Teacher Asks Students To Plan a Terrorist Attack

Tired of looking at an endless parade of dioramas, an Australian teacher had her class plan a terrorist attack that would "kill as many innocent Australians as possible." "The teacher, with every best intention, was attempting to have the students think through someone else's eyes about conflict. I think there are better ways to do that. ... This is not what we expect of professional educators," said Sharyn O'Neill, director-general of the state's Department of Education.

Comments

How do you anticipate weak points

[sheddd]

Without thinking like that?

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[madddddddddd]

let the adults think about it...

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it's more like let "the authorities" think about it.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[William Robinson]

How do you anticipate weak points without thinking like that?

Yeah Right.

So let's start asking students to come up with some new innovative concepts for 'how to steal laptops', 'how to make a kid blind so he could be used as begger', 'how to rape', 'how to murder somebody and dispose body in acid' and many more.

Seriously, anybody who is trying that on students is out of his mind.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[Urza9814]

What about teaching students to hack into computer systems? That's fairly common and fairly well accepted...and in those exercises it's not just a 'think of a way to do this', it's a 'here is a server, here is a PC, go do it'.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[Kell Bengal]

And you know what? We should have students thinking about exactly those kinds of things. They would gain more insight into what make some societies dysfunctional. Such instruction would come with discussion of the ethical implications of all those acts - as is the case with any social studies course. Certainly, by thinking about potential threats, what makes a threat credible and what can be done to reduce risks, students learn to cope with a world in which the TSA thinks binary explosives are dangerous but lets any fool take a laptop full of explosive batteries onto a plane.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[black3d]

Ah, my high school computer teacher didn't so much teach us how to break into computer systems, as much as challenge us to break into the school computer systems, and then disclose our methods. It was part of their ongoing security auditing and improvements.

It was a lot of fun. Starting with the library computers which had limited internet access and less-than-perfect policy controls. I remember using Netscape Navigator on one machine, to associate command.com as the default application for .wav files, then clicking through to a .wav file to get to a command prompt and wreak havoc. Years later we were breaking into the main school Unix network with ctrl-break's at susceptible points during the execution of scripts with elevated priveleges (which they rapidly fixed as a severe issue). Ahh great times. Alas, I was a mere hobbyist back then, and have trouble actually relating what I was dealing with at the time because I didn't really know... Fun times.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[cgenman]

"How do we secure this area from attack?" is not just a question of putting up standard safety procedures. It's about thinking how people would attack, and finding ways of stopping that. On a practical example "How would someone break into your house?" If you wander around it, find the weak points, and figure out how to do it, you can actually fix your security. "Oh, that second floor bathroom window that is always open is near a tree branch. The wood is rotting around this back door glass panel, and could be easily removed." That sort of thing. Even simple stuff, like "How would you attack someone on this street" can be quite useful. "Oh, there is a dark alley there, I'll walk in the street at that point. We need more lights at the park entrance. Let's keep people from parking at this spot, as it obscures the view of the corner."

If we don't get kids thinking realistically about how one could attack, they're never going to be able to anticipate and defend against real threats as adults. They'll just be standing around looking like fools when someone thinks to make bombs out of shoes, or drive a boat into the levees at New Orleans, etc. Or they'll live in fear of perceived dangers, which have little chance of turning into something real.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[niftydude]

Hell - if you are not allowed to think like that, then how do you even write the next season of 24?
The assignment would have covered such a large range of critical and creative thinking skills - it really seems to me like a good idea. I can't ever remember seeing a school project or assignment that would exercise such a large range of skills in one go.

And for the people who find thinking about it "extremely offensive" - all I can say is: harden up - terrorism in one form or another has existed throughout history, and it won't go away just because you choose to ignore it.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[William Robinson]

If we don't get kids thinking realistically about how one could attack, they're never going to be able to anticipate and defend against real threats as adults.

Maybe you are right for few cases. And maybe this kind of thing might be able to help students down the road.

But that's not the point. At some point you are overexposing a younger mind to violence and social disorder. If that was supposed to wholeheartedly acceptable, we would not have had ratings for movies.

I am not even arguing about bad effect or impact on their innocent minds.

If there is a single student in the class who turns into attacker, for any reason whatsoever, we are basically making schools a training center for terrorists.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[txoof]

Not only does this kind of thinking teach preparedness, but it opens up discussions. This would be an amazing opportunity to talk about what terrorism is, why it happens and who is involved. Students that understand the whole package are less likely to lash out at minority groups and deal with future terrorism more sanely. That being said, As a teacher, I would definitely write a carefully worded curriculum plan and be ready to defend it. It wouldn't hurt to have the department head on my side either. People tend to freak out whenever teachers try something new...

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[Aeternitas827]

My school district took a similar tack with things like this. It wasn't so much endorsing our poking around and finding what could go wrong, they more turned a blind eye to it until something went haywire.

That promptly stopped the day someone used one of the unguarded Administrative accounts and net send over the domain, scaring the hell out of people; luckily, the domain included only our school and the district's administrative building (not the whole district of 20 or so schools); nevertheless, the dean and the local IT guy came to our room first trying to figure out who had done it (ignoring the fact that the originating system's name popped up, and it wasn't in our room), and realizing it wasn't any of us, recruited us to track down the perp.

Before they locked it all down, I was able to modify the default wallpaper on the Freshman class' users (they divided it all up in Active Directory) to have a fake error message dead center (created using VBScript for the purpose), that 'wouldn't go away'. Never got to watch hilarity ensue.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[mjwx]

Without thinking like that?

Every armed force in the western world operates an OPFOR type organisation for just this purpose. Often using tactics, vehicles and equipment expected to be used by foreign aggressors (I.E. a lot of Ex-Soviet and old US equipment that got sold on). Sometimes up to the point where a foreign allied force is acting as OPFOR.

As an Australian, I dont see what is wrong here. Frankly we could use more of this kind of out of the box thinking in the glorified day care system that is education. But unfortunately the NIMBY's wont have a bar of it.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[Lumbre]

If we don't get kids thinking realistically about how one could attack, they're never going to be able to anticipate and defend against real threats as adults.

To me, this sounds like a professor asking students to hack a computer.

It's a learning process to learn the safeguards of what to do to provide computer security. There will always be a subset that use the knowledge maliciously.

There are also home-grown hackers (like there are home-schooled children), so I wouldn't blame the schools. I'd blame the person's character.

I think it's all right if the children (year 10 .. think high school) are mentally prepared for a hypothetical and critical thinking. We do, of course, offer violent video games to teens in the U.S. Don't think just because they are rated 'Teen' or 'Mature' they don't make it into the hands of younger children.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[Aeternitas827]

That being said, As a teacher, I would definitely write a carefully worded curriculum plan and be ready to defend it. It wouldn't hurt to have the department head on my side either.

That, to me, is essentially what this boils down to, is how the assignment was introduced to the class. The same goal here could have been achieved with a scenario along the lines of, 'You're in charge of a city (instead of a terrorist cell); where is it vulnerable, where would be most likely to be attacked if the goal is maximum casualties, (and add) what steps could be taken to mitigate such an event?'

The end result, that way, is almost the same; the students have to think critically, and ultimately would be charged with the same thing--think like an attacker--but with the exact opposite spin. Presented that way, there likely would have been some resistance, but continuing the assignment would be much more justifiable.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[rtb61]

What this really bolis down to is a mass media news outlet http://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest trying to make a moutain out of mole hill in order to sell more advertising.

Basically bugger the schools, buggers the students, bugger the country, this story will sell more page views to reactionary idiots, "YAHOO".

Yet again mass media demonstrating it's adherence to profits over public interests.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[lanceruch]

I am teacher and sometime there is a need to innovate and motivate if the task become routinary..

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[Aeternitas827]

Your logic is a bit flawed here. The news story was an effect of a badly planned assignment; had the assignment been planned, say, as I mentioned above, the outcry--the cause leading to the article--would have been small or not present at all, which would leave the administrators of the school nothing to act on.

In this day and age, something like this is going to draw news attention, but that's not the aim of parents complaining or schools taking action on something; the parents/administrators are the ones making the mountain out of the proverbial molehill; the news are just doing what they're there to do.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[Anonymous Coward]

> the TSA thinks binary explosives are dangerous but lets any fool take a laptop full of explosive batteries onto a plane.

You meant "and proceeds to put the alleged components of binary explosives together - in one bin made from thin metal in a place with crowd they gather"?

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[_KiTA_]

No, it's more like let "the authorities" think about it.

The only thing that will come of able bodied, intelligent students thinking about flaws in the system is able bodied, intelligent students realizing that the system is flawed.

Which is bad, from the POV of someone who knows there are flaws, but keeps his/her job by making sure the general public is too stupid to realize / too fat to care.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[Kelbear]

That's a silly argument. A single student in the class turning into an attacker invalidates the educational process?

Shit, I'm sure some TV shows or movies have been used as a reason for violence, but I don't think we should ban TV or movies.

I definitely believe there is indeed an acceptable casualty rate for certain freedoms.

Look, even in middle-school, pre-911, without being asked. I had worked out that with enough savings, I could take a knife, stab random strangers and ride across America on an unstoppable pattern-less killing spree. This strategy still rings true in the age of terrorism. This doesn't happen because I'm not a batshit crazy murderer, not because anybody can stop me, or because I didn't think about it.

If the teacher was advocating terrorism, then there is a problem, but just trying to get kids to think and gain perspective is a worthwhile cause (Even if he probably could have accomplished it with a less inflammatory method).

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[richlv]

somehow i feel that would be much better than making these topics taboos. then you can wave one topic and have anything passed in the legislative process.

let's turn around your examples. "how to prevent somebody from stealing a laptop", "how to engineer a society that can withstand and prevent/reduce begging/rape/murder". to understand these topics one must understand cause and be able to discuss them, not shut down going la-la-la.

also, this is an interesting and serious enough of a topic, should not have been on idle.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you even know that martial arts are exactly what you would say causing violence and social disorder?

Every martial arts students learns how to attack, but they are teached to not attack but to defend themselfs. If they do not know how to attack, they can not defend.

Example from Karate, it is only for defence, never for attack. You continue defend youself as long as the other can just stand. The idea is to use the attacker own force and actions against itself. It takes longer than do a counter-attack or attack directly but it is effective.
With Bruce Lee's "Intercepting Fist" (idea in Jeet Kune Do) the idea is what it says. Before enemy even attacks, you intercept the attack. All by knowing the ways of attacking.

The wrong way is to teach that the violance is answer for your problems. And that is as well about movies, they teach that violance is accepted answer for problems. And the fact really is that young peoples brains has not developed enough to understand so complex philosophies and the chicken-egg / action-re-action questions. They can not find out the purposes what is behind the story or what history books are not telling.

And even that there would come a ONE student who turns to be a person who wants violance and start planning and executing somethings, there is the rest of the class who know how to defend against him and think like him. Btw, terrorist is not a single person or group of persons. Only king/government can be a terrorist. The meaning what media now call "terrorists" is twisted version to hide the true actions of the government to have a control over own citizens.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[profplump]

First, I'm pretty sure a student who turns into an attacker doesn't need their teacher to tell them to think about how to attack. Presumably that's just something you figure out on-the-job without anyone needing to prompt you. Or are you suggesting that terrorism started when some teacher first asked this question?

Second, you're using moving ratings as an example of how we protect children? Are you kidding? Or even as an example of a just and worthwhile process that people accept as universally beneficial?

Finally, I'd argue that you're underexposing younger minds to social disorder, leaving them ill-prepared to deal with a world where it actually exists. Or God forbid, to actually start their own social disorder in response to social injustices they might witness. Not to mention the obvious benefits to critical and hypothetical reasoning skills, the ability to rationally consider situations that induce fear rather than just hoping that your parents/government/etc. deals with it for you and accepting whatever they say as the best and only solution, the follow-on discussions on the tradeoffs between security and freedom, and the possibility that we might uncover new ideas on how to provide useful safety.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[Anonymous Coward]

DEATH TO ... um... Australia? ok. DEATH TO AUSTRALIA i guess. Really, what, did we give up on America? Or are we just accepting their destruction of their own freedoms via. religious oppression and discrimination by the far, far christian right as a win? How boring!

But really, I am not a terrorist. I love my country.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[lxs]

You can't go looking through the eyes of THE EMEMY. Before you know it you will recognise the humanity in THE ENEMY and suddenly bombing his family and stealing his recources will start to feel wrong. Can't have that now can we?

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[lxs]

I hope that you're not teaching English.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[aussie_a]

The one who made a stink about the assignment was a student. I think pointing out that the security put in place to combat terrorists is actually security theatre is something the teachers SHOULD be doing.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[Xiroth]

Hey, that would have been a really good reason to do it. Unfortunately, the real reason was just to tie the lesson into an upcoming movie about Australia being invaded. She was just teaching the kids how to mount a resistance! :P

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[Hognoxious]

At some point you are overexposing a younger mind to violence and social disorder.

These are Australians, they're genetically predisposed towards those kind of things anyway.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[History's Coming To]

My primary school teacher used to ask us to argue against things we believed..."nuclear weapons are a good and useful thing for humanity to have" was a memorable one. Most useful lessons I ever had at school I think.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[labradore]

Power corrupts, hence most authorities are actually greedy grown-up children.

Most parents love their children and a lot don't use their authority wisely. Do your authorities, ne masters, love you?

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[captainpanic]

At least students will learn how easy it is to commit an act of terrorism.
They will also learn that 100% security does not exist.
They will therefore also learn that they should not depend on the government for their security.

And finally, they will hopefully realize that since the government has never provided full protection, and society is still functioning, the whole problem of terrorism is severely overestimated or even exaggerated.

This is a good lesson... and believe me, most kids will have these kind of thoughts anyway. The most important thing is that they never actually go any further than doing some brain exercise on the topic.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[dissy]

Yeah Right.

So let's start asking students to come up with some new innovative concepts for 'how to steal laptops', 'how to make a kid blind so he could be used as begger', 'how to rape', 'how to murder somebody and dispose body in acid' and many more.

Seriously, anybody who is trying that on students is out of his mind.

So why exactly are you trying to make the world a place where laptop theft, rape, murder, and mutilation is easier for anyone to do?

Why are you against stopping these criminals?

As far as I am concerned, you personally are a worse threat to humanity than any terrorist could possibly be.
Just realize that you personally represent a threat to the entire population of humans, and when you are hated for that, and people call for your own death, this is why.

Personally I *DO* want us to have defenses against all of those things. I want to be able to defend against thieves, murderers, rapists, torturers and people wanting to mutilate, as well as actual terrorists.

Why are you trying to give all those criminals a free pass by removing our only defense against them??

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[HopefulIntern]

Man, when I was in high school we werent even allowed to use the command prompt. Some kid managed to open it and did a 'net send * [message]' to the whole of the school network. Got nailed for it.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[vilms]

Never mind weak points, *If only* I had mod points...

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[nospam007]

"First, I'm pretty sure a student who turns into an attacker doesn't need their teacher to tell them to think about how to attack."

Yep, he could explode his shoes or underwear.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[Anonymous Coward]

If you had read TFA, the aim is to "kill as many innocent Australians as possible.", you would not have made those stupid arguments. Is this what your education process designed for?

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[somersault]

First, I'm pretty sure a student who turns into an attacker doesn't need their teacher to tell them to think about how to attack.

