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Sci-fi Writers Join War on Terror
yoyoq writes "Homeland Security is looking for suggestions from sci-fi writers. "Looking to prevent the next terrorist attack, the Homeland Security Department is tapping into the wild imaginations of a group of self-described "deviant" thinkers: science-fiction writers."
Here's a suggestion: 9-11 could have been prevented with locks on the cockpit door."
Here's a suggestion: 9-11 could have been prevented with locks on the cockpit door.
Everyone's a snide little clever genius after the fact.
Here's a suggestion: no, it could not have been prevented with locks on the cockpit door. It would have likely been a somewhat different attack, but it still would have happened.
Meanwhile, people still catch colds despite having a supply of tissue in the house.
Here's an idea, why not stop wasting time on this sort of, headline grabbing, nonsense and sort out the existing agencies who are supposed to be responsible for this sort of thing so they can gain some actual intelligence about what the terrorists are actually planning and actually do something to stop that.
If Homeland Security really are trying to think of more innovative solutions they might consider putting a stop to some of the activities the US is or has been involved in which tend to increase the number of available terrorists wanting to attack it. This might involve stopping the CIA kidnapping people and taking them off to be tortured, stop starting pointless wars and stop interfering in other countries in order to install regimes that suit your own purposes.
Our sense of risk is so badly out of whack that we're just being ridiculous--it isn't even hysteria anymore, not after this many years. We're being suckered by a sensationalistic media working in cohorts with government, which always, always wants more power. I'd say it was shocking if I could even muster any surprize at how stupid we're being over this.
This group is a professinal think tank, those in the picture all look over 55, and to be a member you need a technical doctorate degree. How much of a "deviant" thinker or "rebel" can they really be? Aren't people that come up with the most inventive and "crazy" ideas a bit younger? I like the idea of employing think tanks, it shows initiative which is vital, but if they really want some results I think they're going to have to attract a different set of thinkers.
How about a sane foreign policy? Like cockpit locks, it won't prevent all terrorist attacks, but less bullying and more actual diplomacy will help. It also wouldn't hurt to examine economic policies and disproportionate consumption of resources. America is a colonial power by fiat and as long as that is so, there will continue to be terrorists.
The sci-fi angle is just silliness, in my opinion.
People are totally innumerate and they overreact to rare, dramatic events. Everyone went nuts over the VT tragedy because it was "the worst school shooting in history" even though it only killed 30+ people. That's less than an average day's worth of gun deaths, or about six hours of car accidents. Now it's almost six years later and people are still overreacting to 9/11. I mean, 3000 deaths in one day and at the same place is impressive, but it still totals to just one month of car accidents. Think of how miserable we've made ourselves since then. Was it worth it?
Asking "whether the next 9/11 can be prevented" is a dumb question to try to answer. It's like "how do we prevent the next car accident?" The sort of questions we should be asking sound cold and calculating, which is unfortunate because it keeps us from asking them:
- Is it possible to reduce the number of terrorist attacks?
- Is it possible to reduce the number of terrorist attacks to zero?
- What is the probability per year that a terrorist act might affect you?
- What is the probability per year that our self-flagellating counterterrorism efforts might affect you?
- Since 9/11, how many additional hours of your life have been spent in airports?
- How many years of your life have been spent as a soldier overseas?
- How many years of your life have been lost as a soldier overseas?
- Is terrorism even something most of us worry about personally anymore?
It's unfortunate that we have created security monsters like TSA that simultaneously don't work and would be political suicide to get rid of.
My own idea for "preventing the next VT tragedy" was to crack down on the manufacturers of doors, not the sellers of handguns. If it were illegal to manufacture doors with closed loops in their handles, the guy wouldn't have been able to chain the door shut.
Yes, but it's a lot easier to declare war on a concept that (more or less by definition) you can't beat by shooting at than it is to solve world hunger and abolish inequality over the entire planet.
Or, to put it another way (for those who still think the US is doing well in Iraq): Think of terrorism like a vicious, unpredictable animal that wants to attack you. That's easy enough. But there's a twist: it gets stronger every time you shoot at it, bomb it or do anything violent towards it. Why are you still shooting at it?
As TFA notes, the 9/11 commission said the attacks were a result, in part, of the government's "failure of imagination". SF writers, unlike some beltway bureaucrats and politicians, aren't lacking in that, at least.
