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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."
.. not to mention thousands of soldiers and their families.
EMail: 0110001101100010010000000110001101110010 0110000101111010011011100110000101110010 0010111001100011011011110110
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 9/11 made us safer. Read his words, not the words someone put into his mouth.
Read Talebs Fooled by Randomness
People don't do anything unless they are clubbed on the head. Until then we are dumb as ever...
Ask yourself, ever been burnt? Or name somebody who has not been burnt. We all know we can be burnt and thus we don't need to experience the joys of a burn (regardless of the degrees). Yet we are all burn ourselves at one point in our lives...
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
I think a lot of programmers would rather just be busy elsewhere, or make it as complicated as possible so it earns a lot of money and the project fails under it's own weight.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
It didn't make us safer, it just made us more paranoid. That may mean we are looking for trouble in more areas but it doesn't make us more effective at doing so. It increases the amount of noise in the system and costs us a lot of money, liberty, and even sanity in a lot of cases.
Twinstiq, game news
Something smells mildly like V for Vendetta around here...
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
If our countries no-fly list can't be handled by just a simple relational database, then we've got more serious problems than replication.
Man, if I had mod points I'd love to mod this up
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.
Well, back to rejecting software patent applications.
Am I wrong, or would a clever misspelling on a ticket bypass the entire point of an automated no-fly list?
I know the people that check your boarding passes don't check *that* closely. If your name is Faisal Shahzad, you could probably substitute an a for an e or a silent q or something without it being noticed.
Or am I helping the terrorists now? It's all very confusion.
Pre 9/11:
Plane hijacker: Open the cockpit
Pilot: Ok
*passengers cower in fear*
Post 9/11:
Plane hijacker: Open the cockpit
Pilot: I'm sorry, I can't, the door cannot be opened until we are on the ground
*passengers storm the hijackers*
It used to be you played real friendly with hijackers in a hostage situation. Now we know better. We didn't need to change a thing to keep 9/11 from happening again. As much as I'm a critic of many of the anti-terror changes, though, some just make sense (bullet-proof cockpit doors so air marhsells can shoot into them, locking the doors during flight, pilots carrying guns, etc)
On a semi-related note, a friend of mine's father is an airplane pilot. A few years ago, he was going through the security checkpoint. So he hands the TSA agent his gun and goes through the procedure. On the other side, the agent hands back his gun, and says "I'm sorry, sir, I need to confiscate your shampoo"..."you do know I'm a pilot right? And you just handed me a loaded gun?"..."I know sir, please don't make it any more ridiculous than it already is"
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
The reason it takes so long to check the list is that the airlines are not giving the manifest data back to the TSA. The TSA updates the lists, but it doesn't have access to the manifests, so it cannot check. Instead, the airlines check the lists whenever they chose, but no less than every two (previously eight) hours.
The big government solution would be to compel the airlines to provide the data to the TSA, which can then check the manifests against the lists as the data comes in. But privacy advocates and European governments are opposed to giving the "big government" real time access to people's travel plans. The government has been willing to accept the current system as a compromise.
Ultimately, the question is whether you want to allow the private sector to actually perform the no fly list reconciliation and keep your data relatively secret, or whether you want the government to be able to instantly identify people on the no fly list, but have access to your movements via air travel.
The choices are not great, and I won't express my preferences.
--AC
To give him the benefit of the doubt, it appears he's saying that 9/11 was a "wake up call" which should have brought us out of a certain level of ignorance about the state of things both outside and inside our country. While ignorance might be bliss, nobody ever said it was safe or smart.
The problem with this is that it seems to assume that there's a surefire way to prevent all attacks or acts of aggression against the country. Like I was telling somebody yesterday, the only reason that bomb didn't go off in NYC is luck. The guy was stupid and we got lucky. In a city the size of New York there's no reason somebody couldn't detonate a crude device like that without arousing suspicion. Sometimes, no matter how much effort you put in you cannot eliminate a certain level of ignorance.
In any case, the real question is whether or not we're less ignorant of the dangers than we were previously. Given the state of things I'm not so sure we are.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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Slashdot has previously posted about the decline of NoSQL. It was a nice idea, and some stuff was learnt from it, but it's not really any better than an SQL system which has been tried and tested with over 20 years of experience. There's a reason Google uses an SQL backend.
Death and taxes are both inevitable, however, death doesn't get worse year after year.
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.
Table-ized A.I.
What has he been smoking? Volunteer? As in giving away your services to an agency that has a mission to take away your rights?
Tisha Hayes
> Couldn't someone volunteer to show them how to implement a reliable, scalable, NoSQL setup?
First such a thing would need to exist.
that your average undergraduate computer science class could tackle, for the cost of coffee and peanuts, in an order magnitude smaller amount of time, and with more competency than the huge bloated slow as molasses and obsolete upon implementation bs that characterizes government involvement
but i'm not saying that as a typical cynical "we're doomed", and that's that, useless observation
what i'm saying is: really, give the problem to an undergraduate computer science class. put carnegie mellon or RPI in charge of implementing it
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
This is a load of crap. Those who knew in advance about the attacks were not fired afterward, they were promoted.
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
They're busy killing people in Iraq and Afghanistan. Al Queada has _exploded_ in political and "terrorist" operations there, it's become part of daily politics. It's also far more effective for their immediate goals of political control, fairly effectively counteracting the military might of the wealthiest nation on Earth.
After all, it worked against the British Empire and later the Soviet Union as invaders of Afghanistan.
Couldn't someone volunteer to eliminate the new buzzword, fad, you name it, "NoSQL"? Anyone who uses it proves that he's a jerk and probably a proud owner of iPad and iPhone, too.
Thanks.
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...
Well, people in Germany and Japan weren't all happy and friendly when they lost WWII, but they lost the war, and they had to do and listen to what we said.
And look how well it turned it has turned out for them. In some ways, messing with the USA is probably the best thing evil governments can do that turns around those countries.
The thing is, that this is a stupid straw man argument that's been put into Schneier's mouth. 9/11 may or may not have made "us" more likely to be killed in terrorist attacks. However terrorist attacks are almost completely irrelevant to the lives of anyone living anywhere except for Iraq. If you've read Bruce's blog, it's pretty clear that he believes 9/11 and more importantly the over-reaction to it in the USA has made pretty much everyone less safe. Just one statistic: more people have died travelling by car to avoid travelling in a plane through dislike of the TSA than died during the 9/11 attack. More importantly, taking away freedom has reduced our security because often the government can be the biggest threat. Since people no longer know what their rulers are doing it is more difficult to make sure they do the right thing.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
yep... see also the plot of "The Mouse That Roared" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mouse_That_Roared )
It's striking how ineffective al-Queda has been over the last decade. Bin Laden called for attacks on oil facilities back in 2004 - nothing happened. Bin Laden is still out there, issuing audio tapes, but few seem to be listening.