Playing devil's advocate - this student may be too dumb to figure out a decent method of attack, and a much smarter kid or group of kids could provide him with a great plan.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[sourcerror]

Haven't you heard, Big Brother loves you?

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[Yvanhoe]

You don't understand. The danger with this kind of teaching is that people might realize that anti-terrorist measures are just a big ridiculous joke. That a bunch of educated persons with a $10,000 budget would have an easy way designing a terrorist attack.

I mean, we are supposed to be paranoid about airports right ? Hackers from the CCC have shown that they can do a RFID clone of the access badge of security staff. Yeah, sure, T-rays and biometrics passports make us safe...

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[garompeta]

NO, it is precisely the contrary. Looking through the eyes of the enemy what you gain is EMPATHY not resentment. E

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[PriyanPhoenix]

The bigger danger is that children may start to understand terrorism as an expected element of conflict, one that has existed for centuries, one that should be expected, planned for where it can be anticipated, but not allowed to disrupt real life. Then they would learn to have a measured response to this touchy buzzword, and we've lost fear as a tool to control them.

Naturally this must be prevented.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[roman_mir]

Your comment is good and all, I just wanted to point out the little thing here:

We need more lights at the park entrance.

, just note that 'bad guys' are also people who probably also don't see well in the very dark conditions (well, unless they have night vision equipment), so actually they wouldn't be sitting in the dark waiting for prey, most attacks happen in well lit conditions.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[Odinlake]

What about teaching students to hack into computer systems? That's fairly common and fairly well accepted...and in those exercises it's not just a 'think of a way to do this', it's a 'here is a server, here is a PC, go do it'.

There's a difference in badness between "hack" (into a computer) and "kill" (thousands of people). Furthermore the former is much less likely than the latter to latch on to some dark primeval instincts of a depressed juvenile. Moreover still, a discussion about hacking (the technical aspects, not the so much the social) will probably lead to someone learning something directly useful. A discussion about mass murder? Very few people spend their daily life with anything related to that, and many of those who do are called "paranoid".

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[Moridin42]

Yeah. Lets not teach them about World War I, or II, or the US Civil War, or the Napolean era, Alexander the Great, the sengoku jidai, and dozens of other wars and conflicts from around the globe.

They might be overexposed to violence and social disorder! ... Except, they're in high school. If they're too young to handle violence and social disorder in an educational context they're too young for, well, school. Where there is violence and social disorder in practice. Not, necessarily, on a large scale. But you also don't get to close a text book to get away from it.

Perhaps Australia's literary curriculum is quite different from what I went through, but I got to read various and sundry classical pieces with violence and social disorder in it. And was asked to write papers analyzing those pieces on such content. I know, its a shock. I would've loved to argue that I was too young to be exposed to all that. Mostly because I would have enjoyed taking a hammer to my own kneecaps more than reading them.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[Odinlake]

What about teaching students to hack into computer systems? That's fairly common and fairly well accepted...and in those exercises it's not just a 'think of a way to do this', it's a 'here is a server, here is a PC, go do it'.

By the way, are you suggesting we say to the students 'here is a bunch of people, here is a chainsaw, go do it'?

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[ConfusedVorlon]

we all watched war games.

perhaps a similar lesson can be learned by the kids in this exercise...

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[Jesus_666]

That's exactly what the GP means: If you develop empathy for the people fighting against you you're no longer susceptible to the usual "they're evil and they only live to destroy us" rhethoric. Imagine what would happen if the government and media lost their ability to incite fear at will. The government would actually have to do what the people want instead of what gives it more power and the media would have to resort to journalism.

Thus, the government isn't interested in students being taught to think critically about the enemy du jour and neither are the media.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[luis_a_espinal]

What about teaching students to hack into computer systems? That's fairly common and fairly well accepted...and in those exercises it's not just a 'think of a way to do this', it's a 'here is a server, here is a PC, go do it'.

Agreed that you have to teach on the subject of questionable practices to understand the perpetrators, but there is a caveat of who you are teaching what and in what kind of social context. You don't teach kids in a social vacuum, and the teacher could have achieved what he wanted to achieve by assigning a different subject (explore how "the other" people see us and why, or study of the root causes of modern terrorism, international politics and such.)

All in all, there are few HS teachers that do what Mr. Marino tried to do. But of those who do, the overwhelming majority of them achieve their goals without resorting to this kind of homework. Yes, yes, it might be legal if we want to go down that route, but was it the appropriate, most effective thing to do? Some common sense and trade-offs need to be applied every once in a while.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[Jesus_666]

German students are exposed to violence and social disorder. German history class is 50% "German history between 1928 and 1945", under the premise that teaching the students about the inhumane cruelty of the Nazi regime will keep them from repeating these mistakes. There's some really gruesome stuff in there, especially when you get to the concentration camps. Mind you, this is not the same as showing them gory depictions of artillery shell victims. It's perfectly possible to teach someone about gruesome matters in school without sinking to the level of a B-movie.

Having gone through that, I not only know how to effectively gas people but also the basics of how to take over a poverty-stricken country and about the logistics of efficient genocide. Those are the side effects of having learned about the rise and fall of the Nazis - and the "how to take over a poor country" thing is in there explicitly so we can identify and potentially do something about people using similar tactics (and to prevent these tactics from becoming applicable in the first place).

Now, if the school teaches you how to build a bomb you know how to tell that someone is building a bomb and you can tell that not everything with wiring and batteries is an explosive device. You don't become more dangerous, usually, because at least all male teenagers I knew back when I was one were perfectly aware of how to construct a pipe bomb and many also knew how to improvise a somewhat functional fuel-air explosive using flour. We knew that because things going "boom" are naturally interesting to teenaged males and because it was trivial to find out how they work even back then. (And no, none of this was covered in school.) Granted, most girls probably wouldn't look into explosives on their own but I'd expect the deranged ones to do so.

Nowadays I wouldn't expect anyone with a serious intent to do harm to pick up his knowledge in school. Wikipedia can already tell you a lot and a Wikipedia session followed by half an hour of googling will give you everything you need to build an effective bomb. The schools are not imparting any new knowledge to those who already wish to kill someone.

Likewise, it's fairly easy to learn about effective bomb placement by reading/watching reports about terrorist attacks. Comments like "the terrorists did X wrong, otherwise the explosion would have been much more severe" aren't exactly rare. And given how a lot of amok runners spend quite a bit of time preparing for their run and tend to have a fascination with thiese things it's prefectly reasonable to assume that they will inform themselves about how to go about their business.


Unless American minds are extremely fragile, I'd say that teaching them about how terrorism works is unlikely to scar them. And teaching them about the methods of terrorism is unlikely to make them much more dangerous than they already are.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[jargon82]

Back in high school I bought a laptop at a garage sale that turned out to be chock full of qbasic code and the PDS compiler. One of the programs allowed you to net send but specify the "from" computername. This was of course used only for kind and gentle purposes at the time, but before posting this I googled around to see how this was possible. Anyone got a clue? :) I seriously doubt I still have the code 14 years later.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[Hognoxious]

If you had read TFA, the aim is to "kill as many innocent Australians as possible.",

Yes, as part of a hypothetical, theoretical scenario.

It would hardly be realistic in context if the aim was maximizing the number of yummy cakes eaten, would it?

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[stonewallred]

When I was in the 7th grade, I was learning advanced infantry techniques, how to set an ambush, how to field improvise explosives and booby traps, and how to wreak havoc on supply chains and supply dumps. We also learned how to eat bugs, and survive with very minimal equipment and supplies. I kid you not, our instructor was named Sgt.Doom, and he was a Ranger with extensive time spent in Vietnam, along with other "unnamed" ugly places (his way of reference, not mine). He also taught us ways to silently kill or incapacitate sentries and other targets, how to carry weapons not concealed per se, but unobtrusively and other exotic tricks. Surprisingly, only a few of us students ended up in prison. Out of my class of 40 or so, only 8 of us ended up as wards of the state prison system. They ended up retiring him not long after I got out of school.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[PopeRatzo]

At some point you are overexposing a younger mind to violence and social disorder.

Oh, come on, they get that from watching Jersey Shore.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[HungryHobo]

And yet there's a point.
if a crowd of kids in a few minutes chatting can come up with a number of schemes that would probably work with little or no chance of getting caught then that leads on to a question that every person, adult and student alike should ask- why we don't see destruction on that scale regularly if it would be easy.

The rational answer is of course that terrorists aren't such a great threat as they're made out to be.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[thej1nx]

"It's about thinking why people would attack, and finding ways of stopping that."

There. Fixed it for you. You wouldn`t happen to be working for US foreign policy department by any chance, would you? Would explain a lot of things.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[HungryHobo]

If course we could go with your idea that asking such questions will corrupt their young minds and awaken their inner terrorists.

If the teacher had asked the students in a history class if their was any way they could see that the outcomes of some major battles could have been changed with changes in tactics, would that have beeen better?
It's still asking them to think about slaughtering people on a massive scale.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[Anonymous Coward]

Well how about your GOVERNMENT spending xxxx bIllion on security measures, while taking xxx billion out of Hospitals and health care. Evey dollar spent means another dollar not spent where it can do the most good.
Net result: The government is a terrorist, because its first priority is not about saving lives, but being seen to do something. The national road toll is how many people?
The Afghanistan .gov defines lawful terrorism

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[1u3hr]

There's a difference in badness between "hack" (into a computer) and "kill" (thousands of people). Furthermore the former is much less likely than the latter to latch on to some dark primeval instincts of a depressed juvenile. Moreover still, a discussion about hacking (the technical aspects, not the so much the social) will probably lead to someone learning something directly useful. A discussion about mass murder? Very few people spend their daily life with anything related to that, and many of those who do are called "paranoid".

Right, school teachers should never discuss war, genocide, or any event in the past that anyone might have strong feelings about; and should never, ever discuss why "enemies" of your country might feel as they do. In fact, studying history at all is double-plus ungood. Any teacher who even suggests that people from different cultures have any reason for their actions, other than "They're evil", should be immediately sent to a re-education camp till they understand how much Big Brother Loves Them.

(Sorry for the heavy handed irony -- but really; get a grip. If you can't discuss the real world in high school, when do you? )

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[networkconsultant]

Didn't britian found austrailia to get rid of it's terrorists?

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[b4upoo]

I agree. This type of lesson can hold a student's attention and provide a positive experience. It would not hurt if after the lesson the teacher added something positive such as the game of chess is all about attacking an enemy and defending ones' king and then spending a bit of time teaching kids the rudiments of chess.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[stdarg]

why we don't see destruction on that scale regularly if it would be easy.

The rational answer is of course that terrorists aren't such a great threat as they're made out to be.

That's rational based on the assumptions of the assignment. The danger with teaching this lesson to children is that they may not see the flaws in the assignment itself, and the teacher didn't seem likely to point them out either. For instance, in reality, terrorist hopefuls don't have easy access to military grade chemical weapons. A big way domestic terrorists are caught is when they start networking with other terrorists to get supplies of advanced weapons (not homemade fertilizer bombs). It's probably also a huge barrier to entry. If everybody just automatically had WMDs, then you probably *would* see destruction on that scale regularly.

Another big flaw is that the assignment presumes motivation on the students' behalf. It doesn't ever ask, how would you *become* convinced that you need to make a terrorist attack to make a political statement. It just says, you *are* convinced, so how would you do it. Is that realistic?

The lesson learned after asking those questions is about how to fight terrorism. The answer isn't "don't worry about it" as you imply. It's "we need to watch people who seem motivated, such as religious extremists, before they take the first physical step to an attack" and "if we miss that, we need to catch them at the networking/supplying stage where they are most exposed" and "people like me probably won't be terrorists because we lack the motivation, and it's actually quite difficult to acquire that motivation without some obvious signs, so we need to watch 'others'."

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[xtracto]

And why exactly is he out of his mind??

The important question to ask about that is "WHY?", or more descriptively "for what reason?".

If I was the head of a wallmart, I would love to hear students more innovative ways to "how to steal laptops" from my shop. Also, if I was an FBI officer of the child-abuse division, I deffinitely would be interested on "never seen before" ways that children could be coerced and abuse them.

And the same with all the others...

The important issue is with what PURPOSE do you come up with such plans. That is why in law they are interested in the INTENT or purpose of the actions.

 

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[Anonymous Coward]

Very few people spend their daily life with anything related to that, and many of those who do are called "paranoid".

Very few students spend ANY time in a building that is on fire, but that doesn't stop every school in the US from having monthly fire drills, does it?

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[Anonymous Coward]

We don't ignore it. We just imagine terrorists and fight them.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[stdarg]

If we don't get kids thinking realistically about how one could attack, they're never going to be able to anticipate and defend against real threats as adults.

The assignment wasn't realistic though, because it presumed access to chemical weapons and sufficient motivation to use them. There IS no way to defend against motivated terrorists who already have advanced military grade weapons.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[xtracto]

Lol... German teaching Nazi stuff is not the best of the examples...

Here in "poorer" East Germany there is quite a strong presence of pro-NPD (e.g. the new National socialist party). I guess after children read about what Germany was and then see their surroundings/current state they feel entitled to go to the far-right.

Evenmore... I was disgusted after going to a concentration camp (Buchenbald) and reading a guestbook some comments from Germans cheering at all the atrocities presented there (comments like "Hitler was right").

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[stdarg]

The wrong way is to teach that the violance is answer for your problems

You can call it what you want but in all your examples, violence *is* the answer for your problems. When you use your enemy's force against him, that's still violence. You're certainly not helping or healing him. Bruce Lee's "intercepting fist" thing is fighting fire with fire.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[stdarg]

There's a difference between connecting the dots on your own and being directed to for an assignment. You know all about gassing people, fine. You could design your own gas chamber. But did you teacher ever say, "Class, how would you improve the design of gas chambers to make them more efficient?" I mean what's the point? What would you learn from that that is socially useful that you didn't learn already (gas chambers are bad)?

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[KarrdeSW]

My High School did a mock revolutionary war battle every year. The freshmen and sophomores are the grunts, with a few of the more motivated ones acting as commanders. The juniors/seniors act as "referees" who decide what losses the individual groups of soldiers take during each sortie (the "weapons fire" is really just the kids pointing sticks at each other and going 'pow' or sometimes launching a water balloon from a slingshot).

Honestly, it's a fun day had by all, and it is reasonably educational when you consider that each side is collaborating on its own battle strategy, tactics, ambushes (our nearby park is basically a large valley that has a LOT of open land AND a lot of interesting terrain). Then, of course, just seeing it all in action from the high ground as hundreds of students march, 'sortie', scramble, regroup, retreat, etc is just really impressive. I believe there were some years where there were even deserters and defectors.

I guess my point is that it is possible to educate children with these sorts of tools without exposing them to the harsher side of it. Admittedly, the terrorist attack from TFA sounds a bit extreme, and the teacher definitely seems to be acting in bad taste. I guess I don't really have a point, I just wanted to nostalgia. :)

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't go looking through the eyes of THE EMEMY.

Oh no! Not the EMEMY! Anything but that!