I think that comment very often gets taken out of context in order to justify exotic anti-terrorism schemes. It wasn't a "failure of imagination" in the sense that nobody in their wildest dreams thought that it could happen. I mean, let's face it, there's nothing far fetched about smuggling weapons onto a plane. That's why they have metal detectors at the gates. There's nothing far fetched about hijacking a plane. That's happened dozens, if not hundreds of times, in the past 30-40 years. There's nothing far-fetched about suicide bombers. They blow themselves up on a daily basis in the middle east. There's nothing far fetched about attacking the WTC. That had already happened once. The only "failure in imagination" is the failure to believe that terrorists would combine their most effective and well-known tactics into a single act.
But the worst part is that the "failure of imagination" wasn't the reason that 9/11 happened. It was the failure to prevent people from smuggling weapons onto planes and hijacking them that allowed 9/11 to happen, and those are threats that have been around for a very long time.
It's like Bruce Schneier has said many times, if you're spending time and effort in trying to prevent hollywood movie-style terrorist attacks instead of the routine, more effective (and much more likely) types of attacks, then you're probably wasting your time and resources. We're far more likely to end up with car bombs blowing up bridges or suicide bombers blowing themselves up at shopping malls than we are to end up with some exotic antrhax-infected mutant sharks with laserbeams. Hell, a handful of Beslan-style school attacks executed simultaneously across the US would probably have as big of an impact as 9/11 (look what happened with the relatively minor Virginia Tech incident), and it would probably be easier to implement too.
"...But there's a twist: it gets stronger every time you shoot at it, bomb it or do anything violent towards it. Why are you still shooting at it?..."
Very simple! Our jobs depend on there being a vicious animal that wants to attack us. This was fine during the 60s, 70s and 80s, and we had good job prospects. We got lots of established government funds.
Then, in the 90s, our vicious animal suddenly died on us. We were stuck. We weren't just going to quietly retire. We tried to invent drug barons, organised crime, and minor foreign countries as a new vicious animal, but it wasn't the same.
Now we have Islam! If we had been clever, we could have encouraged this ourselves, and paid Osama to crash those planes. We probably didn't, not because we wouldn't, but because we didn't have the foresight. But now it's happened, we're back in clover.
And we're damn well not going to mess this one up. It's going to last a long time, just like the Russian animal. Have you noticed how we insist that speeches are made stressing that this willl be a 'long haul'? Too right. We're not stupid. Everyone told us that invading Iraq would make things worse. Why do you think we did it?
Well, this is certainly a good brute-force approach. The problem, of course, is that there are a lot of vulnerable places. Schools, shopping malls, stadia, airplanes, hospitals, large buildings, bridges, factories, food processing plants, ports, power plants, electrical grid, network control centers... and the list goes on. So that means millions of guards. Possibly tens of millions. Assuming you're actually going to protect vulnerable places with well-trained guards. In a modern technological densely-populated society, that's a lot of places to protect.
Now if you want well-trained, highly competent guards, you're going to have to pay them more than the typical rent-a-cop rates. That'll be expensive. You'll have to arm them (with at least non-lethal weapons).
Let's say you only need 2.5 million guards in North America. (well under 1% of the population). Of course, they only work 40 hours a week, so you're looking at just over 4 shifts. OK, 10 million guards. Well-trained, highly competent, so you'll probably have salaries of around 50k, and support infrastructure and overhead that doubles that. 100k/year. That's a trillion dollars a year.
Is that really the best way to improve security? I can think of a lot of ways other than spending a trillion dollars on 'well trained guards in [all] vulnerable places'.
And you'll have something much closer to a police state -- either they'll be government guards or corporate guards.
And if you miss just one vulnerable place, then the approach fails. No, I'd rather apply intellect and thought to the problem rather than try and brute force it. I'm not sure the SF writers are the way to go, but I think it's a lot better than going the police state road and spending a trillion a year for the privilege.
-Holmwood
I'm not a Sci-fi writer but here is what I suggest:
Hello! We are not in a movie or a video game. We live in The Real World. People realy die, people realy suffer. We can't just rewind the movie or restart the game.
If you don't want someone to hurt you, don't be his enemy.