It's very hard to operate covertly against a hostile or unsupportive population. During WWII, the French resistance was able to operate successfully and was able to support British and American commandos. But no OSS spy dropped into Germany ever even made radio contact with HQ. Islamic terrorists in the US are in that position. If they try to recruit, somebody will probably turn them in, or they will be infiltrated. If they try to operate alone, they don't seem to accomplish much.
Loser terrorist operations recruit loser operatives. The "shoe bomber" (the only US terrorism incident tied to al-Queda in the US in the last year) did very little damage, was caught, and provided intel about the opposition. The bozo who tried to bomb Times Square last week may have been connected to the Taliban, and may have had "training", but he totally botched the job. He got caught, too.
What's with the talk of NoSQL and distributed databases, etc. How large can the no-fly list possibly be? If you put every human on the planet in there, you've got 6 billion rows, and not all that many columns in a row. This is not a database scalability problem. It's a bureaucracy and process problem. Quite frankly, the TSA ought to be able to publish modifications to the list in a manner that airlines can import in a fraction of a second and final manifest checks can surely run in less than a second between the time the gate closes and the time the plane pushes back from the gate. The only things standing in the way of an effective and simple technical solution are bureaucrats and govt contractors.
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!
I think I'll take a solution that works, and try not to care so much about whether internally it queries in SQL or JSON. But since I'm entertaining this absurdity with a response, let's remember that the NoSQL databases are designed to be eventually consistent, which isn't necessarily a property I want my government's law enforcement relying on.
That's shocking, who wouldn't like to have virtual strip searches, specious claims that they're on some sort of mythical no fly list or be hassled because they look vaguely middle eastern?
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.
Would you be particularly friendly to a foreign nation coming in and telling you how to run your government? Just curious.
Depends on who their predecessor was, what that "how" is, and whether they'd leave willingly.
The US enforcing democracy would have been universally welcomed by Hungary in 1956.
Leading up to 9/11 was a motive and facts that allowed terrorist to gain self sacrificing followers.
Wanna win out over terrorist? Simply stop giving them reasons to do what they do.
If I hear one more thing about NoSQL, I'm going to go crazy.
NoSQL is a niche application, and it's use is only valid for some very specific situations. I handle databases of several TB of data, and that is only a fraction of what some people handle, with MySQL. I have a distributed DB over 3 countries, with latencies over 150 ms between slaves, and it works like a charm. Have we suddenly forgotten how to optimize applications?
Suddenly, the min requirement to run any application is a quad core machine with 8 GB of RAM, and since we can't be bothered to optimize our RDBMS, we drop them altogether.
We don't need no NoSQL (Yeah, way too many double negatives in there). We just need to stop hiring retards in our IT departments.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
However terrorist attacks are almost completely irrelevant to the lives of anyone living anywhere except for Iraq.
Or Ireland.
This is exactly the sort of application where a "tried and true" solution (like a good ol' fashioned relational database) makes sense. Since the list is only updated by the TSA (and is treated as read-only by everyone else), using a traditional SQL database with simple synchronization/replication is a no brainer. You don't want to be reinventing the wheel, especially on critical infrastructure like this.
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.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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.
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.
Cowards like you are the reason we are all losing our freedoms as Americans. Go hide under the bed and leave the rest of us alone.
I don't believe ANY of these terrorist attacks were actually what the government told us.
It's real simple - you have a 'Revolution in Military Affairs' - the agenda is there, it needs to be brought into existence, therefore you need a precipitating event.
What did every 'revolution' throughout history use? What did the Communists do? Incite terror attacks. What did the Jacobites do (just for the culturally illiterate out there - that would be the guys in the French Revolution)? Institute a 'reign of terror'.
What does the American military pursuing a 'revolution in military affairs' do? Especially when they cite in documents such as 'Revolution in military affairs and conflict short of war' directly entire passages from Lenin (just for the techies out there - that was the guy that brought Communism to Russia)? What do they do?
Come on, Slashdot, you can put two and two together here - just get rid of the linear thinking for a minute there.
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!
However terrorist attacks are almost completely irrelevant to the lives of anyone living anywhere except for Iraq.
Or Ireland.
Or Israel.
Ezekiel 23:20
I'm not aware of any successful major terrorist attack after 9/11
I don't know if I'm even aware of a major (publicized) terrorist attack attempt post 9-11 that COULD have been successful. We had a guy with a binary explosive in his shoes, the Christmas fellow, that group of fellows on the east coast (I want to say) a few years back that the media tried to play up as a threat, and then the Times Square fellow who didn't know what he was doing at all despite being trained.
The only thing any superpower nation can do to protect themselves is to retire from calling itself a "superpower". Any country that gets nationalistic and starts tossing its weight around as a superpower is certain to have plenty of nationalists from other countries focused on figuring out a way to knock that superpower off the top of the hill. China, you want to be called a superpower? Think it would feel good to have the world's hatred pointed squarely at you? Or is there another country that would like to be the target of the rage of every phallically-insecure ultranationalist thug in the world who wants to make himself feel bigger by blowing up your people?
As a citizen of the US who just wants to have a somewhat reasonably decent life, maybe do some good for his fellow man before he punches his ticket, anyone out there can have the ego boost that comes with being part of a superpower. I'd PAY you to take it. Oh, you don't want this? You don't want to be taxed out the wazoo so your country can fix up the economy of other countries even though your own economy is in the tank? Only to have those countries you build up decide to bite the hand that fed them? You'd rather pay your taxes for clean water, good schools, and roads instead of blowing it all on the biggest military budget in the world? You know, we don't really want this. Most of us would much rather just work hard, get something positive back from our government instead of the news that we're going to war again. With some other random country that we never imagined we'd have to go to war with because the corporations who own everything decreed that they were bad business partners. If you want this in your country, then hurry up and take it! I'm sure you'll love it. I'm sure it will make your weenies feel huge, right up to the point that some "terrorist" plants a few bombs in your office building.
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.
Crime is at an all time low, education would be nice though.