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[darkmeridian]

We need to train our kids in outside-the-box thinking in order to have them compete in the real world. I remember there was one US war game exercise against an Islamic nation. The US commander thought that he had a huge advantage in communication because he could jam the radio receivers the Islamic forces had to use. The OPFOR commander used minarets to hide giant horns to send signals to his men. The "umpire" for the war game disallowed that hack as outside the rules of the game. Of course, then we invaded Iraq and Afghanistan and that's the kind of asymmetric tactics that we're running into.

A similar thing happened during US planning for an invasion of Japan during World War II. All these generals and admirals had differing casualty estimates for an invasion. Nimitz had a very high number because he assumed that the Japanese would use kamikaze aircraft to sink Allied landing craft filled with soldiers before they even got out of the boats. No one else had thought of that; they had only taken casualty estimates after Allied forces had hit the beach. So Nimitz recommended an initial feint with fake landing crafts actually loaded to the gills with anti-aircraft guns. The Japanese would hopefully attack mostly empty ships and give up a huge advantage.

Again, thinking outside the box is something that needs to be fostered in our kids. You have to be able to put yourselves in other people's shoes in order to succeed in many ventures, from warfare to business to life in general.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[Anonymous Coward]

It would be okay if most of the pupils were muslims...

(Hang on - most of them MIGHT be muslims by now, seeing as Australia has an anti-white immigration policy - i.e. apparently white people aren't allowed to have their own countries any more...)

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[dcollins]

"Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you." - Friedrich Nietzsche

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[Coren22]

Especially when you are a nubile female changing in front of the camera.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[Minwee]

Surprisingly, only a few of us students ended up in prison. Out of my class of 40 or so, only 8 of us ended up as wards of the state prison system.

20% of your 7th grade class wound up in prison, and this was surprisingly low? Unless you were already in Juvie, I'll rather not see the rest of your school.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[Abstrackt]

Didn't britian found austrailia to get rid of it's terrorists?

Britain only claimed the eastern half, and not just terrorists ended up there.

Oh, right, I'm on Slashdot, what I meant to say was "whoosh".

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[GameboyRMH]

Google is your friend:

http://www.nsasys.com/network_tools_utilities/net_send_messenger_spoofer.html
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/IP/fakesend.aspx
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/IP/anetsend.aspx

On Linux it should be possible to make an anonymous net send utility from a customized version of smbclient.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[CAIMLAS]

I'm sorry, but how much "empathy" can you realistically hold for an enemy which, by preference, targets non-military targets, instead seeming to prefer targets of ideological opportunity which result in the highest shock factor, almost invariably being targeted at civilians?

If I'm having a feeling of "empathy" with those people, would it not be likely that I'd be prone to develop a preference for that kind of attack myself? Would that not identify an ideological affinity?

There's a word for that. It's "traitor", or maybe "murderer" if you go through with it.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[pe1rxq]

No, Australia was for the regular criminals.
The religious nutjobs went to that other continent on the west side.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[anegg]

Year 10 students would be about 16 years old, I believe. This is a fairly fluid time for many people in terms of morals and social consciousness.

Depending on the context in which such an assignment was issued, there could be a lot of value in it. Examining a potential threat by planning an attack yourself is an excellent way in which to uncover vulnerabilities, especially vulnerabilities that exist due to invalid assumptions. Its too bad we didn't do this prior to 9/11 when we might have realized that the assumption that hijackers wanted to survive the hijacking was no longer valid. This is something that adults should be doing, but also one in which students may have a more "fresh" and unassuming state of mind that could prove useful in uncovering those unwarranted assumptions.

However, having 16 year olds do this in a context that doesn't also examine why it wouldn't be right to make such an attack would be unacceptable to me. Its likely that the review would uncover lots of situations where causing mass mayhem is fairly easy, especially if the perpetrator/perpetrators doesn't/don't mind being caught. The fact that such attacks aren't made more often is probably related more to our basic social contracts than anything else. To cover this well with the age range in question would be difficult, and to fail to cover it well could possibly be disastrous, if only on a small scale (think Columbine).

I started off this response ready to argue against censorship and in favor of free thinking everywhere, but I find I must put some constraints on my thoughts. Interesting.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[GameboyRMH]

Wish I could have done that in place of gym class :D

By other "unnamed" ugly places, do you think Sgt. Doom might have meant Mars or Phobos? :P

Funny story, once when I was a little kid I climbed up some weird thing in a school gymnasium (it was like a box made of ladders with two sides missing). I guess nobody saw where I went until I was on top of it. I was looking way down at my teachers who were freaking out, I don't remember how tall it was but it felt like I was waaaaay up there. I was totally calm until my teachers started yelling at me. I just didn't see what the big deal was that everyone wanted me to come down so badly.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[Runaway1956]

You are right - people want to rely on authority. I grew up when "question authority" was an unofficial motto. Always, QUESTION AUTHORITY!! If the authority figure can't handle questions, then he certainly can't handle the authority he has been entrusted with.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[Runaway1956]

20% is only double the national average. You didn't bother to ask where GP was from. If he grew up in the Bronx - hey, his class has an exceptionally LOW average! Nor, did you ask what his classmates went to prison for. Nothing he said indicates that they are violent offenders. I'm not willing to judge his story, without more details.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[Jesus_666]

Not much but if the assignment was "Class, using your knowledge of how it went in the Thirties and the current political climate in Germany, how would you go about turning Germany into a dictatorship with you at the top?" the students could learn something about how our society works, why it works the way it does and which problems we need to be more aware of.

The sibling pointed out a very true phenomenon: Far-right ideologies are fairly common in former-GDR states. The very same states usually have a struggling economy and a hard time attracting investors. It's easy to see that this breeds dissatisfaction with the country and is a fertile ground for extreme ideologies.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[tehcyder]

our instructor was named Sgt.Doom

His parents should have called him Wendy or something. "Sergeant" is a bad enough first name even on its own.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[tehcyder]

When I was 14 or so, there was a kid in our class who was in the Officer Training Corps, and they did all sorts of military training, including counter-terrorism tactics. Plus they got to dress up in camouflage stuff and fire real guns.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[vxice]

Actually not thinking about terrorism WILL make it go away. Hundreds fold more people have died on our freeway in the last year than from terrorism. The costs of the attempted attacks are low but extremely unlikely to succeed even marginally let alone spectacularly. We don't declare war on cars ban them from our roads and attack entirely unrelated devices in response to the holocaust brought about by the mechanical menace. We don't place severe restrictions on their movement that in the end do little to protect us. Our insistence on being scared shit less every time a shadow moves has hurt us more than the terrorists could hope for. We are hurting our selves with our insane behavior and belief that we can completely stamp out terrorism and anything that moves us towards that is good no matter how much it overall actually hurts us. Privacy, safety from the government, freedom of movement and religion are all friendly fire casualties. While the government can and has taped your phone line and records with out warrant, created laws that would through bureaucratic process loose your citizenship because the government says you might be a terrorist(without trial of course) hell your lawyer even has to ask permission from the government to argue with them the case that killing alleged terrorists is unconstitutional because they say you are a specially designated international terrorist. Quit scaring the children so they can sleep at night, the terrorists are out to get you but there are many well qualified people doing a good job trying to protect you but they keep quite about it so that you don't loose sleep about it and the terrorists don't get free airtime Fox might as well be a terrorist organization for its frequent mention of potential attacks everytime something happens. OMG was it terrorists we don't know more about the terrorist angle with us to discuss terror expert but if he were an actual terrorist we wouldn't sell them airtime... You are more likely to die from thousands of other much more easily prevented causes where no where near as much effort is being put.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[Pros_n_Cons]

Why has nobody been modded up for calling you a complete and utter moron?
We're going to lump intrusion detection in with having childrens minds plot, and plan the murder of millions of innocent civilians? This is the same thing to you liberal wack jobs? fuck, we're screwed.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[Runaway1956]

Actually - if you start to understand your enemy, then you might understand that we are ALL monsters.

Can you imagine loving a creature that was designed by evolution to be a killing machine? Fangs, claws, lightning fast reflexes, superior vision, superb sense of smell, and ultrasensitive hearing - all rolled into one.

What kind of monster could love such a creature?

Ask yourself that the next time you see a little girl stroking a cat's sleek coat.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[tehcyder]

I'm sorry, but how much "empathy" can you realistically hold for an enemy which, by preference, targets non-military targets, instead seeming to prefer targets of ideological opportunity which result in the highest shock factor, almost invariably being targeted at civilians?

As a thought experiment, imagine if your country was occupied by foreign troops, and you thought it was your duty to get rid of them by killing both the foreigners and also any "collaborators", with this latter word meaning anyone who was not in your resistance network. Then look up the maquis during WWII.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[tehcyder]

because at least all male teenagers I knew back when I was one were perfectly aware of how to construct a pipe bomb

That's pretty hardcore, I don't think I could even walk and talk properly when I was one.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, there's the group of people who believe that if we just left the muslims the fuck alone, they'd leave us alone, which is probably not true.

Then, there's also the group of people who believe that time and time again we keep propping up corrupt dictators and arming and training muslims and then are somehow stupid enough to be shocked and surprised when our weapons and training are used against us, which IS true. It's hilarious watching this "ground zero" debate and people calling the imam or whatever unamerican for saying that bin Laden was a "product of America" when the CIA was responsible for training him. Meanwhile Obama continues to prop up Bush's corrupt Afghan buddy rather than "accidentally" letting him get assassinated and starting over. (Speaking of which, it's kinda funny how everyone Bush spoke highly of turned out to be rather shitty. How long after Bush "looked into Putin's soul" did Putin start shelling Georgia?)

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[Anonymous Coward]

ENEMIES don't have families! Report to the Truth Chambers!

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[Beyond_GoodandEvil]

As a thought experiment, imagine if your country was occupied by foreign troops, and you thought it was your duty to get rid of them by killing both the foreigners and also any "collaborators", with this latter word meaning anyone who was not in your resistance network. Then look up the maquis during WWII.

Not always the best strategy, look up Reinhard Heydrich.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure about empathy, but it might be worthwhile to understand why they attack civilians. I don't think it's a preference, I think it's just that military targets are difficult and have a lesser effect. When your goal is to "get attention" (to put it too nicely), civilians are easy to kill and you get more shock value for your terrorist buck. Then they justify attacking civilians by saying we've killed plenty of their civilians too, directly and indirectly. I couldn't speak to the truth in that, but that's my understanding.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[Monkeedude1212]

I remember using Netscape Navigator on one machine, to associate command.com as the default application for .wav files, then clicking through to a .wav file to get to a command prompt and wreak havoc.

Aha! We did something similar in our high school, except we weren't prompted to break into the systems nor were we trying to wreak havoc. My friend and I were upset that our teacher had seperated us in the computer lab, for talking. With the thing locked down so that nothing could be installed without admin privileges, no run, and C:\Windows\ requiring a password for anyone on the domain. However, we just made a batch file to open C:\windows\system32\cmd.exe and chose to run-as and did the local computer's guest account, which surprisingly wasn't disabled.

Once we got into the command prompt, we used Telnet to talk back and forth, the teacher none-the-wiser. However, we got busted, because of some weird setup that they had - all of our telnet conversations caused a command prompt to pop up on the Librarian's computer showing what we were saying. At first we were scolded, then we were lectured, then they watched us, then they asked us if we wanted to fix the website.

Ah, good times. To relive those days.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[Anonymous Coward]

*** Warning. Thoughtcrime Alert ***

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[Anonymous Coward]

I think this is a great idea. Maybe somebody could also set up schools to do this next to the jihadist training camps, as well!

Or did you mean to say that only Americans lack empathy, and that the suicide bombers are just completely empathetic individuals who fully understand the damage they're doing, and the people they're doing it to?

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[DavidTC]

Dumb people cannot do smart things, even if told in general terms how.

Look at that Times Square bombing idiot. Generally, that was a reasonable plan.

But, as he is a total moron, it didn't work at all. He didn't bother to find out exactly how to explode propane tanks, he locked his keys in the car, he waited far far too long to blow the thing up, the guy he bought from remembered him, etc.

Dumb people can do smart things if someone actually plans out every step, and they practice and drill, but that generally would not happen as part of a hypothetical.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[jalefkowit]

Even in middle-school, pre-911, without being asked. I had worked out that with enough savings, I could take a knife, stab random strangers and ride across America on an unstoppable pattern-less killing spree. This strategy still rings true in the age of terrorism.

Indeed.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[Americano]

As a thought experiment, imagine if your country was occupied by foreign troops, and you thought it was your duty to get rid of them by killing both the foreigners and also any "collaborators", with this latter word meaning anyone who was not in your resistance network. Then look up the maquis during WWII.

As a thought experiment, why are the "freedom fighters" in the "resistance network" not asked to develop empathy as well?

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[lrdplatypus]

I once crashed my high school's network by plugging a CAT5 cable into two ports on the same hub. Taught the school not to build the network entirely out of hubs. Also gained access to the command prompt by creating a hyperlink to cmd.exe in a Word97 document. Confused the heck out of the computer lab teacher when I remotely shut down every computer in the lab.

Its the simple things in life.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[Americano]

How about, instead of asking the kids to "plan the most awful attack they can imagine," you ask them to "think about where our city is vulnerable to attack or disaster today, what those attacks could be, and then talk about how to defend against them to minimize casualties and secure things?"

War-gaming & crisis response planning don't stop with "Your bomb goes off in NYC, 1 million dead!" -- that's where they *start*. If you RTFA, that wasn't what the class assignment was about, it was about "kill as many people as possible, and talk about how you'd do it, and what the effects of your chosen attack would be on the human body."

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[carp3_noct3m]

Indeed. I used to be part of an anti-terrorist task force, and we used to do red cell (opfor) runs, in the process training various government and foreign military's. One of my favorite exercises would be when we would use large amounts of guys posing as civilian protesters (who often rode the razors edge of violence) and heavily distracted the protecting force. One time, when using this method on a fake embassy, my guys were able to get me inside the wire, and I was able to wreak havoc (theoretical) on the installation. We learned some very good lessons about distraction and unconventional entry methods, and were able to recommend measures that I believe have since been taken up as SOP. Without thinking like your enemy, and everyone in between, you are simply blind and willfully ignorant. That being said, I have come to the conclusion that some people just have the natural ability to think "outside the box", but we need more of them. (as a side note, eventually they caught me inside the wire, and my fellows howled with laughter as I ran away with a squad of reaction force chasing me with batons and OC spray, eventually catching up with me and leaving me zip tied and slightly bloodied, only to have them get distracted again, and me able to get out of my ziptie and escape!)

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[Anonymous Coward]

Ememy. I chuckled.

Or maybe if you look long enough through the enemy's eyes, burning children alive with gasoline to intimidate or punish their parents will seem reasonable. Maybe you'll think flying airplances into their landmarks is moral and just.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[Anonymous Coward]

Excuse me, but of the many Saudi hijackers of 9/11, how many of their families were bombed?

How many of their resources did we steal? Seems to me we paid for Saudi oil resources, quite handsomely. But hey, I guess some nomadic traditions justified political rife in their country that spread thousands of miles overseas leading to an attack on civilians. That was justified in your book? If so, then's it's similarly not so far as attacking the wrong freaking country (something I believe is wrong, and I think is more complicated than the simple scenario put forth here).

And, understanding Iraq and 9/11 are separate, what exactly did Kuwait do to Iraq?

"Can't have that now can we?"

Maybe instead of spouting the typical leftist mantra, you should think for yourself, instead of falling in line to your lords on the left side of the aisle.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[geekoid]

" This is a fairly fluid time for many people in terms of morals and social consciousness."

