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Engineers Make Good Terrorists?
An anonymous reader writes "Engineers' focus and attention to details, along with their perceived lack of social skills, make them ideal targets to be recruited as terrorists, according to EETimes. Planning skills make engineers good 'field operatives' was written up by Raphael Perl, who heads the Action against Terrorism Unit of Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. He offers that 'Engineers ideally make excellent strategic planners, and they make excellent field operatives. They think differently from how other people think.' That may sound like a stereotype, but Perl claims that 'because of those traits, terrorist groups actively recruit engineers.' He says that Al-Qaeda has widely acknowledged that a significant number of the group's top leadership had engineering backgrounds." This is the second time in just a few months that engineers have been likened to terrorists.
We've been tapping engineers for our cause ever since Counterstrike came out.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
...but alas I'm an engineer, not a lawyer. :(
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
We should flood these terrorist groups with engineers and let them improve all their weapons. Afterwards, they'll have pieces left over and nothing will work. Isn't there some saying about "give an engineer a broken computer and he'll give you a working radio"?
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
With a name like Perl, this man is well-suited to discuss the link between coding and terror.
Also, if you read TFA, he goes on to state that "laziness, impatience, and hubris" are the three virtues of a good terrorist.
P.S. Christ, what has happened to Slashdot's page layout today?? The goggles do nothing!
Breakfast served all day!
I hate these articles, but I can't decide if I hate them because they're intellectual snobbery (not only are we better than physicists, mathematicians, chemists, etc, we're also superlative terrorists!) or I hate them because they're anti-intellectual (Engineers are all smart and anti-social, therefore they're basically the unabomber).
Basically anyone who is methodical and knowledgeable would make a good X, where X is something that needs a methodical knowledgeable person. Engineers are required to be methodical and knowledgeable, so QED.
I don't know why they're so damn fixated on engineers though. Doesn't take an engineer to slam a plane into a building, and that's about the most successful piece of terrorism to date.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Reminds me of the quote in Wargames: "He does fit the profile perfectly. He's intelligent, but an under-achiever; alienated from his parents; has few friends. Classic case for recruitment by the Soviets"
That engineers plan things well should be no surprise. Engineers as a group design everything from bridges to sports stadiums to computer chips. They try to find a good balance of expected average need, overbuild and contingency performance, and cost.
That both the terrorists and those fighting the terrorists would want chemical, electrical, structural, and electronics engineers for their specific areas of expertise alone should come as no surprise. That they're also found to be good planners in general is only slightly less obvious.
The assumption that all engineers are similar to terrorists I think is a stretch.
Engineers make good EVERYTHING.
But terrorists? Only if the engineers are lonely, disgruntled people in-general. I think most engineers would be more Constructive than Destructive by nature
You see... that is the problem. The term "Terrorist" has been so deluded that most people will fall into that category anymore. Smoke pot? Terrorist. Downloaded a song? Terrorist. Using SSH? Terrorist.
And it is thrown around even more, if you show an average intelligence larger than those who would label you a terrorist... and how many people do you think fall into that category?
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
I frankly find the analysis to be flattering. I don't have to agree with who I am being compared with to appreciate the comparison.. only the qualities being compared are important.
So, thanks for the complement
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
How do you tell if an engineer is an introvert or an extrovert?
The extrovert looks at your shoes.
Overall, it's hard to disagree with the article. Heck, a guy who has the persistence and brains to go through the gruesome class schedules of an Engineering school will not be easily deterred by obstacles. And he is inventive by training if not nature.
An engineer could easily turn bad... And he'd be very good at being bad, if he has the motivation. So the conclusion should be obvious: don't alienate engineers.
That said, I recently met a very nice and competent guy from Pakistan who is in the USA on an H1B visa. He is a PHP developer, and he is quite good. We discussed finances, and to my horror, I found out that he is making $1100/month. His employer houses him in an appartment along with six other H1Bs, so he prolly saves $1000/month in rent, but still, this is an insultingly low pay rate for such a qualified guy, but a factor 4 at least.
Now, this guy is very nice, and way too busy to even think about trouble. But I can't help thinking my reaction if I was dropped into a country where I would make less than your average waiter, after years of hard schooling. I'd harbor a grudge, that's for sure.
So a piece of advice for Execs and VPs: don't be too stingy with your folks. Them techie weirdos can turn into rampaging monster at the drop of a hat. Heck, I'll give them free espressos and decent raisses if I were you. :-)
Fantasy: http://ferrisfantasy.blogspot.com/
I disagree. Simply put, engineers would be excellent terrorists. Engineers look to solve problems. The problem is just determined from a frame of reference. As terrorists, the problem is bringing down some infrastructure by determining its weaknesses and exploiting them. As engineers, the problem is developing the infrastructure and designing them to be robust.