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.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Ummm, officially, to stop "the terrorists" and to bring freedom and democracy to the unwashed masses. Unofficially, to control our oil interests. At least with WWI and WWII, the enemy was clearly defined. In the current situation it's any man, woman, or child who may be in the way.
Regardless of the reason presented for our presence there, there are still foreign troops in their country enforcing laws given to them by an outside force. It's not a new story, it's been going on for longer than we have written history for. We (unfortunately) haven't grown beyond this, except our tools and tactics for executing these decisions have become more refined. ... and before anyone says it, which someone will always do, I'm not talking poorly of our troops. I'm talking badly about the decision makers who are sending the troops out to execute those decisions.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
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 .
Slipping shoelaces ?
Safer? If you call security theater and constant fearmongering safety, then yes. But we lost a lot of freedom for that illusion of smoke and mirrors.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
It also made us less free.
Liberty > Safety.
Lisa, I would like to buy your rock.
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!
Ruby Neural Evolution of Augmenting Topologies
. . . then baffle them with bullshit. Let's be honest, this problem is too complex for a group of humans to solve. Like viruses, there will always be vulnerabilities. We survived 9/11, and we would have survived with or without a new massive bureaucracy. So, why did we bother? The same reason they round up the usual suspects, tell god to bless america, or rail against injustice -- we need the release. It offers some hope, a chance to believe that there is a simple solution, pablum for the masses. By creating something so complex that no one can understand it, then no one has to explain it, and no one can break it. A conundrum locked inside a mystery wrapped in an enigma is both the impenetrable barrier and the perfect trap.
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.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
> this is a stupid straw man
> more people have died travelling by car to avoid travelling in a plane through dislike of the TSA than died during the 9/11 attack
Wow. Countering a stupid straw man with... a stupid straw man?
9/11 was an inside job
Bruce is nothing more than an Israeli Mossad shill.
I don't think this is what was said.....
9/11 has been used as an excuse and a reason to subvert the constitution and make us less free.
Like a lot of people, I don't believe the official story, and I think that anybody who does really hasn't done the research, or just doesn't want to think about all of the implications.
I believe that the only way in which we MAY be slightly safer is that people are more observant of their surroundings, but any possible additional safety does not make up for what we've lost. The fact that people spend so much time and money and fear on something that is so unlikely to happen to any one of them just shows how politically useful it's been for those who would manipulate the public.
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.
If you read this blog regularly, you'll know that Bruce holds the TSA in complete contempt. He also has stated that of all the changes post 9/11, the only effective ones are reinforced cabin doors on planes, and as you pointed out, passengers that will resist.
TFA says that the way 9/11 made us safer is that it raised the stakes so that 'small time' jobs like oklahoma city just are going to be 'impressive' enough to potential recruits, not that anything we have done in response to 9/11 has helped, just the actual attack itself.
That's because the ultra tight security inherent in Ninnle Linux has meant that it can't be cracked...unless you have access to NinnleKeys, which very few people do, people such as Linus Torvalds and Dick Cheney. NinnleKeys is able to access just about any encryption available anywhere...kinda like that secret chip they had in Sneakers, only for real, and that reality is Ninnle!
Who says we need a big-ass DB? It is not like the no-fly list is that large.. In fact, from a data perspective it is down-right puny. The trick with both the no-fly list and the more commonly checked SDN (Specially Designated Nationals from the US Treasury) list is that people deliberately make minor spelling changes to their name to avoid detection. So the name search has to be fairly "fuzzy" (which is not something SQL databases are very good at).
Meus subcriptio est nocens Latin quoniam bardus populus reputo is sanus callidus
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 .
I assume you meant *decades* of suffering, not centuries, considering that the GDR only existed for 41 years. It may have felt like centuries to those suffering, I'll grant you that.
However terrorist attacks are almost completely irrelevant to the lives of anyone living anywhere except for Iraq.
Or Ireland.
Or Israel.
Or India
Or Iran
Or Indonesia
First of all, it is clear to anyone who actually reads Schneier's article, that he said nothing of the sort. Secondly, the popular leftist and anti-American narrative that the US' response to 911 is responsible for fostering more terrorism is equally specious and circular, especially the equine excrement fairy tales of oppressed muslims in the US treated as "second class citizens" by "racist extremist groups." I call BS. BS. BS. BS. Propaganda unanswered is nothing short of complicity.
Yes and no. Yep, we could use that money for other things. On the other hand, if the terrorists get a nuke and New York goes foom, I'm guessing the U.S. expenditures and effort on security get seriously upgraded. If you believe they will do it regardless of how hard we try to stop them, then you should start saying your prayers now, it will help prevent the logjam later.
Or you could make suggestions about what should we do to make the Islamic terrorists happy. Well, in the Koran it say infidels should pay taxes to the Muslims for the privilege of being allowed to live. And the Al Queda (sp?) at least believes this. How much are you willing to contribute? Think hard now, we don't want to upset the little fellers.
Maybe Saudi Arabia and the Oil States would make them happy. You won't mind paying...well, what will you be willing to pay them? Don't forget they believe you owe them for your life. Surely that should be worth quite a lot for you, right?
Now you have to ask the question: are you feeling lucky?
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.
Doesn't that imply that, perhaps, those safety measures HAVE worked?
Homer: Not a bear in sight. The Bear Patrol must be working like a charm.
Lisa: That's specious reasoning, Dad.
Homer: Thank you, dear.
Lisa: By your logic I could claim that this rock keeps tigers away.
Homer: Oh, how does it work?
Lisa: It doesn't work.
Homer: Uh-huh.
Lisa: It's just a stupid rock.
Homer: Uh-huh.
Lisa: But I don't see any tigers around, do you?
Homer: Lisa, I want to buy your rock.
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?
Are you seriously suggesting that Muslims/Middle Eastern looking people were treated equally well in the US before and after 9/11?
Good sentiment and nice liberal touch but sadly your accounting doesn't favor reality.
Who left the door open? We got teabaggers wandering in.
Now where did I leave that can of Raid?
"Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everybody agrees that it is old enough to know better." - Unknown
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.
And all the people who died in car accidents prior to the mandatory installation of seatbelts would disagree that we are now safer?
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
They know if they do nothing and just tell people it's all ok, no one will believe them and someone ELSE will do something about it once they are voted out for inaction. And you don't get to pick your enemies, so there's not much the USA can do about an enemy which is ok with using kids as walking bombs.