Actually it's not. Most of them won't change their opinion much even after age12.Sad.

The Columbine bombing attempt has nothing to do with this.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[Anonymous Coward]

Bullshit

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[__aarzwb9394]

I will start with a style tip. Your overuse of scare quotes makes you sound like the most manipulative of gallery players. Ever thought of trying talk radio or TV punditry?

You are confusing (deliberately or otherwise) empathy with sympathy.

Sun Tzu teaches us to know the enemy - he ain't no faggy white flag waving traitor.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[Omestes]

My grade school decided I was suicidal, threatening counseling etc, because I climbed up on the roof one day and was having a grand time taunting my friends from the edges. No one beleived me when I claimed I wasn't up there to kill myself, and that I really doubted a single story fall would do the job properly.

I think some kid in my "homeroom" class offed himself a couple weeks previous, so I can see, I suppose, their concern. I got in trouble for questioning the validity of his "accidental" hanging to his parents.

Closer to the topic, my high school had me and a freind upgrade all of their old AT&T boxes (with glorious Hercules graphics) to more modern boxes running Windows 3.11. Well they had a firm do it, but for some reason we got the task of ripping out all the old hardware, and somehow ended up being the unpaid gophers for the actual network team. Out of this we ended up with the all the network passwords for the school and lab (not District, we were the first school to get the modern treatment), and limited access to the server room. I think this was punishment for running a very small piracy ring on the network (1$ and you get a Space Invaders Clone, 2$ for something else, etc...), and using the computer lab guys teacher to print out our "underground" paper (which half the staff clandestinely distributed for us), and to print out copies of the old Anarchist Cookbook text file to sell for 5$ a pop (ah... to be pre-Columbine).

This is the best idea of punishment, if kids get in trouble for being "too bright", punish them by making them do something productive with it.

As for the actual topic at hand... I don't see how teaching kids to be terrorists is at all useful. Teach them the point of view of the people who turn into terrorists, perhaps, but not how to actually do it. In Jr. High I had a teacher make us read Brave New World, 1984, Fahrenheit 451, and Harrison Bergeon (I think Walden 2 as well, but that might be a bad memory) and then design our own utopia. Probably one of the only class related things I remember from any schooling that wasn't college.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[Anonymous Coward]

Phail.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[aquila.solo]

It's better than seeing through the eyes of the ENEMA. And you thought goatse was bad...

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[Anonymous Coward]

You are a complete moron. @Sheddd is 100% correct.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[Nyder]

What about teaching students to hack into computer systems? That's fairly common and fairly well accepted...and in those exercises it's not just a 'think of a way to do this', it's a 'here is a server, here is a PC, go do it'.

In mid 80's my office teacher used to give me disks she got as demo for new software to figure out how to copy for her because the school was too cheap to buy the software for her.

Granted she didn't teach me how to do it, i figured it out on my own, but she allowed me to do it and use computers to do it.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[bingoUV]

Give it time (of the order of a few minutes), and the human eye adapts reasonably well to darkness. The bad guy can notice that this area is generally dark - conceal himself in it at an appropriate time, wait for a while for his eyes to adjust. As long as he mostly looks within this dark area, he will be able to see enough to handle himself.

But normal people or security guards casually/briefly glancing at that place will not see anything - because they spent most of their last few minutes looking at well-lit areas so their eyes are adjusted to a lot more light.

Result - bad guys able to remain active in the dark place undetected for some time . This may or may not be dangerous depending on the location of the dark place.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[aaandre]

We don't know the 16-year olds personally and we don't have a transcript of the class verifying that there was no mention or implication of the moral standing of such undertaking.

I have a problem with presuming that 16-year olds have to be specifically educated on the harmfulness of a terrorist attack. It implies their being sociopaths separated from carrying out of such an attack by mere lack of know-how in the matter.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[Anonymous Coward]

But then later (1980s?) they let all manner of wogs, lebbos and other undesirables in - apparently in an attempt to piss off the British.

"Gehick gehick gehick, we just fucked up our country! That'll give them Poms what for, right boys?"

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[anegg]

I don't know the context in which the assignment was given. Where I said "Depending on the context..." was intended to indicate my lack of certainty here.

I obviously don't have a problem presuming that 16 year olds may require some specific guidance about the ethics of such an attack. Sociopathic or not, I have known some pretty stupid things to have been undertaken by people in this age range, some of which could have gone very wrong and caused grave problems.

I believe in the overall social contract observed by most of us, in that we couldn't possibly form large societies without this social contract being ingrained in our DNA. It is simply too easy to cause major damage to large segments of our population, and the fact that this damage isn't being done indicates to me that by and large we aren't likely to cause this sort of mass mayhem.

However, there is a point at which an individual's level of intelligence and capability for action is high, yet at which that individual's maturity is not, where an "inspired" idealistic action could be undertaken that would have significant negative consequences.

The people who flew the 4 airplanes on 9/11 were born of human parents, raised in human societies, yet still found it in themselves to take over planes full of other humans, slice the throats of the pilots, then fly these planes into buildings full of other people with the express intent of causing mass mayhem. One failed only due to the actions of heroic sons of bitches on those planes, the other three succeeded.

Were the sociopaths? Or were they soldiers in a war? How fine if the line dividing these two labels?

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[md65536]

let the adults think about it...

Yes, kids shouldn't be worrying themselves thinking about anything. I forbid my kids to think about the reality of life... about things like conflict or death, or foreigners. I forbid them to put themselves in other peoples shoes, or even think about what life is like for others or how others might think. I forbid them to feel fear or anger, or contemplate or problem-solve or role-play, or use their imaginations. It's tough sometimes... just last week I had to explain why Mr. Scraps was no longer around. I told them that Santa Claus needed him to be the official ruler of Chocolate Mushroom Land. Sometimes strict discipline is not enough to stop them thinking, but thank god for tv which is a real help. In a year one of them will be 18 and then he can decide for himself if he wants to think about things or not.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[BASH guy]

For several years I did threat analysis in US Air Force Bases. My reports were usually poopooed as no imminent threat. I thought my job was to identify perceived threat. Of course there was no consideration that an international border is only a few hours drive or that its half a day flying half way around the world. I finally gave up since my surperiors appeared not to be interested. Maybe they would not tell me if I found a nugget. Maybe there was no money to fix the problem. Maybe they did not want to be embarassed. Since then I thought I was doing a public service by pointing out choke points and hazards around my city with letters/e-mails to the mayor which he did not acknowledge.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[Lumbre]

I say you should be critiquing the teacher's judgments about the mental capacity of the students, not the subject matter. Whether you write an essay deductively or inductively (which seems to be what you're arguing in your 2nd paragraph), your final result should be the same.

It wasn't too long ago (in America's history at least) that children were working rigorously in farms, factories, etc. just for survival. That still happens in third-world countries. I say we shouldn't be afraid to expose mature youth to the violence and terrors today, especially through hypotheticals.

You're saying 'kids'. I wasn't talking about the 'kids' that are at home playing with "Lego's" or just care about their next game of "GTA" or "WoW". I was talking about the 'kids' already out there making a simple game of Tic-Tac-Toe out of C/C++/Java, able to build a computer from scratch, or got Asterisk to compile and work successfully.

Do I think the teacher approached it incorrectly? Yes, though media distorts things. Do I think a different hypothetical would be as effective? Yes. Do I think the subject matter should be completely forbidden? Leaning towards no.

And yes, I RTFA

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[Michael D Kristopeit]

yes, the age requirements on political decision making positions, such as the ones described in the story, were put there by individuals who just don't understand how things SHOULD work.

you and your children are idiots.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[aaandre]

U.S. 16 year olds != trained/brainwashed jihad "warriors."

I tend to think "the people who flew the 4 airplanes on 9/11" are a. not very well known to us (in fiction vs. fact kind of way) and b. they were probably feeling like warriors sacrificing for a "just cause"... as they were programmed to. After all they gave their lives... so they must've believed something was more important.

P.S. All soldiers are programmed/brainwashed in order to be able to kill fellow human beings without immediate severe emotional trauma.

Re:How do you anticipate weak points

[Kell Bengal]

Maybe they should? Maybe if the terrorists realise that we're all people too, just trying to get by, they'll understand that we're not their enemy. It's the few people in power who drive and profit from foreign policy, and for the most part they're fucking us over too.

so...

[santax]

What do they expect? I expect from teachers to be teaching the ability to learn. No matter how touchy this subject is for some people, this isn't something that should be punished. Hell, read the wikileaks of the CIA message today... They are doing the exact same thing!

Re:so...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you expect teachers to only teach the ability to learn. There would not be a need past elementary school for educators except in very highly specialized areas of learning.

http://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html

Re:so...

[Fluffeh]

What do they expect? I expect from teachers to be teaching the ability to learn. No matter how touchy this subject is for some people, this isn't something that should be punished. Hell, read the wikileaks of the CIA message today... They are doing the exact same thing!

Yes, but the CIA pretend they don't do that sort of stuff. Given how stupid and paranoid most people are, I can see how they want to crucify the teacher. I wouldn't have an issue with that sort of lesson, but at the same time, it might not be overly appropriate. The teacher was a year 10 teacher (that means the students are around 15) and thinking about it, that allows kids to watch just about any movie or play any game released in Australia. I don't see how it is a gross stepping over a "maturity level" line in the sand.

Especially given some of the recent curriculum around how early Australians treated indigenous Aboriginals and the content taught there, this isn't out of line with expected maturity levels of our children. If they are old enough to be expected to understand that, I fail to see how an assignment like this is stepping over a line to ensure that they have actually understood their classes.

FTFA: "There is a difference between being a terrorist and learning about terrorism." - quote from Student in the class who got this assignment.
To me, that simply means that all her class work went in one ear and out the other. Total head buried in the sand mentality if you ask me.

FTFA: "Brian Deegan, whose son, Josh, was killed in the 2002 Bali bombings, said the reality of terror plots at home in Australia is exactly why students should learn about terrorism in school. He said the teacher could have been on to a good idea if the end result of her lesson was to extract feelings of regret and sympathy for the victims of their fictional massacre."
Couldn't agree more with this guy. It's good to see that at least some of us Aussies still have common sense and are able to get past all the media frenzy that anything to do with words like "terrorism" or "war on [insert topic]" seem to stir up.

Re:so...

[scotty.m]

Exactly. So? This is a nothing issue, parents should never have complained, media should never have published it. I do understand people want to protect their children from sensitive issues, but this real life. Terrorism is real - not learning about the issue will turn impressionable kids into naive adults.

Re:so...

[deniable]

Yeah, but it's a slow news week in Australia. There's nothing worthwhile happening here so they have to drum up whatever garbage they can. This one has terrorists and think of the children in one neat package.

Re:so...

[SakuraDreams]

Next lesson, "How to plan the perfect child abduction", and following that, "Rape and murder, picking your victim and disposing of the body afterward". Got to prepare the children in case they will need any of these skills in the future.

Re:so...

[Kell Bengal]

FTFA: "There is a difference between being a terrorist and learning about terrorism." - quote from Student in the class who got this assignment. To me, that simply means that all her class work went in one ear and out the other. Total head buried in the sand mentality if you ask me.

Can you please explain why you feel this statement suggest the student hasn't grasped the substance of the lesson? It sounds to me like the student is quite correct: knowing about terrorism doesn't mean you're going to commit acts of terror anymore than knowing about WWII means you're going to invade Poland.

Re:so...

[Anonymous Coward]

Australia has an election, with unresolved vital seats, resulting in a hung parliament, two major parties going insane, one minor party party of a coalition with a major party losing a potential member to schisms, three independents holding the balance of power and dictating terms, a probable fourth independent who used to be a public servant and blew a whistle on a war related policy, celebrities being idiots, two political parties knifing their own senior staffers.

And you suggest it is a slow news week?

Re:so...

[deniable]

Whoosh. The whole country has gone TL;DR on the election it seems.

Re:so...

[Kell Bengal]

Ah... having read that statement in the context of TFA, it's clear the GP was correct. The student mistakes writing the assignment for "being a terrorist". My bad.

And wow. That's a really dumb student.

Re:so...

[wvmarle]

OP is quite right: student obviously missed most of the lesson.

Terrorism has a few faces that can be taught about, including why people commit these acts, how they are committed, what we can do to prevent such attacks (acting on both the how and why questions), and the result of attacks.

Seriously thinking about how they are committed (from the linked article: "The task included choosing the best time to attack and explaining their choice of victims") can give great insight ways to mitigate such attacks, and dealing with them if they occur. Coming up with a terrorist attack plan is doing just that, it makes one think about how an attack could be done. It makes you look at it from the other side.

I know it can be challenging for a 15yo to actually go deeper in matter than the face value of what the teacher produces. It's out of their comfort zones. And if this student thinks that learning about terrorism (which imho should include THINKING about it) makes you a terrorist, then indeed he missed the point entirely. Stepping into the mind of a terrorist is a very good way to think about the matter, and if that student thinks that merely thinking about terrorist attacks, how they were done, how they could be done, and why they are done, makes him a terrorist then this student himself might need some urgent counseling to stop his terrorist tendencies.

And about WW2: in my history lessons I have learned quite a bit about tactics used, particularly related to the invasion of The Netherlands (my home country). About how the Jews were deported and killed. Why this was done too. How the Dutch helped rounding up the Jews. it doesn't make me a crazy statesman like Hitler at all, on the contrary even. The same for such a lesson on terrorism: it won't make children into terrorists.

Re:so...

[Arancaytar]

But the CIA had the sense to not tell anybody what they planned. I'd much rather trust a secret agency with a history of complete harmlessness and trustworthiness than a sinister high school teacher. :P

Re:so...

[TapeCutter]

It's good to see someone actually spoke to Brian Deegan, his story was being misused by the media to suggest he was angered and offended by the assignment.

Also that type of assignment is nothing new, especially in forensic science classes. When my daughter was attending HS in Oz (over a decade ago) she came home with an assignment to plot the perfect kidnapping/ransom crime. The teacher then selected several of these plots and the new class assignment was to use forensic methods to cath the fictional kidnapper. The upshot was that her teacher and I learnt that my daughter had a promising career as either a forensic scientist or a master criminal.

Most of her classmates also loved forensics, IMHO it's an entertaining and engaging way to teach science and critical thinking, which btw is the very thing that is lacking in the tabloid reporting of this story.

Re:so...

[spyked]

Yes, but the invasion of Poland took place 70 years ago. Terrorism (or whatever some people perceive as terrorism) happens now.

I think high school kids should have their thinking matured enough to decide whether they liked the idea or not, and express their feedback on the matter. The fact that the principle withdrew the assignment only because it was a touchy, political subject is amusing and shocking at the same time.

Re:so...

[bane2571]

Wait, we had an election? Why is no one talking about this?

J/K, you're completely right about that, everyone seems to have forgotten we have no real elected government right now.

The whole idea of not teaching something is offensive to me and the style of teaching mentioned in the article is exactly the best style for engaging the teenage mind.

FWIW, I reckon the best terrorist action against Australia would be breaking the sydney dams;The flooding would be impressive and there would be mass water shortages. As a highschooler I would have loved doing the research on what would be required to bust a few dams and flood sydney.

Re:so...

