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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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.