A lot of people foam at the mouth about the USA's presence in iraq and afghanistan, but I'd put money on none of them having a better solution then troops. after all, america's enemies in these regions can't be bought with money and they hate freedom and democracy, so there's really no carrot we have that will get them to like us.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
I'm seriously suggesting that innuendo and unsupported assertions are BS. Show me the data.
We do not live in the era of horses and five week mail delivery any more. Before you put up stupid shit like this, how about at least making sure we can't easily check it. If you look at basic cause of death statistics for Israel, terrorism isn't even listed it's such a minor issue. Please come back when you've realised that Google exists.
In fact the only good thing about your post is it was less stupid than it's parent post. At least there really are some suicide bomb attacks which kill people in Israel; the Real IRA kills practically nobody.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
Or or the domInion of canada:
(Sorry, only way I could squeeze an "I" in there)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_India_Flight_182
Do you even know what a straw man is? It's an argument nobody makes. I'm making the argument about the TSA, so even if it were wrong, stupid, entirely malicious and just generally fucked up, it still wouldn't be a straw man.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
You talked to him? Before or after?
You are welcome on my lawn.
Couldn't someone volunteer to show them how to implement a reliable, scalable, NoSQL setup?
Why in fuck would you use a NoSQL setup to build a database that contains some millions of records? This is well within the reach of a modest relational implementation, saving you (and your client) the headache of re-inventing relational database technology badly. NoSQL sucks for almost everything that people use it for. It's the MySQL of the new millenium - simple enough that simpletons can use it, so they do in droves, thereby convincing themselves that there has been a sea change in the world of computing.
I didn't need to.
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.
Yea, because it's easier to label and kill the messenger then deal with the facts of the message that don't jive with your notion of reality.
Well, I'm going to go get a beer now, I'll toast one in your honor. Hows this sound, "here to the willfully ignorant and the people who want to color their views so much they do not resemble reality any more". Or how about this, "here's to throwing intellectual honesty out the window". Oh well, some friends are meeting me, I'll ask them which would be best to toast you with.
Something doesn't have to kill you to be "not completely irrelevant".
What do you think the CIA was chartered to do? Or more like, what they've been doing for decades.
It doesn't involve American troops patrolling the streets of a foreign nation, enforcing our laws, and working outside of our laws.
Proper action is taken through an abundance of *GOOD* intelligence, using that intelligence properly.
Our goal for going in was to take Osama Bin Laden. That goal was forgotten and still has never been achieved. Putting thousands of troops on the ground there will only serve to relocate him. Well, it has only served to relocate him. He's not going to be hiding out in a house in the middle of US occupied territory. You're not going to find him hiding behind a bush with a convoy driving by.
Instead of the wasted money to keep our troops on the ground there, proper use of intelligence and a strategic strike could have wiped him out where he sat.
It's much easier to hit a target who isn't aware that you know where he is until it's too late. Sending the target on the run into any number of countries now opens up your search area to ... umm ... the entire planet. Well, most likely one of dozens of countries, but still that's dozens of countries.
We've made what could have been several weeks of intelligence gathering and a one day mission, into years of US occupation of foreign territories.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
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.
Please, state their goals. If you assume no constraints then I suggest that the best strategy for achieving their goals is to build a very strong economy, then go from there. For example, you want the US out of the Middle East? Build a strong economy and then you can force it. You want to kill people? Build a strong economy and then you can afford a massive nuclear weapons platform and take out the entire country.
I think the terrorists are stupid, or lazy, or irrational, or impatient...or maybe all four!! Even one dirty bomb or nuclear device detonating in a large US city wouldn't achieve their goals.
Yes safer very safe since now the number of "threat countries" = 195
The population is the enemy, yes that means you, X has always been the enemy
I feel safe
The problem today is, we aren't dealing with a government. We are dealing with idealogues, zealots, and radicals.
Now, take another look at Germany and Japan, and the rest of the Axis powers. Have the allies succeeded in stamping out the ideas of Nazism, and the divinity of the Emperor? Today, there are more skinheads, neonazis, and white supremacists here at home and around the world, than there were in 1940. Japan's Emperor is still a divine figure, if diminished in power.
No government has the power to root out an ideology, and crush it. And, I hope that no government ever does get that power.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Terrorism as a tactic means that the purpose is to increase repression on the population by the state this has definitely happened, the objective is to incite revolution or popular uprising this has not happened and will not happen Americans are to stupid to have a revolution without outside help or instigation the USA died when the founders did, there hopes betrayed and there child murdered.
They where not theists nor where they capitalists they asserted self determination and responsibility, the American people immediately took up the cause of empire after 1776 so here we are.
there is no mystery to why everyone wants to kill you, and why most of you want to destroy your own government and your own people
your all to stupid to live but you have big guns
There ain't no technological fixes (NoSQL) to social problems (TSA).
show them how to implement a reliable, scalable, NoSQL setup
you had me at #!
I don't think Bruce Schneier is evil.
However when it comes to physical security (as opposed to IT or crypto) in many cases he's just wrong.
I'm no fan of the American approach to aviation security (as opposed to the Israeli approach) however Schneier should stick to what he knows. In the past he's railed against the few techniques which really work, simply because of his political views. For example, the question of profiling. Yes, when done badly, it's stupid. When done well however it is more effective than any technology-only solution. e.g. making harmless non-Muslim grandmothers take off their shoes to be X-rayed.
Do you or your partner snore? - Visit www.snoring.com.au
That sadly enough was exactly Bin Laden's plan.
Thankfully most places did not hate US citizens they just thought the US government was evil. A lot of that changed with a change of President, and I think McCain, Hillary or any other skilled political operator could have pulled that off just as Obama did.
I'm not sure if Bin Laden's plan would have worked if there wasn't already a President from the extreme end of the Republican Party trying to bring even more extreme people into the fold.
"Just under three thousand people would disagree... (Score:5, Insightful)"
To say that 9/11 hasn't made the US safer afterwards ... because of the loss during the event itself ... is confused. (You are referring to the 2,976 killed on 9/11, aren't you?) For that to be scored 5 Insightful demonstrates there is something faulty with the rating system here.
Now, what you referenced about thousands of US soldiers (about 4,400) being killed is insightful. 9/11 endangered our troops by whipping up popular need for retribution, thus enabling politically and financially motivated persons in positions of power to push through an invasion of a country unrelated to 9/11.