[halowolf]

This media frenzy makes my pine for the Stuart Littlemore days of Media Watch.

Re:so...

[Anonymous Coward]

"There is a difference" not "There is no difference." The student agrees with you.

Re:so...

[dippityfisch]

I am alarmed how quickly the spineless school principal caved in to political correctness.

Re:so...

[Anonymous Coward]

"There is a difference between being a terrorist and learning about terrorism."

And if this student thinks that learning about terrorism (which imho should include THINKING about it) makes you a terrorist, then indeed he missed the point entirely.

You were modded insightful. why?

Differences means it isn't the same. So the student says that learning about terrorism doesn't automatically makes you a terrorist. So you missed the point of his or her sentence entirely.

Re:so...

[gnalle]

Terrorism could be a touchy subject for some of the students, and the teacher has to respect that. I would never give my class an assigment like this.

Re:so...

[Anonymous Coward]

The assignment wasn't to go out and commit terrorist acts.

Re:so...

[dissy]

Quote from you: "And if this student thinks that learning about terrorism (which imho should include THINKING about it) makes you a terrorist, then indeed he missed the point entirely"

Quote from student: "There is a difference between being a terrorist and learning about terrorism."

You should be happy and stop complaining then, as your if statement is untrue and so will not be executed.

It's amazing that not only you, but at least 3 people who modded you totally ignored what the student said, claimed the student said the opposite, and then insulted them for something that was never said :/

Reading comprehension, it's what's for dinner

Re:so...

[wvmarle]

The student said that she doesn't want to be a terrorist (fair enough), but quite strongly implied that she didn't even want to consider how an actual terrorist would think.

"There is a difference between being a terrorist and learning about it" definitely doesn't exclude the idea of pretending to be one, trying to think like one. It's like acting: you can act like a murderer, think like a murderer, and do that all without ever becoming one. This statement is a reaction to an assignment that includes thinking like a terrorist - she rejects it with this statement, as if doing this assignment would make one a terrorist.

The problem here is that she obviously doesn't want to think outside of her comfort zone. And that's the problem here. Her statement implies to me an underlying thought of "terrorism is bad, terrorism is scary, I don't want to think about it really".

Re:so...

[TapeCutter]

Even without Littlemore, Media Watch is still the most underrated show on the box.

Re:so...

[zarzu]

"I was shocked and quite offended," she said. "I'm offended that it's Australia but I'm disgusted because it doesn't matter where it is, it's still not something you ask someone to do or think about. ... There is a difference between being a terrorist and learning about terrorism."

that is the original quote from the student. the problem is that she actually implies that thinking like a terrorist makes you a terrorist which is why this sentence is actually against the assignment. of course if this sentence were just standing there alone, any reasonable person would be thinking otherwise because clearly thinking like a terrorist does in no way make you one and this student did miss most of the lesson. just like everyone else who is outraged.

Re:so...

[CarbonShell]

But compared to the students, the CIA plans might actually be done...

But why is this all such a bad thing?
If I do not know about hacking, how can I recognise a hack attempt?
The best way to learn something is to do it or just think through it!

I'd say anyone with half a brain has already had such thoughts. Hopefully in a creative kind of way.
When I hear the dump arse cops say how safe this and that place is, I always think 'yep, because that is the LAST place someone would hit'.
Why should a terrorist make it hard on themselves? A suicide bomb at a populated place that is not closely monitored by the police is the best place.
Plus the 'shell shock' would be greater because no one would expect it. If you bomb a stadium, regardless of how tragic, people will think 'but that was naturally a target'.

Not to mention, you get a lot of fresh ideas of the kids. Remember this is a group of individuals who try to hide info from their parents, don't obey rules or live in 'acceptable ways' (as viewed by the masses) and speak in a strange language.

Re:so...

[Anonymous Coward]

And if this student thinks that learning about terrorism (which imho should include THINKING about it) makes you a terrorist, then indeed he missed the point entirely

I think YOU missed the point: the student was quoted as saying that there was a DIFFERENCE between the two.

Re:so...

[SakuraDreams]

Why troll?

The problem here is that planning a tactical operation designed at killing as many innocent victims as possible is not seeing the right problem through the eyes of the terrorist. The terrorist uses violence usually as a last resort (or at least justifies it this way) and his aims are to kill and maim as many people as possible. If one is teaching class about first aid after a terrorist attack or how to avoid being the victim of one, I guess teaching the class how to prepare for one themselves would add insight to that. The students would then know which situations to avoid - eg. crowded subway in a European city or busy pub in Bali (or any country with active militant factions). However, if the aim is to look at the motivations of the terrorists one should study historym economics, sociology, religion and the current geopolitical profile of nations where terrorism originates. Either one studies the tactics or one studies the strategy. I gather this is more about the strategy than empathy for someone who can't kill as many persons as he likes but empathy for someone who is unable to bring across his grievances in a non-violent way.

In the same way one should not teach kids how to plan the perfect rape, unless one wants to teach women which situations to avoid, instead if one wants to get into the mind of the rapist or abductor (in my example above) one should look at the psychology of the aggressor - this may include his mental state, personal and family history, socio-economic factors, etc.

Re:so...

[Dephex Twin]

What the fuck are people talking about in this thread? How the hell are you getting from that quote to your conclusion? It is ridiculous.

Re:so...

[Dephex Twin]

So, just to get this straight... "there is a difference between being a terrorist and learning about terrorism" implies "thinking like a terrorist makes you a terrorist"?

Re:so...

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, the student said "There IS a difference...", so she agrees with you.

Re:so...

[zarzu]

only in the context of her answer. she is arguing against the assignment as you can clearly see (shocked, offended, blabla). the over and over quoted phrase from her point of view means that there is a difference between learning about terrorism (your teacher tells you what it's all about, why it happens, where it happened, etc) and being a terrorist (planning a terrorist attack). she equates the planning of a terrorist attack (thinking like a terrorist) with being a terrorist. now if you don't agree you're quite welcome to explain how she means with the last sentence, in context of her previous outrage of course.

Re:so...

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, I think you and several other people completely mistunderstand that statement. Which baffles me since I'm not a native english speaker and to me the meaning is quite clear.
He says: There is a difference between BEING something and LEARNING about it. This implies, quite clearly, that he thinks learning about it doesn't automatically make you a terrorist, or in other words: learning about it is not bad, only being a terrorist is bad.

Re:so...

[Anonymous Coward]

A Patriot of the American revolution.

Hiding in bushes sniping,
No real suits of combat.
The Battle of the Kegs.

Terrorists.

Re:so...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, now I get it. I was confused because as you said, the sentence on it's own did seem quite reasonable. But I guess what she wanted to imply was that the teacher wanted them to be "be" terrorists instead of learning about it.. which is of course absolute nonsense.

Re:so...

[xtracto]

Shit, it is the same as cryptanalysis and reverse engineering!

I first got attracted to those two by reverse-engineering keycodes and winzip registration key algorithms.

Re:so...

[Anonymous Coward]

OP is quite right: student obviously missed most of the lesson.

Terrorism has a few faces that can be taught about, including why people commit these acts, how they are committed, what we can do to prevent such attacks (acting on both the how and why questions), and the result of attacks.

Seriously thinking about how they are committed (from the linked article: "The task included choosing the best time to attack and explaining their choice of victims") can give great insight ways to mitigate such attacks, and dealing with them if they occur. Coming up with a terrorist attack plan is doing just that, it makes one think about how an attack could be done. It makes you look at it from the other side.

I know it can be challenging for a 15yo to actually go deeper in matter than the face value of what the teacher produces. It's out of their comfort zones. And if this student thinks that learning about terrorism (which imho should include THINKING about it) makes you a terrorist, then indeed he missed the point entirely. Stepping into the mind of a terrorist is a very good way to think about the matter, and if that student thinks that merely thinking about terrorist attacks, how they were done, how they could be done, and why they are done, makes him a terrorist then this student himself might need some urgent counseling to stop his terrorist tendencies.

And about WW2: in my history lessons I have learned quite a bit about tactics used, particularly related to the invasion of The Netherlands (my home country). About how the Jews were deported and killed. Why this was done too. How the Dutch helped rounding up the Jews. it doesn't make me a crazy statesman like Hitler at all, on the contrary even. The same for such a lesson on terrorism: it won't make children into terrorists.

Re:so...

[kevinNCSU]

The issue causing the confusion here is the guy copied the only contradictory part of her statement, here it is in full from the article:

Student Sarah Gilbert, 15, told the newspaper she was horrified by the assignment.

"I was shocked and quite offended," she said. "I'm offended that it's Australia but I'm disgusted because it doesn't matter where it is, it's still not something you ask someone to do or think about. ... There is a difference between being a terrorist and learning about terrorism."

Gilbert _ whose mother lost a relative in the Bali bombings _ wrote a letter to her teacher refusing to do the assignment.

"Even though it may seem petty, to me my beliefs are more important than an "A" stating I am smart," Gilbert wrote. A copy of her letter was published by the newspaper.

She's clearly very against the assignment, though it is completely unclear why she said that last sentence as it was taken out of any context by the reporter with the ellipses. I don't understand why the reporter would do this as it seems completely contradictory to her other statements so a little context like "but when asked if it was the same she did admit" or something like that would really help with the reader's ability to comprehend.

Re:so...

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, I think they, you know must have actually RTFA! OMG.

Re:so...

[Anonymous Coward]

"There is a difference between being a terrorist and learning about terrorism"

What is there to be confused about with this quote? How could two people on this forum possibly think this means the student misunderstood? They're saying that learning about terrorism and being a terrorist aren't the same thing. Go back and read it again.

Re:so...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you look at that quote out of context and in isolation, it looks like what you think it looks like. But that's actually your mistake.

Consider:

a) Yes, I'm happy to do this assignment. There's a difference between being a terrorist and learning about terrorism. It's fine.
and
b) No way am I going to do this bullshit assignment. There's a difference between being a terrorist and learning about terrorism, ya know!? This crosses the line!

You're reading the statement in isolation as if it was used in context (a). Which is perfectly reasonable.

But if you'd actually read and comprehended the article, you'd see that the student was *complaining* about the assignment, and was actually using it similarly to (b).

IMO, (a) is perfectly valid statement by an intelligent rational person. (b) is a reactionary statement made by an idiot who doesn't even understand what they're saying themselves.

Yes, it can be hard to understand idiots, sometimes.

Re:so...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ridiculous if you read the quote in isolation. Pretty well obvious and inescapable if you read the quote in context. I had the same reaction as you, initially, however before spouting off in here making myself look idiotic I bothered spending 4 seconds skimming the article for the paragraph in question, at which point all became clear.

Re:so...

[Anonymous Coward]

You need to consider the context in which the statement was made. Consider the difference between:

(a) I'm happy with the assignment. There's a difference between being a terrorist and learning about terrorism, you know. It's fine.
and
(b) I'm not doing this bullshit assignment! There's a difference between being a terrorist and learning about terrorism, ya know!? This crosses the line!

You're reading the statement in isolation where it looks, at face value, like statement (a) -- the statement of a logical, rational human being.

But if you read the article, you'll see that the student was using the statement to argue along the lines of (b) -- a reactionary statement from an emotional idiot who doesn't fully understand what she's saying herself.

Yes, it can be hard to understand idiots sometimes.

Do you tend towards asperger's/autism by any chance?

Re:so...

[Anonymous Coward]

OP is quite right: student obviously missed most of the lesson.

And if this student thinks that learning about terrorism (which imho should include THINKING about it) makes you a terrorist, then indeed he missed the point entirely.

The OP you're defending quotes:

"There is a difference between being a terrorist and learning about terrorism." - quote from Student in the class who got this assignment.

I think you all are interpreting an ambiguous statement subjectively (I assume used with that same purpose by the reporter)

Re:so...

[Anonymous Coward]

knowing about terrorism doesn't mean you're going to commit acts of terror anymore than knowing about WWII means you're going to invade Poland.

It doesn't? Well there goes my plans for the weekend.

Re:so...

[phoenix_rizzen]

I think both you and the OP have misread the quote, as what you just said is exactly what the student said.

I believe you and the OP misread the "a" as "no" in the quote from the student.

Otherwise, you are both agreeing with the student, by arguing against them?

Re:so...

[wvmarle]

The statement by itself is not the problem.

Using it as argument to reject the assignment is the problem.

Re:so...

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is something like this modded up? The student explicity stated that learning about terrorism does NOT make him a terrorist. Doesn't anybody even read comments properly anymore?

Re:so...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, stupid. The student said that learning about terrorism does NOT make you a terrorist: "there is a difference between being a terrorist and learning about terrorism."

Re:so...

[twright0]

Can you please explain why you feel this statement suggest the student hasn't grasped the substance of the lesson?

It depends on whether or not you think the student approved of the lesson. If he is endorsing the exercise, then his statement is along the lines of "We weren't actually being terrorists, we were learning about it, it's a good idea and negative reactions are overblown" and he has clearly grasped the substance of the lesson. If he was disapproving, his comment was more along the lines of "We shouldn't be pretending to be terrorists in order to learn about terrorists" and he missed the point of the exercise. So, it depends on the context of the quote given by the student.

Re:so...

[Anonymous Coward]

Parents are stupid and politicians are morons.

Re:so...

[Anonymous Coward]

the student said:
"There is a difference between being a terrorist and learning about terrorism."

You wrote "And if this student thinks that learning about terrorism (...) makes you a terrorist, then indeed he missed the point entirely"

i dont get it.

the student clearly stated that "learning about terrorism does NOT make you a terrorist"
you write if he thinks "learning about terrorism does make you a terrorist", he missed the point entirely

obviously he didnt think that. so he didnt miss the point, at least not for that reason.

Re:so...

[Anonymous Coward]

The parent post is modded up, but I don't get it.

FTFA: "There is a difference between being a terrorist and learning about terrorism."

FTP: "...if this student thinks that learning about terrorism ... makes you a terrorist, then indeed he missed the point entirely."

Am I missing something? Are my critical reading skills not what they used to be? Unless the FA quote is taken out of contect, isn't the student saying that learning about terrorism does NOT make you a terrorist? Can some one explain this to me?

Thanks.

Re:so...

[Anonymous Coward]

The teacher then selected several of these plots and the new class assignment was to use forensic methods to cath the fictional kidnapper.

 

It's interesting that the imagined best kidnapper needed help peeing...they really thought this through!

Re:so...

[Anonymous Coward]

FTFA: "There IS a difference between being a terrorist and learning about terrorism."

Emphasis mine. OP is wrong.

It was a TRAP!!

[oldhack]

You stupid tiny anklebiters!

Ship the little shits over to GitMo.

Re:It was a TRAP!!

[Anonymous Coward]

We'll torturte the little buggers - no tweets, no SMS, none of that bullshit. That'd fuck'em up.

Re:It was a TRAP!!

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

You stupid tiny anklebiters!

Ship the little shits over to GitMo.

One man's 'flamebait' is another man's 'brilliant satire'.

Re:It was a TRAP!!

[Moddington]

And judging by the current score of the GP, one man's 'flamebait' is yet another man's 'insight of the day'.

Re:It was a TRAP!!

[Anonymous Coward]

One man's 'flamebait' is another man's 'brilliant satire'.

Spoken like a true libtard.

