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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.
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...
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.
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
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
I just turned you into the FBI for "aiding and abetting terrorists". Enjoy the view, and don't drop your soap, ever.
Table-ized A.I.
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.
It may be more complicated than that. He used low-grade explosives probably because the higher-grade ones would attract more attention during acquisition. Thus, it appears that it's merely an attempt to get around the system by using crappy weapons. Maybe it would have worked slightly better if he didn't make other planning mistakes, but not much.
Table-ized A.I.
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 )
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!
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.
However terrorist attacks are almost completely irrelevant to the lives of anyone living anywhere except for Iraq.
Or Ireland.
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.
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.
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.
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 ?
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
I'm seriously suggesting that innuendo and unsupported assertions are BS. Show me the data.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
You mean the same France who forwarded the fake nuclear report to the US? Or the France who was making secrete oil deals with Iraq that Violated UN Sanctions and stood to lose out on billions if we went to war with Iraq?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niger_uranium_forgeries
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/11/AR2005101101384.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil-for-Food_Programme#Criminal_investigation_in_France
That is something completely made up in your mind with absolutely no evidence to support it. Where do you think we are, in your preschool class with no access to the internet or anything?
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!