Those among us who supported the invasion of Iraq in the frenzy of fear that followed it should take time to think about it. Here's a good moment. What harm can be done when you're lashing out while emotionally charged? That's thousands of young US soldiers killed without cause. That's over 30,000 troops wounded. Because you backed a needless invasion. And this doesn't even begin to address the cost in innocent Iraqi lives.
It made up safer alight. Now it takes so long to get on a plane there isn't a chance of terrorist ever getting a plane DOWN! They'd give up before ever getting on one and go for a softer target OUTSIDE the USA. We're safer alight.
Secondly, the popular leftist and anti-American narrative that the US' response to 911 is responsible for fostering more terrorism is equally specious and circular, especially the equine excrement fairy tales of oppressed muslims in the US treated as "second class citizens" by "racist extremist groups."
I think thou dost protest too much. Anti-American sentiment is actually anti-government sentiment and the only way you can connect Americans with the US government is to accept that its foreign policy represents the democratic will of the people. If you don't like the fact that a war for petroleum portrays you as a racist, because it was justified as a protection against WMD's or to catch an old spook asset (like OBL and Saddam), then perhaps you should address the government which commits those war crimes, instead of impugning 'leftists'.
The truth is laid out much more clearly if you look at Arizona's new state law regarding immigrants. Middle Eastern governments have never been particularly 'Western' in their thinking, but our governments are now becoming 'Eastern' (like them) as it interns military prisoners and cordones off political dissent, and indebts itself to China.
The dissolution of the Arab league and the growth of Middle Eastern terrorists didn't suddenly start in 2001 - Timothy McVeigh didn't suddenly start plotting against the government after Waco. If the Arab League were still around this might be a conventional conflict along the lines of the Iran-Iraq War with attacks/defense/armistice and all-around 'disciplined' projections of force by leaders. The fact is that US abuse of their position on the UNSC has undermined resolutions of the General Assembly for over 60 years (based on guilt, shame, or bigotry inspired by WW2 and not objective, logical measures in the current context) and that is the 'apartheid democracy' which the US government has projected to the Middle East since the Korean War. Overbearing, oppressive, and unnecessarily invasive because the enemies of the government are a symptom of its internal policy and the servants of that government cannot believe their targets are actual human beings, or the training won't take.
Equine excrement actually doesn't smell too bad and is quite good for the dirt, but your propaganda is nothing short of complicity, so I thought when you were shoveling it into the noise-machine, you might reflect on how embarrassing your position is from the reality-based community's perspective. You've basically made a distinction between liberals and incompetent douchebags, so it's pretty amusing if you also distinguish yourself from the former.
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.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
NoSQL and "reliable" don't go together. Implementing a safety system in which integrity is critical with NoSQL would be a significant mistake. While it may be that the data doesn't have to be relational, as another poster commented it surely does need to be ACID.
So, I must agree with the "reality-based community" or risk being "embarrassing?" I'd prefer reason over dogma, thank you.
Iraq was to fight the "War on terror"
Afghanistan was a response to the attacks on 9/11 with the ultimate goal to capture/kill osama bin laden(which we still haven't done)
I hate when people think that both are for the same reason. Iraq was a response to some stuff that occurred int he 70s and 80s, and with the attacks on 9/11, Bush decided it would be a good idea to take care of the weapons of mass destruction that he thought Iraq still had. 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) They also apparently got close to nuclear weapons.
In the late 80s and early 90s, the UN told Iraq to dismantle and destroy these weapons. Iraq complied. The issue was bush didn't think they did comply, and that they continued to produce weapons(which wasn't true)
I never fully supported Iraq, but i will continue to support Afghanistan. Mainly because most of the people that live there still support osama bin laden.
O.o
And you know profiling works how?
Hint: there are too few actual terrorists to know if anything works. But I'm sure you're too busy letting your political views color your perspective to let fact get in the way.
Yes , i meant decades :-)
Slipping shoelaces ?
I have only one word: Thermite
The difference is that neonazis are now a confined minority with several counter-minorities keeping them in check even before you consider government interference (in fact the government has to put more effort into making sure the neonazis don't get beaten to death by the rest of the population). The old nazis were more than an ideology, they were a form of organized crime (they had the SA spread terror among their opposition even before they got any official power). That structure got stomped out even if a few silly kids still think Hitler was cool.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Not to be forgotten - after WW II The Marshall Plan was quite a major thing helping the situation of post-WW I to not repeat itself.
It is debatable if that (basicly giving free money away, a very few receivers actually paid back the loans in full and it was quite clear even at the moment the aid was given) was a very fair deal for American taxpayer at the time but it no doubt also helped the post-war US economy in some areas.
yeah I do feel safer from terrorists, but I feel hugely less safe from the the people who are supposed to be keeping us safe. They're frightening the hell out of me.
it's so easy to forge a report these days, and then steal oil and nuclear resources...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niger_uranium_forgeries
Perhaps you should try reading the summary? Or even the title on the discussion? This is a discussion about safety. If terrorism doesn't even register on the death statistics, that's because it is irrelevant to your safety. Now, it might influence your fear. A large number of misinformed people or cowards might mean it has economic consequences, but it would be completely irrelevant in a discussion about safety.
(N.B. I don't accept that terrorism causes some vast number more injuries per person killed than e.g. car crashes; feel free to provide statistics to show I'm wrong)
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
Of course terrorism is about fear. The clue's in the name.
The fact is that terrorism forces a reaction from the population and government, if only to stop it becoming a more serious problem. This means it's not irrelevant to the lives of the population. If everyone ignored terrorism, do you think the terrorists would just leave it at that, or perhaps increase their activity until they weren't ignored?
Wikipedia says that in 9/11 "the hijackers were well-educated, mature adults, whose belief systems were fully formed".
The only problem with profiling is that the profile isn't what you were expecting.
fuck I'm sick of you war apologists.... "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..."
There were MILLIONS of people who knew perfectly well that Powell and the rest of the bastards were lying through their teeth. Myself included - I shouted at the TV when I saw Powell holding up that little vial and attempting to interpret those worthless satellite photos - it was a crock through and through, but perhaps you didn't see that in the comfort of you "fair and balanced" media over there in zeppoland. "All the world" ? really ? Is that why France leapt in too with all guns blazing. The vast majority of the British population didn't believe either, but Blair the Poodle wasn't listening to his own democracy - he had orders from a "higher power". Yours is such a narrow-minded, self-involved naive point of view.
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.
I didn't bother reading the rest of your horseshit ... you really live up to your nick...