News flash, thinking only happy thoughts

[Anonymous Coward]

doesn't help with national security

answers

[A3gis]

Heh, i can't help but bet half the answers went along the lines of: "take 4 hostages, put them in the upstairs office inside a warehouse, then wait at strategic points covering the roller door, back door, and ceiling air duct for Counter Terrorist forces."

Re:answers

[joocemann]

As CT that map is one of the hardest to break without a serious coordinated effort or a set of stupid enemies. Counterstrike rocks.

Re:answers

[Samulus Maximus]

"Fire in The Hole!"

Re:answers

[deniable]

Except they were told to plan a a chem or bio attack. The plan was probably 'plant the bomb and stop the CT forces until it blows.'

Re:answers

[A3gis]

that was the OTHER half of the answers (interestingly they were split 50/50 between planting at site A and site B). ;)

Re:answers

[Anonymous Coward]

Hahaa, the classic mistake! They always forget about the sysadmin muttering about uptime!

Re:answers

[deniable]

They've got a big hole right nearby. Handy explosives, too.

Re:answers

[Anonymous Coward]

And the other half involved torturing a school teacher.

Re:answers

[imakemusic]

The hostages were a distraction. Looks like you didn't find the bomb. You get a fail this semester.

Re:answers

[Mark Trade]

Damn campers.

Re:answers

[balbus000]

Ah the memories. I know what I'm doing when I get home from work.

Sounds like a good exercise

[johnhp]

If nothing else, it may make the children more aware of the possibilities regarding terrorism.

For best effect, they should do it a few times with different criteria. For example they could plan a scenario for ten men, and another for three. Or they could form plans about how to best disrupt commerce, or affect public opinion, etc.

Best of all would be for them to write origin and outcome stories for their scenarios that are based on real world conflicts. The students could get some interesting insight by taking a look at WHY a terrorist makes an attack, and by exploring the outcome.

Re:Sounds like a good exercise

[joocemann]

I would imagine it served to illustrate the truth about terrorism and the farce of what is claimed to be successes in the supposed 'war' against it. Most people either have a working knowledge, or immediate/easily-found access, to various approaches to the harm/killing of large numbers of people; they just don't know it until they try to think in that mode. I'm sure most people reading this article, or my post, may be inspired to also brainstorm --- and thus uncover the obvious: it is very easy to kill lots of people and terrorize.

I think the main barrier to terrorism isn't the ways by which it can happen, but rather the incapacity of most people to actually do it.

It's a shame that some groups of people are left with no other options (some cases), and other groups of people are deceived/manipulated by their faith (other cases), to use terrorism. But its also a shame to carry out multi-billion dollar war efforts against only a fraction of all terrorists, and then continue barking out faux success stories through accomplice and complicit media, as if they are in any way based in reality; the truth being that we've done almost nothing that will truly protect us and while having barely dented the numbers of those in that fraction, we have enraged easily influenced youth to replenish the ranks.

 

Re:Sounds like a good exercise

[Anonymous Coward]

Or they could form plans about how to best disrupt commerce, or affect public opinion, etc.

drive around early in the morning and place cement blocks and other debris on important roadways,

Re:Sounds like a good exercise

[jack2000]

I know i might get modded down into oblivion but I'm going to say this anyway.

You can't win a war of attrition with gorilla fighters ( terrorists )
They will aways find a way to surprise you or sabotage your infrastructure.
In my opinion you should aim to remove the objective of your enemy. Utterly destroy what the gorilla fighters are fighting to reclaim/protect. The scotched earth way. For every suicide bombing kill tenfold of the native population of your enemy.
Failing that just exterminate them all.
I know it sounds vulgar, demented, say what you will. No gorilla fighter can fight you if they have nothing to fight for.

Re:Sounds like a good exercise

[johnhp]

It comes in shades, but for the worst cases, I agree. The damage done by a terrible early slaughter will heal over time, but the wounds of a 10 years occupation will stay fresh.

Re:Sounds like a good exercise

[epine]

I wonder how many suicide bombers have as their last thought "I know I'm going to get modded down for this" then press submit anyway.

You can't "win" against an angry child, either. The goal is to achieve a modicum of semi-peaceful coexistence and trust that over time, agendas evolve in a larger context.

Human males are exposed to paternal uncertainty and for that reason have an innate agenda to gain control over the social structure of marriage and reproduction. In a society where this solution becomes culturally entrenched, usually girls are poorly educated and there is a lot of violence and anger among young men (who have few immediate reproductive prospects), and birth rates are high, so life is (relatively) cheap.

This is the perfect age to teach the psychology and politics of social structure and reproduction, but it would take a teacher nearly as brave/foolish to venture into it. While we're at it, we could teach more of the emotional components of the act of sex, and less about the plumbing (well covered on the internet).

It helps to bear in mind that women are ultimately as self-interested as men and that little that goes on in any society goes on without a great deal of complicit involvement from women, no matter how unfair the system appears to the participants or the outsiders.

Rumour has it that Tiger Woods personally collected over one hundred female votes in favour of male infidelity.

I guess that leaves a lot of schmoes out there who aren't getting any, and aren't going to take it any longer.

Re:Sounds like a good exercise

[bzipitidoo]

If it's such a good exercise, let's do it here.

You go first.

P.S. I can think of all kinds of things a few bombs could really mess up. The lesson may be that we're extremely vulnerable, and there's little we can do to prevent determined attacks. Look how often suicide bombings claim lives in the Middle East, despite the presence of tons of security and hordes of troops on active duty. In the US, only took one deranged man plus a little help from another to take out a large building and kill hundreds. Fortunately terrorists tend to be a stupid lot, going for the high profile targets like tall but ultimately not particularly important buildings, and airplanes, rather than critical infrastructure. And even more fortunately, remoteness does offer considerable protection. The ability to retaliate so powerfully that the perps will be wishing they'd never tried it may be the best deterrence. That, plus the ability to quickly repair and rebuild, so they see how very little even a successful attack really accomplishes. Have to make sure would be enemies are in no doubt about any of that either. Part of why 9/11 happened is that the Taliban and Al Qaeda deluded themselves mightily. They seemed to really believe and certainly hoped the US was just a paper tiger that would fold on the first blow. They dared to regard the entire operation as fantastic propaganda for domestic (Islamic) consumption, with the US dragged into the role of being a mere helpless victim for use as an object lesson. Prevention is costly and difficult. In other words, MAD is better than Star Wars.

Re:Sounds like a good exercise

[joocemann]

The PLO/PLFF/etc have faced Israel in exactly that sense with Israel basically destroying palestinians in exchange. And yet some palestinians still foster enough hate to continue.

Scorched earth won't solve terrorism. Terrorism has little to do with any specific group, purpose, or culture. Terrorism is a means by which a small group or individual can garner attention and fear for some purpose.

The point being that 'some purpose' could be anything. DC Sniper. Red Brigades. IRA. Militant Islam.

Hell, the owner of LEGO could wipe out hundreds in some easily brainstormed plot --- like driving a large bus into a Linkin Park concert crowd at 120mph -- and then make an announcement that he wants us all to say we love his LEGOs.

Terror. Terror-ism.

And if you desire a world that has any sense of freedom, even far less than we enjoy now --- terrorism will not be defeated in any serious sense. Given the risks, such that I'd more likely die from a car accident, or eating meat, or food poisoning --- I say lets keep the freedom going and take basic precaution to known threats.

Re:Sounds like a good exercise

[LongearedBat]

Gorillas are quite peaceful. They like to eat leaves in misty mountains.
Guerrillas, on the other hand, are humans who fight in small skirmishes.

Also, I disagree.

You only win a war when you convince your enemy to stop fighting,
whether due to exhaustion, lack of ability, or lack of incentive.

The ultimate victory is not to wipe out your enemy. That’s usually very costly, extremely difficult and can earn you more enemies. (In fact, these are the very reasons why terrorist attacks are counter productive, in that they generate more animosity.)
The ultimate victory is to turn your enemy into your friend. That usually costs less, is still difficult, but you earn respect from everyone, and you gain a willing ally.

Having said that, finding a way to make peace can be very difficult. And that’s exactly why situations such as the current floods in northern Pakistan are so important politically, as they give an opportunity for people to show that they want to be friends. If the Taliban hinders foreign aid, then the people will more likely prefer to help friendly foreigners rather than disruptive Taliban, if they can.

Re:Sounds like a good exercise

[blackest_k]

It would have made an interesting project with a lot of critical and insightful thinking. The outrage is perhaps more interesting than the original idea. Over 200 australians have been killed by terrorists in total.

hows that compare with car deaths or murders per year in australia.

Terrorism doesn't do a great deal towards advancing political aims and probably achieves the opposite effect.

The personal tragedy is huge of course and surprisingly far reaching one of the students was related to someone killed by terrorism.

An obvious case where you can uncover an insight has to be the new mosque in new york. Gut reaction it is a bad idea. Considered reaction you are associating an innocent group of americans with a bunch of terrorists who killed 3,000 people. Thats not right they had nothing to do with 9/11. So why are people acting like they did and just who is being terrorised now?

To deny religious freedom to segregate certain groups of americans is wrong which is why the mosque should be allowed.

The idea of the mosque was to provide a place to heal the wounds of 9/11 and the first thing that needs to be recognised is that it wasn't american muslims that carried out 9/11.
     

Re:Sounds like a good exercise

[_Sprocket_]

If nothing else, it may make the children more aware of the possibilities regarding terrorism.

The key part to this is that the class studies terrorism. The material covered chemical and biological weapons. I'd imagine it also covered a bit of ideology and psychology of terrorism. Thus, the exercise was really a theoretical test to put that knowledge in to theoretical action - or at least look at all the pieces analytically and understand more than the simple facts of what nerve agents do or how fear motivates.

From the article:

Grades were to be allocated based on students' ability to analyze information they had learned on terrorism and chemical and biological warfare and apply it to a real-life scenario, the newspaper reported.

What stands out for me is that this wasn't simply an exercise in Hollywood scenario building. This was practical application of material.

Re:Sounds like a good exercise

[c0lo]

In my opinion you should aim to remove the objective of your enemy. Utterly destroy what the gorilla fighters are fighting to reclaim/protect. The scotched earth way.

What terrorists want is terror. Meaning, their objective is to remove your peace of mind, disturb your way of life (killing some, the probability of being you the one that's killed is non-zero).
Would you care to translate your scorched earth metaphor when the earth is your way of life? What if the earth is your life?

Yes, removing their motivation to terrorize you is a solution (and not the only one - each of the solutions have its merits and costs). But I don't think that removing the objective (which, I argue, is something different from motivation) is a solution. Unfortunately the same confusion seems to be made by the governments: in the name of protecting our life-style (values, etc) they are choosing means that actually destroy them (violence - the last resort of the incompetent. Funny how quick the govs showed their incompetence).

Re:Sounds like a good exercise

[Anonymous Coward]

This reminds me of over a decade ago, when the "anthrax letters" were circulating through the post office addressed to congress critters.

At the time I was taking a network plus course at the local community college, and commented to the teacher that the terrorists were not actually trying to kill congress critters, or were woefully incompetent. When asked why I felt that way, I pointed out the following things:

1) Weapons grade anthrax is difficult to procure. VERY difficult to procure. Especially in the quantities that were being transmitted through the post mail service.
2) Everyone and his brother knows that congress critters do not answer their own mail.

Taken together, it would mean that the terrorists were savvy enough to either steal a shitpile of weapons grade anthrax from a government weapons facility ( a pretty awesome feat)-- or were savvy enough to culture it themselves without killing everyone in their cell (another awesome feat), but were somehow too stupid to plan an actually effective delivery technique. This does not follow. It is more likely that the actual intent was to cause national panic over a compromised postal system, or that the "attack" was a ruse designed to distract attention from some other issue, but the latter is fairly deep into the tinfoil hat domain.

I further added that if *I* had been the terrorist, I would have delivered the weapons grade anthrax directly to the house and senate in the following manner:

Hijack a fully loaded Krispy Kreme doughnut truck, and steal the driver's clothes and clipboard, then impersonate him.
Liberally spike all the powdered sugar doughnuts it (the truck) is carrying.
Drive up to the house and senate buildings, and "Deliver" a "Complimentary free sample" (on behalf of Krispy Kreme, in recognition of the work that they do for our country) to the congress and senate cloak rooms, complete with forged delivery confirmation paperwork. (bonus if you have hacked the delivery schedule database to confirm the delivery in advance. Afterall, this is a terror cell sophisticated enough to secretly heist weapons grade anthrax in the first place.)
Drive away, knowing you will have gotten a surprisingly large portion of both legislative bodies directly exposed to GI anthrax.

Needless to say, this line of thinking shocked my instructor sufficiently that she asked me to not talk about it any further, and completely dropped the subject.

Personally, I thought it was an excellent way to frame the current political situation, and evaluate what was happening around me at the time. The prevailing theories being circulated by the mainstream press did not seem to hold up well under critical review, and motive was, to my knowledge, never fully disclosed. To me, the fact that I could concoct a superior delivery plan on the spot than the one utilized by the terrorists was reason enough to doubt that attacking congress critters was the actual intention. If their plan was to sow seeds of disruption and intrigue, then their plan worked perfectly. The question then, is why they would go through all the trouble of procuring actual anthrax, just to cause a sensationalist media firestorm, when the mere suggestion of anthrax would have been equally sufficient, and also what they stood to gain from creating this media blitz in the first place.

Having more people think about that situation in the critical light that I did back then, would have instigated a more meaningful investigation by the mainstream press, and would have neutered much of the shock and awe value of the event in question, instead fostering useful, and rational inquiry.

Personally, I think this teacher is on the right track here.

Re:Sounds like a good exercise

[silentcoder]

Scorched earth worked to end the Guerilla phase of the anglo boer war.

The price was the slow death by disease and starvation of 27 000 women and children...

But that wasn't terrorism, it was guerilla tactics in a formally declared war used by the invaded nation as a defense against the invaders.

When you're dealing with actual terrorists - no it doesn't work. It worked because the Boers had lost a LOT but not everything - it worked because surrender meant saving the ones still alive.

If you try to leave guerillas with nothing "to fight for" what you actually do is leave them with "nothing to lose" - every civilian you kill in a country means 5 formerly moderate family members signing up at the nearest training camp.
In fact I think you'll find scorched earth policies is the best possible way to make a LOT more terrorists. When you make people feel that they are fighting a genuinely just war against a cruel and murderous nation - you remove all the moral blocks that stop people like you and me from using bombs to get our way. You remove the family ties that make us reconsider.
Most of us won't risk our families suffer for our believes. But when we've already lost them - avenging them can become all we still care about.

Scorched earth policies only work when you're fighting a properly declared war against a force using guerilla tactics against soldiers. It doesn't work against terrorist who target civilians as a matter of course.

Not to mention there is the whole Geneva convention and such you know...

It's easy to say scorched earth when you belong to a powerful nation. What if you were born in one of the smaller, oppressed nations - and some insane people in your country planted a bomb on the soil of a powerful one they have a grudge against ? Hell Timothy Mcveigh is your own piece of proof that terrorists targeting their own people is not unusual - rationality doesn't enter into it by definition.

So after Mad Mickey plants his bomb, the powerful nation comes and levels your city with misiles, shoots at your children in school busses, their misiles "accidently" hit your schools and hospitals and their soldiers push you around on the streets, rape your mother who was innocently imprisoned because she has alzheimers and walks with a cane and couldn't make it home before curfew because she got disoriented and lost.
You lose your job because their actions have destroyed your economy and the few family members you have left are struggling and starving and you remember that things were better before they show up.

