to agent AT ALL that you need tiny exposures to be incapacitiating or the stuff just doesn't work. If you have (say) 300,000 lethal doses in a litre of agent, try getting a lethal dose of that agent to 300,000 people - it's a nontrivial problem.
3) The people who invested most heavily in this equipment (the USSR and the USA) had access to MONSTER delivery systems, and the targets were expected to be densely packed. We're talking hundreds of tubes of artillery, and aircraft-based delivery systems that for all intents and purposes were giant crop dusters. We're not talking a couple of litres of agent here; we're talking about tanker-truck quantities.
4) The primary military objective of chemical weapons isn't to kill the enemy; they are a nucience and area denial weapon. As soon as you deliver a chemical strike, you force everybody in the area to get into their protective gear - bunny suit, gas mask, "Boots, Rubber, Clumsy" which is a serious pain in the ass and interferes with combat effectiveness. A chemical strike can channel the enemy, slow him down, induce fatigue and stress, forces him to take time to decomtaminate - but it rarely inflicts serious casulties.
5) The golden example of this is the Sarin attack on the Japanese subway a few years ago. Of all the places in the world to do a chemical strike, that's the best - stupid high population density maximizes the exposure pur unit volume of agent, limited ventallation reduces the amount of agent burned off, few exits maximizes the time the target is spent exposed to agent, and the agent itself was reasonably modern.
It SHOULD have been a slaughterhouse, according to conventional wisdom. But in reality, the amount of casulties due to agent was tiny; they inflicted more casulties through panic and stampeding than due to agent exposure.
Chemical weapons JUST DON'T WORK unless delivered in huge volumes - and the ability to deliver in huge volumes is limited to large, well-equipped state armies. A chemical strike is well down the list of potential threats to the civillian populace.
A skilled and motivated sniper is far, far more dangerous than a dozen nutballs with a litre of VX.
The fact that the Department of Homeland Security was advising people to buy plastic sheeting to protect themselves against chemical attack is completely ludicrous... and while I have a hard time buying into anybodies' tinfoil-hat conspriracy theories (never assume malevolance where stupidity will serve) that sure looks like fear-mongering to me.
DG
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by Robert Blumen
We are living in Brazil. The future as foretold by Terry Gilliam's 1985 rich and multi-layered film masterpiece Brazil is upon us. First released fifteen years ago, Terry Gilliam's Brazil was astonishingly accurate in forecasting political trends. In a previous essay, I examined the film as a critique of socialist central planning. In this piece, I will discuss how Brazil portends Bush's War on Terror.
The world of Brazil shows a totalitarian society in which freedom has been forfeited for a false promise of protection from terrorist attacks. Gilliam shows how the threat of terrorism is manipulated by the state as a means of political control over the population. The threat of terror is created by the internal security police in order to generate public acceptance of totalitarian police powers.
Gilliam's exposition raises some important questions: Is the terror created by the power of the state in the alleged pursuit of terrorism worse than the terrorism itself? And are they really any different?
The ministers of state in Brazil have succeeded in creating a society organized around a continuous response to the threat of terrorism. Random bombings occur regularly. The protagonist Sam and his mother must go through a security check in order to enter a restaurant. And then during their meal a large explosion blows out the back of the dining room; they continue eating while bodies are dragged away.
As in modern America, there is some doubt about whether Brazil's "War on Terrorism" is really working. At the opening of the film Minister Helpmann, the Deputy Minister of information (the internal security agency), appears on TV immediately after a bombing takes place:
INTERVIEWER: Do you think that the government is winning the battle against terrorists?
HELPMANN: Oh yes. Our morale is much higher than theirs, we're fielding all their strokes, running a lot of them out, and pretty consistently knocking them for six. I'd say they're nearly out of the game.
INTERVIEWER: But the bombing campaign is now in its thirteenth year.
HELPMANN: Beginner's luck.
Now in the US, we are told by the Bush administration that the war on terrorism will become a more or less permanent state of affairs.
U.S. war may last decades
Military pushed to think broadly
By KAREN MASTERSON
WASHINGTON - The U.S. war on terrorism may rage for decades and has forced Pentagon strategists to think more broadly than they've had to since World War II, a top military official said Sunday.
"The fact that it could last several years, or many years, or maybe our lifetimes would not surprise me," Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Sunday on ABC's This Week.
The film has been reissued on DVD with commentary by the director in which he states that it was his intention to convey that there were so many government plants, double agents, agents provocateurs, moles, infiltrators, etc. that at some point even the government did not know for sure whether there were any real terrorists or whether all of the terror was fabricated by the police as part of their anti-terror campaign.
In a conversation between Sam and Ministry of Information office Jack Lint, Lint reveals how he - as a key member of the internal security department - understands the events that are taking place:
SAM: You don't really think Tuttle and the g
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