We could certainly use that money better. Give it back to the people who earned it, from whom it was taken by extortion (taxation).
I think our founding fathers said it best:
Benjamin Franklin: "The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either."
On the other hand, if the terrorists get a nuke and New York goes foom, I'm guessing the U.S. expenditures and effort on security get seriously upgraded. If you believe they will do it regardless of how hard we try to stop them, then you should start saying your prayers now, it will help prevent the logjam later.
And if you believe you can stop this without trampling many of the freedoms we have, you've lost touch with reality. I'd rather have a few million die than sacrifice our freedoms as a whole to save them. The world isn't safe, you could die walking out your front door, live with it.
It's a well known fact that the us army needs a war every ten years, the gunpowder goes bad if kept for longer than that.
Nice response, but (IMHO) your argument on Iraq is flawed.
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.
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.
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.
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.
BUT, the people that wanted war knew they couldn't sell it to Congress or the public based on chemical or biological weapons. The term WMD was introduced to explicitly blur the line with nuclear weapons and peoples inherent fear of them.
Change the term "WMD" in your argument to "nuclear weapons" and tell me if you still stand behind it.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
When done well however it is more effective than any technology-only solution. e.g. making harmless non-Muslim grandmothers take off their shoes to be X-rayed.
And how do you know they're non-Muslim? The colour of their skin? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jihad_Jane
The answer is a) obviously; If the terrorists were capable of increasing their activity they would do that already. They might begin to stretch themselves too much for a little while; which would cause more failed missions and weaken their organisation even more quickly. Very quickly the number of attacks would reduce since you can't recruit if nobody sees you doing anything. In fact, the strategy which worked against the IRA; a group who carried out many more, often larger and more definitely more effective terrorist attacks than "Al Queda" was specifically and deliberately ignoring them. Margaret Thatcher, used to talk about "denying the terrorists the oxygen of publicity". This isn't even a new an controversial thought. Minimising the media success of your opponent is one of the basics of almost any counter-insurgency manual.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
most of the world
Most of the world's people, most of the world's governments, or both?
My friend, what you spell out is how terrorist organizations work around the world. Sometimes there are big targets, but the small ones are just as powerful if not moreso. Your list looks like its straight out of the IRA playbook.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Provisional_Irish_Republican_Army_campaign_1969%E2%80%931997#Early_campaign_1970-1980
the answer is a) obviously; If the terrorists were capable of increasing their activity they would do that already.
If they're already doing enough to get noticed and taken seriously, they don't need to.
I agree with the rest though - the media is an effective tool for terrorists. But how can you deal with this without removing freedom of speech?
The point that started this was that terrorism didn't matter because the casualties were low. In fact the IRA often (but not always) gave warnings of their attacks, allowing evacuations. This was still effective terrorism, because of the credible threat that if they were ignored there wouldn't be a warning next time. Terrorism doesn't require casualties to have an impact, and the IRA problem wasn't dealt with by ignoring them.
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.
I fail to see how launching two wars, for which 9/11 was the initial explanation, makes the United States any safer from terrorism.
Perhaps its the fundamental retardation of intelligence that occurs in the human brain whenever money and power are involved but it seems that none of the powers that be realise that wars are the direct producers of terrorists. Especially foreign occupations in which civilian casualties are the daily norm.
I submit to you that 9/11 by no means has made the United States "safer" from terrorists but in fact has produced a domino framework where all it will take is one bump and all hell will break loose. Not to mention the subsequent actions taken by the US Government have supplied the terrorists with the best recruiting propaganda they could ever dream of.
However; if by safer I am meant to read: "a loss of civil liberties and more bogus restrictions on citizens" then bravo. Well done.
The first half of your post (increased drone usage radicalizing Pakistani opinion) conflicts with the second half of your post (Obama is soothing Muslim opinion), mainly because Obama has dramatically increased the number of Predator drone attacks in... Pakistan!
Also, planes smashing in skyscrapers and big chunks of the Pentagon being blown up happened just eight months into the Bush administration. At that point, he had pretty much been completely focused on domestic affairs (tax cuts and No Child Left Behind). Unless you really think that lowering American taxes inflamed Saudi and Afghani public opinion, your post doesn't make much sense. More quasi-successful small-scale terror attacks on the US have occurred in the past eight months (Fort Hood Shooting, Christmas Day Bomber, Times Square Bomber - all of whom were mentored by Anwar al-Awlaki) than in the last couple of years of the Bush administration. A year's worth of soothing didn't seem to accomplish much.
Not saying that Bush=good or Obama=bad (or vice versa), just that I think that the motivations of recent Islamic terrorism are a bit more complex than the identity of the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Exactly, and it hasn't been happening in the US. If people *wanted* to do it, they would be doing it.
What makes more sense?
That we have tons of enemies who want nothing more than to give up their lives to kill some americans, but they are completely unable to get into the US, are unable to do things like rent cars or buy weapons when they get here, or are otherwise completely and 100% thwarted by our counter-terrorism efforts
- or -
That we just don't have that many people willing to try to kill Americans in the US, and the ones who do try things are usually just not mentally coherent enough to pull it off
I'm going with the second option - the first requires too many completely absurd things to be true.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
Those that would sacrifice liberty for safety deserve neither and will lose both.
Just one statistic: more people have died travelling by car to avoid travelling in a plane through dislike of the TSA than died during the 9/11 attack.
You got a reference for that? Not disputing your point, I'm just interested.
Of course I didn't RTFA.
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.
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.
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.
Not really. It wasn't refuted, it was questioned which is completely different. I hope you arne't speaking of the Joe
Hey, moron, just saying it's 'more effective' does not actually prove your point.
The problem with profiling is, as Schneier points out every time it is mentioned, that any known focus on certain entities means there's now known to be less focus on specific other entities.
This isn't some problem with it being done 'badly', this is how that works. By definition, focus in one area removes focus in other areas. Saying 'we will profile these people' is the same as saying 'We are not going to look as closely at people who are not those people'.
Which, as even utter morons should realize, means that terrorists will either use said people, or at least faking being said people.
Ergo, the only profiling that doesn't reduce security is profiling of things that are unalterable and unforgable.
Behavioral profiling, for example, makes sense...it's very very hard to train people not to act nervously. Ergo, singling people out on the basis of that might make sense. Or might not...it's just a possibility of what might be a good idea, as opposed to profiling on the basis of people wearing red shirts, which would obviously be stupid.