Do you say "It's all Mad Micky's fault- let's find him and his cohorts and hand them over so it will end" ?
Or do you say "Mad Mickey was right all along - these bastards deserve to die for what they do, deserve to suffer as they made us suffer. As we suffer for the crimes of one, so they all should suffer for the crimes of a few of the soldiers. We don't have an army that can beat them in open combat, but we can plant bombs like Mad Mickey did, we can use suicide attacks to get in among them. They killed our women and children - we can kill theirs... we may not be able to win back our homeland, or win a war - but we can make them feel a little bit of the suffering they have made us feel."

Honestly ? Do you think you wouldn't choose the second option ? Even if you say so - you do realize that almost every person alive WOULD take it.

You're using scorched earth tactics NOW. All it does is make MORE enemies who have LESS to loose.

Re:Sounds like a good exercise

[deek]

If you believe the terrorists were stupid for going for the world trade center, and other high profile buildings, then you don't really understand how they think, nor what their intentions were. You need to put more effort into your exercise. I'll grade your essay a C+.

Re:Sounds like a good exercise

[c0lo]

The idea of the mosque was to provide a place to heal the wounds of 9/11 and the first thing that needs to be recognised is that it wasn't american muslims that carried out 9/11.

Generous and correct idea, an extremely risky implementation.

Assume that the mosque will be built at ground zero, can you imagine what will happen if it is vandalized/desecrated by even a single person that just doesn't get it? (and how many are the ones that don't get it).
Funny thing, a risk of the same nature that the teacher in TFA took: many will get the message wrong and possible the issue will escalate (unfortunately, not only at the /. level).

Re:Sounds like a good exercise

[AK Marc]

I'd bomb the train as it passes over the bridge headed north out of Sydney. A bomb in the train would likely not take the bridge out, but it would certainly disrupt train service and possibly car service over the bridge.

And then repeat a couple weeks later.

Continue repeating. And, when it's impossible to repeat (likely never), then do the same on the same bridge, but with a car bomb.

To cut off a part of a city like that will cause massive disruption. Do you fire someone that can't come in to work for half a year? Or pay them to do nothing? What if it's over a hundred thousand such people?

Re:Sounds like a good exercise

[Anonymous Coward]

Holy crap you two missed the point by so much it's scary.

Do you even know what a war of attrition means? Because you say you can't win won, then go on to essential describe fighting one as the best route.

The "objective of your enemy" is usually to get you the fuck out of their business. By going in slaughtering their innocent civilians, you're just creating more terrorists by pissing off more people past the breaking point.

Committing genocide to stop suicide bombing? How about "don't occupy the country in the first place"? How about "don't go around overthrowing democratic countries and installing puppet dictators"? How about "the occasional terrorist act has happened throughout all of human history, and unless it's an epidemic, don't make it worse by killing ten times as many innocents, because then you've just turned all of those innocent's families into terrorists"?

What the hell is wrong with you?

Re:Sounds like a good exercise

[Darth Hamsy]

You certainly can't fight well against Gorilla fighters. Against guerrilla fighters, I'm not so sure.

Re:Sounds like a good exercise

[blackest_k]

The thing about the mosque which I think has been a clever move by somebody, is how much of an effect the concept of having a mosque 2 blocks from ground zero has had its got people thinking and talking sometimes both at the same time. Yet there is no substantive funding for the project, I'm not sure if it ever will get funded.

you really have to be rational about this if 2 blocks is too near how far away should it be 10, 50, blocks away?
The real problem is that Americans are blaming other Americans for something they had nothing to do with. Who exactly is being terrorised here? If I was an American Muslim I really wouldn't choose to go that Mosque the chances of some "patriot" deciding to shoot me on my way to church or blowing the place up really would be quite unsettling.

However the concept of the Mosque is very powerful since it asks Americans to think and that is a good thing.

If you take a situation closer to home for me the division of people into Catholic or Protestant its easy to see that you shouldn't blame everyday Catholics and Protestants for the actions of militants.

dividing a community against itself is very powerful and destructive and this is something 9/11 achieved and its about time Americans began to heal that divide.

Re:Sounds like a good exercise

[FrameRotBlues]

Wishing I had mod points to give you today, even though you're only an AC... Excellent critical thinking skills, solid "A" material.

Re:Sounds like a good exercise

[c0lo]

The real problem is that Americans are blaming other Americans for something they had nothing to do with. Who exactly is being terrorised here? If I was an American Muslim I really wouldn't choose to go that Mosque the chances of some "patriot" deciding to shoot me on my way to church or blowing the place up really would be quite unsettling.

Exactly right. Same level of provocation (that should remain only at an intellectual level) as the teacher in TFA.

Anyway, two good ideas (maybe not the best), both of them creating absurd visceral reactions: makes me feel like either I'm born much too early or much too late.

p>However the concept of the Mosque is very powerful since it asks Americans to think and that is a good thing.

Once again, agree: with the note that, unfortunately, it is not only the Americans that should do it. Even more depressing: a person meant to teach the kids how to think is shooed when she actually tries to do it.

Re:Sounds like a good exercise

[Anonymous Coward]

That's only what happens if you are trying to combine scorched earth with some restraint towards civilians, which isn't really scorched earth at all. See the Hama Massacre for an example of what happens if you don't.

Don't think for a moment that I'm arguing in favour of this, it's resorting to terrorism in order to quell terrorism, but it does work. It works because you make it clear that by joining up with an organisation who want to attack the state you're inviting the state to hit back hard, and they'll hit back at you, at your friends and family, at your town, at everybody who lives near the town, at anybody who might have recently visited the town... If you can make people too terrified to allow terrorists among them, let alone even thinking of joining them, then you've won.

Re:Sounds like a good exercise

[thasmudyan]

You can't win a war of attrition with gorilla fighters ( terrorists )
They will aways find a way to surprise you or sabotage your infrastructure.

True.

In my opinion you should aim to remove the objective of your enemy. Utterly destroy what the gorilla fighters are fighting to reclaim/protect. The scotched earth way. For every suicide bombing kill tenfold of the native population of your enemy.
Failing that just exterminate them all.

In the case of Islamic terrorism though, that's not really possible. Standard procedure here would be to thwart the enemy's objective. An objective which in this case would be the destruction of our freedoms and the preparation for a fundamentalist takeover of our society. Sadly, they already partly succeeded. As things are right now, further terrorist acts are practically superfluous, because we're quite capable of doing the rest of the terrorists' work for them. We already declared war against our own citizens, no outside threats necessary!

This is what makes "winning" the war so difficult, because we would first have to change our society back to a free culture. And even if we could do that, we'd still have to address the actual threat of religious extremism that makes up the support network without which terrorists would simply be reduced to insane criminals with limited means. Of course, we lost that fight as well. It's no coincidence that the founder of the "911 Terror Mosque OMG!!111!" is one of Fox' majority shareholders. The same guys are funding boths "sides" (if you can call them that), both of which actually have a radical and thoroughly religious agenda optimized for their respective cultures.

So, yeah, of course it makes sense to think about attack scenarios and to do what we can to make everybody safer, but the bad news in this case is that as long as our society is actually worth defending, it will by virtue of its free nature always have a huge surface exposed to attacks.

Re:Sounds like a good exercise

[xtracto]

I would imagine it served to illustrate the truth about terrorism and the farce of what is claimed to be successes in the supposed 'war' against it.

THIS.

Sometimes I think the government does not really want us to know how futile and stupid the "war on terrorism" is.

I remember watching a documentary sometime after 9/11 flight rules became supposedly very strict to aid against terrorism. On this documentary the guy actually introduced A METAL KNIFE to an airline (inside the METAL telescopic tubes of a luggage handle) without a problem; his argument was that, if he succeeded on doing such a thing, definitely terrorist would be able to get nastier things on board.

Security theater....

Re:Sounds like a good exercise

[stdarg]

About your Mad Mickey example.. do you really think almost every person would turn suicidal after their community was attacked?

When people from your community are killed, collectively punished, or whatever, there's no reason to think that it will go on until you are wiped out in a modern conflict. If you understand that they killed Mad Mickey and 50 innocent people because he did X, even if X was justified, you don't necessarily think "screw it all, we're done, I'm going out in a blaze of glory."

If your enemy has plans to destroy you, then by all means be a terrorist. Otherwise, swallow your pride and give up. Plenty of civilizations have risen from defeat -- France, Germany, USA's South, India, Pakistan... really, almost every culture alive today has been defeated and subjugated at some point in the past. Some of them have spent years fighting pride wars as you are suggesting. All it does is delay their return. If Japan had waged a 50 year pride war instead of just giving up, where would they be today? "Free" but living in a scorched earth land with suicide bombers going off every few days? Why would any rational person make that choice?

Re:Sounds like a good exercise

[stdarg]

you really have to be rational about this if 2 blocks is too near how far away should it be 10, 50, blocks away?

There are already other mosques in the area, but they are more than 2 blocks away. Your argument boils down to a slippery slope argument. If we prevent it at X, then X+N is virtually guaranteed to have resistance too. But it won't. It's quite obvious that if you said you're building a mosque 50 blocks from Ground Zero, then most people would not consider it to be the Ground Zero Mosque anymore. Some would, and some would oppose all mosque construction in the entire country. Those are not the 70% of the public who oppose the mosque in reality.

The real problem is that Americans are blaming other Americans for something they had nothing to do with.

Why is that the real problem? That happens all the time. It's almost like saying "the real problem is human nature."

Re:Sounds like a good exercise

[silentcoder]

>bout your Mad Mickey example.. do you really think almost every person would turn suicidal after their community was attacked?

Do you really think almost none of them would ? The percentage who would goes up with the severity of the attacks. The more harm you do - the more people's point-of-no-return you'll breach. You say "scorched earth" - by definition you're going to hit nearly every survivor with that strategy.

>"screw it all, we're done, I'm going out in a blaze of glory."
I don't think ANYBODY thinks that- I specifically said what a huge number of people WILL say however which is. "They've destroyed everything I ever loved, nothing can make that okay... I may only be able to get a tiny bit of justice but by $DEITY I will get that little bit because I owe it to my dead loved ones".

>If your enemy has plans to destroy you, then by all means be a terrorist. Otherwise, swallow your pride and give up.
Exactly - that's what my own ancestors did in the Boer war. Again- scorched earth is a horrible and terrible strategy but it IS effective - in a conventional, declared state of war. It is effective when the people you are waging it against are using guerilla tactics to fight an actual war.
Even then - not all cultures and nations would do so. A LOT of people here were very unhappy about the surrender. We did it because with 27000 woman and children dead, there were as many left in the camps - and we knew another six months and there wouldn't be any. But we also knew if we could have held out another six months we'd have won the war (there is documented evidence of this - British records indicate that plans for surrender on their side was already underway when we did so - though we didn't know it at the time, as it stands the next election saw the politicians who had come up with scorched-earh being utterly destroyed by their own furious people - if we had kept fighting past the election the next party would have had no CHOICE but to run on a "we will surrender and give up the war" platform).
And that is the war that the term "scorched earth" was COINED in - it's the ultimate example.

The point is it only really worked because the fighters on the ground had something left to save by giving up - and didn't KNOW that they would have won if they just held out a little longer. I don't think the sacrifice would have been worth it, to this day the population of my people is calculated to be less than 10% of what it would have been if the concentration camps never happened. We may not have existed afterward since there wouldn't be anybody to bear a new generation.

But there also wasn't international oversight. Do you really think any country -even the USA could REALLY get away with what Britain did there today ? The last country that tried to was at the time at LEAST as powerful as you are now, and ended up at war with the ENTIRE WORLD - and lost.

So you can't GO that far... if anything history suggests that scorched earth strategies, in the long run, causes the invading force to LOSE the war.

Re:Sounds like a good exercise

[dcollins]

"You can't win a war of attrition with gorilla fighters ( terrorists ). They will aways find a way to surprise you or sabotage your infrastructure. In my opinion you should aim to remove the objective of your enemy. Utterly destroy what the gorilla fighters are fighting to reclaim/protect. The scotched earth way. For every suicide bombing kill tenfold of the native population of your enemy. Failing that just exterminate them all. I know it sounds vulgar, demented, say what you will. No gorilla fighter can fight you if they have nothing to fight for."

Comments:
(1) I wouldn't say that it's vulgar or demented. It's just plain Evil, and I hope an evil shit like you gets removed from the face of the Earth at the earliest opportunity.
(2) Is that your reasoning is terrible, that guerrilla fighters are not the same as terrorists, that it's common knowledge that "nothing left to lose" makes for the most dangerous fighter, that there are internationally recognized legal prohibitions against mass punishments like this, etc.
(3) Finally, as is always the case, your terrible fucked-in-the-head reasoning is further highlighted by your inability to even correctly spell words such as "guerrilla", "always", and "scorched". 'Tis always thus.

Re:Sounds like a good exercise

[CAIMLAS]

The number of men isn't what makes a successful plan work, it's the implementation.

Sure, more men are useful, but with proper planning, you could see tenfold the results from 5 men as you'd get from, say, shooting up a mall.

There's a reason why terrorist organizations have been trying to recruit indigenous people from colleges, and it isn't just to find pasties. It's because intelligent people within a society tend to understand said society better than non-natives, and being young, they're also more likely to see holes in the walls everyone else has come to overlook.

For instance, someone who grew up before the Internet (and not working in IT) isn't likely to see telcom equipment as existential, whereas someone who was born in 1990 would. What happens if telcom infrastructure were interrupted at the same time as another coordinated attack or two, creating a "perfect storm" due to societal expectations, stresses, and the like - prey on the society's reactions, moreso than the people themselves. Sort of like what happened after Columbine: people were much more responsive to so-called telltale signs of a repeat. Make the society destroy itself. (IMO this has been their goal all along. We're talking about (mostly) Arabs, here - they're not stereotyped as being crafty "just because").

The whole "why a terrorist makes an attack" bit? Nonsense, they're not going to see that until they actually look at the causes indepth, because it's quite complicated: Islamic culture in general, homeland despotism/sharia law, perverse gender roles, economic status, and many other things.

Re:Sounds like a good exercise

[CAIMLAS]

You're using scorched earth tactics NOW. All it does is make MORE enemies who have LESS to loose.

Assuming you're talking about the US, where in the world are you talking about? Iraq? Afghanistan?

You do realize what "scorched earth" means, right? You do realize that it's almost the exact opposite of what the US has been doing almost since day 1 of Gulf War II? Building roads, bridges, schools, water treatment and dispersal systems, etc. - those things are not what someone doing "scorched earth" does. If we were to perpetrate a "scorched earth" response, Kabul would not exist, and neither would Baghdad. There would be no tribal dissent, because word one of the possibility would result in a JDAM being dropped on their villages.

Somehow, there are plenty of Kurdish people over here, of mixed faiths, who do not view the US with hostility and animosity, yet if anyone does in the Arab world, it's them. Strange, how it's the Muslims who are the ones doing all this, sometimes when they've got no social association with the Arab/Muslim world except for their ideology and mosque indoctrination in their home lands of Western Europe.