An anecdote: I recall eating lunch one day a couple summers back with some coworkers (all aerospace engineering senior undergrad or grad students). We spent 45 minutes discussing how one could take down a plane while in flight using simple things - nothing fancy such as explosives. Whether any or all of them would be remotely successful is one matter. Nonetheless, in 45 minutes of eating and discussion we had a list of 10 of so items that could be plausible to taking down an aircraft.
A good engineer will always think of the possibilities of destruction, even if they're in the business of construction. An engineer has to critically think about their designs to determine where the weak points are. Whether designing skyscrapers or secure software, determining weaknesses is a part of the job.
I'm sure the thought police would have a field day with me for saying this, but I think about committing crimes now and then. Not that I would do such thing, I enjoy my life outside of prison. But just as a type of mental exercise it's interesting to me while standing in line at a store, noticing where cameras are located, determining blind spots, exit strategies, exposed wiring that could be cut, etc. I then think about how I would improve the system.
My point is that engineering is about designing stability. You can't produce stability if you aren't able to see the possibility of destruction, so the same qualities that make one a good engineer are the qualities that make them a potential terrorist in the eyes of a paranoid politician.
what does it pay? Health care? Time off? Options? Company Car?
I'd have to agree that it's a fairly thin correlation to draw. Mind you, if I were going to blow something up, I suppose I'd want somebody with an engineering background in demolitions as opposed to an art major.
The question is where you'd fine such an engineer. Unless he/she is already a bit of a nutjob, an engineering background should come with decent employment options and intelligence that would somewhat contrast with the somewhat brainwashed or easily overwhelmed variety of terrorist-recruit that tends to be more readily available.
Recruiting engineers to be terrorists, likely not. Training terrorists to be engineers would be more likely.
As an engineer, when I read "Engineers make good terrorists" my first thought was:
Why would I want to make a terrorist? Aren't there enough?
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
Lack of social skills? No way. I actually had a date last year, thank you very much. We even almost kissed.
We were supposed to go out on a second date, but she got the flu, and then her mother was sick, after that her grandma died and her father had a heart attack and she couldn't make it.
I figured I was better off anyway. With that many people sick in her family, she must have had horrible genes.
Just because you're paranoid, it doesn't mean that they're not out to get you.
You sound like a good engineer. Would you like to join our club to design remote controlled, um, toy cars?
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
I'm an Electrical Engineer.
THIS MAKES ME SO ANGRY I WANT TO BLOW SOMETHING UP!
And yeah, C&C had Engineers. You could take over buildings with them, as long as the building health was below 50%. Otherwise, they would damage the building.
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ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
If very many competent engineers were terrorists, terrorism would be far more devastating than it is today.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
You have to admit, as spelling errors go, it was a curiously apt one...
A real engineer would not be an asset to a terror-seeking team. If it is terror driven by religion, I can guarantee you that the engineer will always be the odd man out that won't want to stick to the rules, be it scheduling of prayers or that pork rinds are not acceptable, etc.
What you want is a sleeper. You find the right kind of young recruit that will make a good engineering student. Indoctrinate first, engineering education later. If you try to indoctrinate an engineer you will probably end up losing your own religion over the ordeal.
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Pedro
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The Insomniac Coder
They weren't "pioneers" in this style of warfare. Combat engineers have existed since ancient times. In fact the word "engineer" comes from their activities, working the siege engines such as catapults, battering rams, etc. As an aside, in the British and related armies, a "pioneer" is an infantry soldier with some combat engineering training. A pioneer in those armies is trained to blow things up in close combat.
Engineering has traditionally been for fighting wars. See the Royal Engineers for example. Over time, people have started to think of engineering as a peaceful profession, but there are still many combat engineers in the world, ready to blow things up.
Al Qaeda has been hopelessly and purposefully over-hyped. We in the US and to some extent other Western powers went looking for a vast international octopus to put the old Cold War spy and intelligence networks to shame. We were told there were sleepers everywhere and huge underground control compounds somewhere in the mountains of Afghanistan. Years later almost every so-called terrorist cell case has fallen apart as utterly empty and not one bit of major organizational infrastructure or evidence has come to light. The truth is that Al Qaeda is tiny and not very well funded. There is no serious wide-spread and powerful terrorist movement afoot. All that energy pretending there was was merely an excuse for greatly curtailing freedom, massively increasing government power and control and creating military power bases in certain highly strategic spots. It is high time we put paid to this vicious nonsense and utterly rejected any arguments or suggestions made on such a basis.
Engineers, especially of the hackerish variety, scare control freaks of every stripe. I think that is a very good thing.