Some other stuff makes sense...for example, terrorists need to be trained, and for various reasons, said training can only happen in a few countries, so we can increase security on this people. Although, like I said, once we start doing that it wouldn't be long until they're using people who we don't know went to those countries. But that, at least, has a moderately high fence to climb, and requires prep work we can catch them in.
Of course, your idea about how profiling works and the idea we can profile 'Muslims' is actually even stupider. We actually could profile everyone under five feet tall, although, duh, terrorists would either buy lifts or just use tall people, so that would be stupid.
But we couldn't profile 'Muslims', even if it wasn't a stupid idea. There's no magical indicator what religion people follow. Hell, they don't even have to 'fake' being another religion. It's like profiling people who 'have a pet cat'...the government has no idea who the hell has a pet cat. I guess we could start registering people for that, but, constitutional questions about having to register your religion aside, I suspect terrorists would just lie.
Although we could profile 'People with obvious external Muslim indicators', which manages to be even stupider. It's like profiling people flying with cat food. Quick, throw your prayer mats in the trash, we have to get on the plane!
I suspect you mean we'd profile Arabs, and have apparently completely forgotten the fact that something like half of all Muslims in the world are non-Arabic. In fact, in the US, Muslims are 26% Arab, 34% South Asian, 24% African-American, and 15% other. Now, in the US, we usually mistake 'South Asian' for Arabic, but even then, that still leaves 40% of all Muslims unaccounted for. (And before you say 'They aren't terrorists', two words: DC Sniper.)
And plenty of Arabs aren't Muslims, and there are other swarthy ethnicities that are often hard to distinguish from Arab. Are you going to start profiling Hindus (Aka, South Asians.) and Hispanics? No? Well, Arab terrorists will use those identities.
In short, profiling is another word for 'Making a list of people who go through less security screening', and profiling 'Muslims' is, well, pretty clear evidence you'd an idiot. Even 'people who look Arabic' would be pretty stupid, but 'Muslim' is, well, so stupid you just need to shut up forever.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
The ever growing security circus humiliation that we are forced to perform every time we want to board a plane certainly doesn't make anyone more secure other than the police-state-industrial-complex.
"When in doubt, use brute force." Ken Thompson
.... 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.
Now they are watching you.
oh shit, me also since i quoted ya.
Be seeing you...
ur 'scaling-up' of Anti-Americans hockey sticks, neglecting the reality of 'we'll kill you dead if you mess with us' amongst 'haven't tried Ice Creams.' This nation provides [pardon the expression] retards food-stamps along with the power to complain about eggs from chickens they didn't technically tend. My point being, if you're going to hate us, don't hate us for what we'll do to you, yours and anyone near you who didn't manage you, but for the unparalleled opportunities we provide to the weak. Politics second, if MMitnik, 'unjustly' serving 5,000 days in a place infested with human-borne vermin and well-tended disease doesn't make you think twice about screwing with the people of/ the United States of America, then you may want to reconsider your position on 'security through obscurity' and/or dilligence.
you are correct. battles to preserve position are excessively expensive when annihillation of enemies and acquisition of land are not brought to fruition. Anything less is an American Ideological perspective of humanity. I am aware of the irony of the "anonymous coward" post for being too laxy to log in for this post.
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.
Isn't that same argument about crime prevention as per the Kansas study? That more crime preventative/detective measures don't affect the crime rate just adjust where the crime occurs? So spending more on crime won't change the crime rate at all.
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.
Thank you for clarifying that for me.
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.
We agree there.
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 possession of the weapons if we didn't care. We just didn't care enough to do much about it.
Well, it depends. Yes, it is perfectly reasonable to change your mind. However, after 10 years of dicking around with Iraq after Gulf War 1, we had a pretty solid knowledge of what Iraq was doing. Mainly dancing around the subject of concrete proof because of his relationship with hostile neighbors. We handled it badly. Letting it drag on that long was politically expedient and we're paying a high price for it.
However, I wouldn't ban my kids from climbing trees after a fall (I have 4 -- kids, not trees), but would teach them to look closer for dangers and weaknesses before climbing the next one. Along that line, we knew Iraq had *nothing* to do with 9/11. There was no connection, and the President eventually admitted it in no uncertain terms. Iraq, in their actions, presented no direct threat to the U.S. then or in their history.
Iraq was invaded because it was convenient. The whole "they have WMDs" was the excuse of the day, considering our responses to N. Korea, Pakistan, India and Israel all having WMDs and nuclear programs.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Next iteration: Bruce Schneier is AN EVIL MUSLIM NAZI!
Wow I didn't know you could read the editors minds at Fox News. Incredible, try me next...
Iraq was to fight the "War on terror"
Afghanistan was a response to the attacks on 9/11 with the ultimate goal to capture/kill osama bin laden(which we still haven't done)
I hate when people think that both are for the same reason. Iraq was a response to some stuff that occurred int he 70s and 80s, and with the attacks on 9/11, Bush decided it would be a good idea to take care of the weapons of mass destruction that he thought Iraq still had. 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) They also apparently got close to nuclear weapons.
In the late 80s and early 90s, the UN told Iraq to dismantle and destroy these weapons. Iraq complied. The issue was bush didn't think they did comply, and that they continued to produce weapons(which wasn't true)
I never fully supported Iraq, but i will continue to support Afghanistan. Mainly because most of the people that live there still support osama bin laden.
You see the problem is bush tried to call saddam's bluff when he had a full boat. What happens next is Bush went on tilt using our entire chip stack to destroy their country one brick at a time.
I think I lost the analogy but you get the point.
9/11 is simply the result of a well organized terrorist group
recognizing:
- Planes are really flying bombs.
- The open cockpit-door policy.
Most other kneejerk "security enhancements" are simply
various power groups capitalizing on 9/11 to advance their
own agendas.
I don't see a single thing on technology in this article.
As far as Terrorism goes, the US was founded on terrorism. Hiding in the bushes, or sacking a ship of cofee, sure nothing like modern day terrorism, but still. We need a better label than just "Terrorism", this is a scape goat term to categorize anyone we don't like into. How about a war on prejudice, stupidity, and lawyers. They are the true terrorists anyways.
However terrorist attacks are almost completely irrelevant to us.
There...fixed that for ya.
