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."

Comments

Just under three thousand people would disagree...

[craznar]

.. not to mention thousands of soldiers and their families.

LOL

[Mark19960]

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.

Re:LOL

[impaledsunset]

Did you even read the article? I know this is something despised around here, but you could at least pretend you tried. You even assert that we are more safer in your own post, after you say that we aren't. I'm not aware of any successful major terrorist attack after 9/11, if you do, will you please share it with us?

Re:LOL

[DarkOx]

I guess it made us safer in the same way y2k made our software date handling better. It prompted us to finally close some of the biggest holes We certainly are still getting it wrong much of the time though and in many instances the best cure we have managed to implement is much worse than the disease.

Re:LOL

[hedwards]

Umm, Iraq wasn't involved in 9/11 nor was there any credible evidence that Saddam was able to attack us in the US. Perhaps you might explain to the rest of us how that makes us safer. And while you're at it, you might consider explaining how the mission in Afghanistan is protecting us more than the alternative of cruise missiles to training camps would.

What we have done is dedicated a huge amount of resources to nebulous goals in parts of the world of little strategic value, without defining the victory conditions or making credible back up plans for the instance where we need to engage in combat elsewhere in the world. There may be something I'm missing here, but Sun Tzu was right on when he indicated that fighting wars far away for prolonged periods is a serious indicator of failure.

This is largely the same problem we had in Vietnam and Korea, where there was a secondary war going on, which we weren't particularly involved in, which kept our troops in the crossfire. Such wars rarely if ever go well, and the lack of interest in the higher levels of the DoD and Federal government to commit resources we don't have to the mission at hand does not indicate that we're likely to make a meaningful positive difference.

BRUCE NEVER SAID THAT

[Anonymous Coward]

Bruce never said 9/11 made us safer. Read his words, not the words someone put into his mouth.

Re:BRUCE NEVER SAID THAT

[ZekoMal]

"After the enormous horror and tragedy of 9/11, why have the past eight years been so safe in the U.S.?"

"If you're a representative of al-Qaida trying to make a statement in the U.S., it's much harder. You just don't have the people, and you're probably going to slip up and get caught."

If you actually read his words, he said that it's much harder to make a big statement terrorist-wise, because the longer it takes you to do it the more likely you are to get caught. 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.

No, just more paranoid

[HalAtWork]

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.

Re:Just under three thousand people would disagree

[CaptainPatent]

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.

Why NoSQL?

[tuxish]

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.

NoSQL? Waittaminute

[Tablizer]

Couldn't someone volunteer to show them how to implement a reliable, scalable, NoSQL setup?

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.

Re:Just under three thousand people would disagree

[hedwards]

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.

Re:Just under three thousand people would disagree

[selven]

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.

Re:Just under three thousand people would disagree

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

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.

Re:Just under three thousand people would disagree

[sumdumass]

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.

Re:Just under three thousand people would disagree

[thesandtiger]

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.