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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."
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...
It used to be you played real friendly with hijackers in a hostage situation. Now we know better.
Well, pre-9/11 the reason everyone just went along with what the hijackers wanted was because in general the hijackers wanted money, to make a political statement while getting themselves dropped off somewhere where they wouldn't get arrested or simply make a statement by landing the plane somewhere safe, taking all the passengers off and blowing up the empty plane. Basically if you just played along you'd be a lot safer than if you tried to take down the guy carrying a submachine gun and a hand grenade...
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
He didn't literally say "The US is safer because of 9/11", but he did make the comments that post-9/11 terrorism is all about scale, and that it's harder to pull off a large scale terrorist act because of the threat of being caught.
Yes... that's the premise of Jennings' article. But is that the same thing as being safer?
First - you have to look at context. Schneier wasn't talking about a factor of safety. He was answering the self-imposed question "Why Aren't There More Terrorist Attacks?" From Schneier's article:
Note that he's saying these attacks are easy (arguably no less difficult than before 9/11 - though that's my conjecture, not his). And, in fact, he even lists attacks that happened after 9/11.
The kicker to Jennings' article is that it imposes a conclusion on someone else's work that was never made. If you go back and look at a lot of Schneier's writing, he often notes that terrorism is not and has never been a major threat. And certainly not the threat that the current crop of fear-mongers make it out to be. To take Scheier's article and conclude that there has been a drastic change in the environment is a step away from claiming that everything done in the name of combating terrorism has been effective. Something else that Scheier is constantly critical of in his writings.
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!
Actually, no, that's not what he's saying.
He's got several points, but the one the second article mangles is a two-parter: (A) A big attack like 9/11 is hard to organize and pull together successfully, without getting caught along the way. (Mostly due to old-fashioned police work, or just the fact that one of you suicide-attackers-in-training might come to the realization that they can actually live this life usefully. And that's assuming you managed to find enough of them in the first place.) (B) No smaller attack is likely to make an impression on the people you need to impress.
So, basically, he's saying is that terrorism has become an all-or-nothing proposition: Either you pull of something spectacular, or you fail. And the more spectacular you try to be, the more likely you are to fail before you get to the point where you pull anything off.
'Sensible' is a curse word.
I think you might be conflating several things into one and then scratching your head when you can't see the connections.
First, these are completely separate issues at hand. 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. 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. 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. 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. You mentioned Vietnam and one of the lessons learned there was how hostile support within the leadership can defeat the most valiant efforts. Another lesson which can be connected was that a defense only strategy doesn't work when it doesn't hit the enemy hard enough. Korea has a few different lessons which would have eventually played in too.
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. In case you are still in the dark or purposely ignoring the threat, it was that he would give the weapons to people wanting to harm us or our allies and given the sanctuary that Afghanistan gave AQ which enabled and promoted their efforts for 9/11, allowing what we thought we knew to exist would result in another 9/11 to either US or our allies except with WMDs instead of jet airliners. Saddam has already at this time promised the families of Hammas suicide bombers a pension of $15 or $25k US after they blew themselves up. So it was not a stretch at all to believe he would aid them in other ways.
So it wasn't because Iraq had a part in 9/11, it was because after 9/11, we saw what doing nothing lead to. And yes, we had already been in diplomatic relations with Afghanistan before 9/11 to the tun of several billion dollars a year in aid and they still supported AQ before and after 9/11.
You cannot apply the art of war here in a literal sense. The problem is that the type of war is not expected to be won quickly in the first place. And yes, victory conditions have been defined, you simply do not want to accept them. The conditions are (for Iraq) when the Iraqi government is elected
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.
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.