I will agree that we handled it badly. However, I think the part that went badly was waiting too long to take action when it was clearly warranted long before.
so we established that you would act differently. However, that's sort of the point and moot at the same time. The climbing a tree example wasn't that you would ban them, it's that you would react differently to them climbing it and that changing your position was perfectly fine. Each and every person would probably have something different to say and the main problem is who is in charge that can execute their change of mind. In the US, it happened to be Bush and the different position was that it's now to dangerous to allow Saddam to hide his possession or WMDs and act publicly against our interests while supporting terrorist. If you were in charge, you could have educated Saddam on how bad WMDs are and what to watch out for. The point isn't the different approaches, it's that different approaches was justified given some action.
No one outside of conspiracy kooks and people attempting to verbally attack the US shares your opinion here. Most of the people are completely clueless to the facts surrounding the situation and formed unwavering opinions based around that misinformation or assumptions without the facts. You even admitted it yourself when you attempted to claim that WMDs are completely made up.
But here is the difference between Iraq, Afghanistan, N. Korea, India and Israel. The difference is two fold so pay particular close attention here. For one, Neither of those countries have engaged in hostile activities with the exception of N.K, against our allies in which the rest of the world came and bailed out. For two, neither of those countries have signed onto the NNPT or Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty or any of it's variants. Iraq was both a member of the NNPT, the chemical weapons ban, the biological weapons ban, and several other treaties along with invading an staunch Allie. And before you show any more ignorance by saying Kuwait was all about oil, you might want to look into the relationship the US has had with Kuwait starting before the US was an actual country and including Kuwait's aid given to the marines in the battle of Tripoli. Our relationship with Kuwait predates oil and our country period. Our support for Iraq in the Iran war was at the request of Kuwait who was paying Iraq for protection against Iran.
The problem decision makers are faced with that i don't think your fully grasping is that they are under immense pressure to do something when faced with a threat like 9/11.
Wah. We elect them to deal with pressure, doing useful things, not going to war against innocent nations under false pretenses and bullying our international allies, etc.
I'd put money on none of them having a better solution then troops
How much money? Who's to say better? Define that a bit and I'll take it.
Troops where, for instance. Troops are a good thing in many cases, but you need to invade the right country for them to do any good.
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!
It was discussed some time ago on Schneier's blog, but I can't find the proper reference. This is pretty close along with this but I can't find the long term impact on people's travel habits which is needed to get the total up the the level of the casualties on the day. Also the extent to which it's security measures rather than fear of flying is really needed to back up the statistic I stated.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
I think you might be conflating several things into one and then scratching your head when you can't see the connections.
It's remarkably easy to make connections when you start with opinions instead of facts.
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.
The US was told to take a hike for a reason. The US was asked for evidence that Osama bin Laden committed the crime. The US refused to present the evidence. Only then was the US request refused. For comparison, the US refuses to turn over Orlando Bosch (living now in Florida) even at the request of many countries which have evidence. See anything hypocritical here?
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.
If refusing to turn over known terrorists qualifies as "official support of the acts" then the US is also guilty. Except no one is suggesting the US be treated like Afghanistan. Civilized people, rational people, sane people, don't go around blowing up hundreds of thousands of people in other countries because of the actions of a few suspects.
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.
Diplomacy is where you work things out through negotiations. You're talking about mercenaries or private military contractors, typically supported by rich individuals, groups, or states; e.g. Al Qaeda, French Foreign Legion, School of the Americas, Blackwater, Dyncorp, and School of the Americas (WHISC). It's not even close to the "same thing."
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.
This is called regime change. When one government doesn't like another government and attempts to force a turnover via economic sanctions (e.g. US's embargo against Cuba), coup d'etat (see US sponsored coup d'etat against Chile's Allende), or bombing innocent people (over 1 million innocent people in Iraq, 100 000+ in Afghanistan). From the perspective of the UN World Court, and pretty much every civilized standard, this is considered illegal and immoral. And violent aggression, or war, requires the highest degree of justification. When the US stops sponsoring terrorism and terrorists (see Bosch, above; or Osama in the 1980s, or Sadam in the 1980s and 1990s, or Noriega, or the Shah of Iran), maybe then it can view others more fairly, and then ask the UN what's best to do.
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.
Yea, because it's easier to label
Yeah, apparently it is:
[...] nice liberal touch [...]
Thus proving that you don't even read your own drivel.
Well, I'm going to go get a beer now
Yeah, that's a good idea. You're too reasonable and clear headed, why don't you get drunk.
Or how about this, "here's to throwing intellectual honesty out the window".
I think this is pretty accurate. Amazingly so, you might say.
You're quite the sight alright.
How was that beer? Did those totally real friends of yours come and hang out with you and do totally real-friend kind of things? Cool.
Even if he is right, I would still rather go back to the way we were. Even if this made us more safe, it has made us less free. Both Democrats and especially Republicans have used 9/11 as an excuse to erode a lot of our rights and freedoms. I'll happily trade whatever measure of safety we got to get our freedom back. We've come to the point where people are seriously debating whether or not American citizens should be told of their Miranda rights.
I will agree that we handled it badly. However, I think the part that went badly was waiting too long to take action when it was clearly warranted long before.
I agree. We shouldn't have been letting them know in advance where inspections were going to happen, nor ask permission to enter areas. The very first time the Iraqis refused with a "this is an off-limits Presidential Palace" the inspectors should have showed back up the next day with an armored division and not bothered to knock.
You even admitted it yourself when you attempted to claim that WMDs are completely made up.
I didn't claim WMDs were made up. I claimed the term was designed to create a vague uncertainty that left plenty of wiggle room for the powers that be. You corrected me in where the term came from, but I stand by my claim that the term was used in the method I described in talking to the public. In the vernacular, WMDs means "nuclear weapons".
Don't put words in my mouth. I have NO qualms about the U.S. relationship with Kuwait, nor any quibbles with the justification of GW1. I didn't say a thing about oil, nor will I. We came to the defense of an ally.
My claim of the "difference" with Iraq is this -- Iraq posed no serious threat of retaliation to ANYONE or ANYTHING we cared about. They were, for all intents and purposes, impotent against the U.S. Korea, on the other hand, is within spitting distance of S. Korea and Japan. Any military strike there could quite possibly mean death and destruction in the tens of thousands of non-participants and allies.
We -- the U.S. -- aren't in a position to do anything about India or Pakistan without starting WW3. They're essentially off limits.
Iraq was opportune. Not only were they essentially impotent, but we already had all the logistics, troops and battle information in place from GW1. It was convenient. If we weren't set up, ready to go, I doubt it would have ever happened.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.