Furthermore, the response towards Mad Mickey by the attacked party is largely determined by why attacked, as well as the level of organizational and ideological affinity he has with his state/whatever of origin. If Mickey is from Dublin, a part of the IRA, and has strong family/community ties back there, then yeah, war with Ireland to destroy that contingent might just be the appropriate course of action.

Re:Sounds like a good exercise

[stdarg]

Do you really think almost none of them would ? The percentage who would goes up with the severity of the attacks. The more harm you do - the more people's point-of-no-return you'll breach. You say "scorched earth" - by definition you're going to hit nearly every survivor with that strategy.

When you originally said "You're using scorched earth tactics NOW. All it does is make MORE enemies who have LESS to loose", I assumed that you were talking about modern wars. My reply was really about the characterization of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars as "scorched earth" just because there is collateral damage and civilian casualties.

With that in mind I mostly agree with what you said. If your enemy has already decided you need to be exterminated, then all you can do is fight. My point is only that even in a scorched earth campaign, that is usually not the case. Most enemies are willing to accept your surrender. So the common line about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq creating more terrorists... well it may be true, but it's not rational, justifiable, or understandable. There is other stuff going on than assuming the US attacks are somehow responsible for all that.

Re:Sounds like a good exercise

[thej1nx]

Obviously, you don't understand motives very well. Plus you refuse to acknowledge the history behind it either, which might have explained the motives to you.

Let us check the motives and aims of the "stupid" terrorists.

1) Spread terror. That is what terrorists do, if you failed to guess it from their name. Americans today are completely terrorized. They crap their pants if someone as much as says the word bomb. Despite knowing that saying the word bomb doesn't makes things explode. Even if the person saying it is another american. Mission accomplished.

2) Take away your cherished freedoms. Your own government now spies on you. You have already surrendered almost all your rights since you are scared. You will easily surrender any freedom and right now, if they mention terrorists. Mission accomplished.

3) Make average american to be as much a victim of US government, as they themselves had been. Read above. Mission accomplished.

4) Polarise the world. By over-reacting and invading an uninolved country, you handed them a bonanza. Instead of focusing on the actual attackers(their leader is still unpunished after even a decade btw), you allowed it to become "western world versus them muslims". This is what their main goal was. They wanted to get the apathetic muslim countries involved too. Your actions in Iraq made it clear to even the uninvolved muslim countries or even any country that America dislikes, that they too are at risk and any and all excuses can be used to unilaterally invade them when their time comes. Iran had done nothing to you. And yet they are on the list next. Nice job telling all the countries that they better get a nuclear bomb like China or Russia(never been invaded despite having WMDs and violating human rights) or else risk finding themselves on invasion list. Mission accomplished.

5) Attach a cost to US government and CIA meddling with their politics, toppling democratic governments and installing dictators, esablishing and encouraging drug trade in their country, assassinating their leaders i.e. teaching US let them live in peace. They failed to take into account that US government doesn't really cares about the average americans. They would rather risk creating more terrorists so that oil companies get more rich. Mission failed.

As for MAD and all that nonsense goes, Osama bin laden is still alive and unpunished. US has proved itself to be a mere opportnistic paper tiger that cannot catch even one man.

They achieved four objectives out of five btw. And all you have done to them so far, is invade a country that had nothing to do with the attacks and given them many more potential recruits, their leader is still unpunished and uncaught. Oh, and the world dislikes you openly now.

You decide now how stupid they are.

I know what I said above is unpalatable to you, but someone had to get you hooked off fox news.

Re:Sounds like a good exercise

[blackest_k]

One of the first things declared in the constitution of the United States is all men are created equal and have freedom of religion.

By tearing away at these fundamental rights, you tear away at the foundation on which America is built.

Terrorists are not destroying America , misguided patriotic Americans are.

 

Re:Sounds like a good exercise

[Anonymous Coward]

terrorist != gorilla fighter

"For every suicide bombing kill tenfold of the native population of your enemy."

That's what Nazis did. Yet the resistance just grew.

I think you completely fail at rational thought.

Re:Sounds like a good exercise

[silentcoder]

>You do realize what "scorched earth" means, right? You do realize that it's almost the exact opposite of what the US has been doing almost since day 1 of Gulf War II?

No. It's not. I am descended of the first people scorched earth was ever used again and a direct-line descendant of the inventor of Guerilla warfare at that. It wasn't the scorched earth that won the boer war - it was the concentration camps. Burning down the farms and destroying the infrastructure had only made my ancestors fight HARDER.
And there is no practical difference between what the US is doing in Iraq now and what Britain did here a century ago. There is... symbolic differences. There is a CLAIM that civilians aren't targeted (Britain said that too - then they killed 27 000 of them). There is a claim that infrastructure is being built not demolished - but the average quality of life of an Iraqi today is an order of magnitude worse than it was before the war.
You've "liberated" them from a dictator ? On the contrary you tossed them out of the frying pan into the fire. Your construction work is just a way to give cushy cash contracts to the CEO's who funded your politicians and keep the oil flowing. It's never been about uplifting the people of the country. If it actually had been - if the average Iraqi citizen today had a better life, with the opportunities that freedom brings then there wouldn't have been any insurgents.

Scorched earth has NEVER worked against Guerilla tactics. But Guerilla tactics are incredibly dependent on the support of the local (non-combatant) population. That's why Britain put the boer women in concentration camps - to remove that supporting population, it was the only way to beat the guerillas. The US can't dare to get RID of the local population like they did - but you could have won their support for YOUR side, if you'd come even close to trying to live up to Bush's "Iraqi Freedom" promise. Instead you've made their lives a living hell, that must by default breed sympathy for the insurgents.
As long as guerillas have the sympathy and support of the civilian population - it's impossible to win a war against them. Congratulations, you've created yourself a war that cannot be won. You're too powerful to lose it, and you've made a system that means THEY cannot lose either... do you really want to see it span decades before ultimately just giving up and leaving ? Did you learn nothing from Vietnam ?

Re:Sounds like a good exercise

[CAIMLAS]

If it actually had been - if the average Iraqi citizen today had a better life, with the opportunities that freedom brings then there wouldn't have been any insurgents.

You seem to be unaware of this, so let me inform you: the vast majority of captured insurgents in Iraq, post-war, have not been Iraqis. The majority have been Iranian and Hezbollah, as well as many from Saudi Arabia and some from Egypt.

The captured ones who have been Iraqis have mostly been of the "they threatened to kill my family" variety. These are not the competent attackers.

So explain to me: why are many of these so-called 'insurgents' from Egypt and Saudi Arabia? US ties with both of these countries have been nothing but beneficial for the countries of Saudi Arabia and Egypt. (What those nations do to their people, however, is another story.)

You seem to be casting this conflict outside the bounds of Islamic jihad. Understanding jihad is crucial to understanding the conflict, because they are the same.

"Giving up and leaving" is an option, but it ignores the fact that the war was brought to us (the West) first, and that the pace of the war in the West is increasing.

Terrorist lego

[Anonymous Coward]

Where can I acquire those terrorist legos? That just inspired me to get out my blackcats and m80s and recreate the twin tower scenerio, but now with a New York terrorist street battle.

Re:Terrorist lego

[Kell Bengal]

Brick Arms

You're welcome.

Re:Terrorist lego

[Anonymous Coward]

Awesome thanks

Re:Terrorist lego

[alexhs]

Try here instead ;)

(was featured right here in june)

Re:Terrorist lego

[xtracto]

That is THE COOLEST playmobile/lego thing I have seen in a while... since I melted my lego guys in the then "bleeding edge technology" microwave haha.

As they say now... you men, have one 1 internet.

Wonderful idea

[toQDuj]

There should be no taboo on thinking thoughts.

Also, this will definitely get the attention of the class, as opposed to all the "nice thought" problems that are chucked their way.

Re:Wonderful idea

[masmullin]

There should be no taboo on thinking thoughts.

That idea is taboo.

Re:Wonderful idea

[sumdumass]

I don't think this is a taboo on thinking as much as it's a taboo on getting others to think something specific.

Children are a special part of society that do not carry the same rights and full blown adults. In most cases, children committing crimes aren't even charged with anything close to resembling the same punishment as adults. The reasoning for this is because the Child's mind is still developing and they are literally handicapped when compared to an adult. This reason is the basis in why children are restricted from entering into most contracts, why having sex with them is generally forbidden, why there is a certain age before being allowed to drink or drive or both, and so on.

Instructing children to create these scenarios is not a good idea as they aren't really capable of the context necessary to fully comprehend the results or the ramifications from the results. what makes it even more disturbing is that the parental supervision, be it from school, from home, or any other organization which maintains control over the child, is most likely not capable of ascertaining when this presents a problem that could carry over to a life threatening situation.

Pushing adaults to think about this is one thing, pushing children to do it is just a little different. I'm not saying they should never think about it, but when the assignment is a terrorist attack, and the real life consequences can be serious bodily harm including death, a great deal of caution needs to be taken into consideration too.

Re:Wonderful idea

[toQDuj]

I beg to differ with your point. I think this is an excellent exercise in figuring out the consequences of one's actions. Indeed, I think this was the purpose of the exercise. Planning a strategy from beginning to end, and predicting the outcome of certain events will surely reinforce the causality training. They will understand the ramifications of what they are planning, because that is the exercise.

Given that the kids were 15, as mentioned above, their sense of morality should already be quite well developed. Therefore I do not expect them to have any doubt in their minds as to what they are planning or thinking about is good or "evil". I actually think this forced thinking about such planning will enable them later on in life to make clearer distinctions between both. In other words, how do you know something is bad if you have not given it serious thought? Apart from the clearest examples (like killing as many innocents as possible), in many cases it is hard to see whether a certain plan has negative or positive consequences.

As for your last point, I think the distinction between adult and children is a little too black-and-white. As soon as you think of yourself as an "adult", you will stop learning from life because you think you (should) already know. That is why you learn when you are young, before you make preconceptions and assume your way into adulthood. I forgot who said it, but this is very applicable: "Stay young, stay foolish".

Finally, hindering thought on the matter will only make kids want to do it more. Supervised thought is better than hindering thought.

Re:Wonderful idea

[mathfeel]

There should be no taboo on thinking thoughts.

Also, this will definitely get the attention of the class, as opposed to all the "nice thought" problems that are chucked their way.

I agree. Because most people don't actually think about the effect of a potential terrorism tactics, the government and the media can terrorize us with idea such as "dirty bomb" or "shampoo bottle bomb" that are quite impractical from a terrorist point of view and the whole 9-11 problem can be solved simply by adding lock in cockpit door (and/or arming the pilots) instead of a cavity search.

Re:Wonderful idea

[Anonymous Coward]

"There should be no taboo on thinking thoughts."

How about child porn?

One parent's photo of his/her child is another man's child porn...

Re:Wonderful idea

[thewb005]

Seriously. What will impact the children's learning more. This radically new, applicable and informative assignment or a report summarizing the history of warfare from their wonderful textbooks?

Re:Wonderful idea

[toQDuj]

obtroll, but nevertheless, yes. By all means, think about child porn. If your innate moral sense cannot distinguish between viable sexual partners or children, or if images can turn you into a paedophile, you probably should be very, very careful about what you do anyway.

Re:Wonderful idea

[NeutronCowboy]

And magically, on their 18th birthday, children suddenly become endowed with the wisdom of adults, and the ability to properly process such thoughts.

Horseshit. You teach kids in a supervised environment, and discuss with them their trains of thought. Early. That is the only way that on their 18th birthday, they aren't as handicapped as they were at 17, 16 or even 12.

Re:Wonderful idea

[vegiVamp]

those kids are what, 15, 16 ? At that age you're capable of a lot more critical thought than what the law gives you credit for. At least, you are if you've been allowed to use your brain in those years - some school systems actively discourage that, of course.

Also, adolescents tend to not have too many fixed thinking pathways yet, so may actually come up with novel ideas and insights that most adults will never consider.

If this excercise is well-guided, with plenty of discussion about the ethical side of things, I fail to see the problem. Hell, half of them probably kick ass at counterstrike and whatnot anyway - it's not as if they're not used to violence in games and on TV.

As far as I'm concerned, this is A Good Thing, regardless of how much some would like to close their eyes and pretend they're in their happy, non-violent place.

Re:Wonderful idea

[sumdumass]

And magically, on their 18th birthday, children suddenly become endowed with the wisdom of adults, and the ability to properly process such thoughts.

No, on their 18th birthday, we simply stop accepting the excuses. It's nothing that has happened with the children at that time, it's just the cut off that society has determined is enough time that anyone should be to a certain point.

If you can show you are above the curve there, you can get emancipated by the courts and become of legal age a lot younger (14 or 16 in some states).

Horseshit. You teach kids in a supervised environment, and discuss with them their trains of thought. Early. That is the only way that on their 18th birthday, they aren't as handicapped as they were at 17, 16 or even 12.

Please show me in the article where it says this assignment was assigned in a way that was capable of doing that? I mean I have no problem giving a 12 year old kid a shotgun or riffle and taking them out to kill animals that we will later eat. I have no problem with taking 7 year olds out and doing this. However, I have control of the guns and the support of their parents who advocate it too. But this doesn't seem to be the case in this assignment and the school doesn't appear to be set up to provide the proper amount of supervision over this.

Please show me where in the article or other place that this is wrong.

Re:Wonderful idea

[sumdumass]

Those kids are what, 15, 16 ? At that age you're capable of a lot more critical thought than what the law gives you credit for. At least, you are if you've been allowed to use your brain in those years - some school systems actively discourage that, of course.

I'll agree with you here except that children of this age are typically lacking the experience to tie it all together properly. If you doubt me, then ask yourself why are college kids take to the cleaners financially by credit card scams and special laws are passed specifically to deal with it? And these are the smart ones who made it to college.

f this excercise is well-guided, with plenty of discussion about the ethical side of things, I fail to see the problem. Hell, half of them probably kick ass at counterstrike and whatnot anyway - it's not as if they're not used to violence in games and on TV.

from the article, it isn't well guided and it wasn't an exercise with an intent like that. and the big difference between it and a video game is that they know there is a disconnection with the game.

As far as I'm concerned, this is A Good Thing, regardless of how much some would like to close their eyes and pretend they're in their happy, non-violent place.

Perhaps you are right. Maybe we should expose every child to something like this and draft them into the military at about age 14. The military could finish their k12 schooling and teach them all about this crap at the same time.

This teacher should be marked Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

"The teacher, with every best intention, was attempting to have the students think through someone else's eyes about conflict. I think there are better ways to do that. ... This is not what we expect of professional educators", said Sharyn O'Neill, director-general of the state's Department of Education.

Funny thing is, if I was a teacher, that is EXACTLY the type of assignment that I would give to students, because it will help them to THINK: analyze, empathize, question, ...

When I was in school I would often take the most controversial subject that I could think of, and something that I had strong opinions about, and take the opposite point of view and write an essay about it. It was an amazing learning process.

One of the reasons why I have never EVER considered getting into teaching is because I realized that schools aren't so much about learning as about teaching people to think like everybody else.

Re:This teacher should be marked Troll

[deniable]

Split them into two teams and have one try to defend against the threats, then have them swap. It would give a balanced view and require some thought. I'm sure the 'intelligence' ops around it would also prove interesting. "The terrorist cell was meeting behind the bike racks, so we infiltrated and bribed them for information with a couple of smokes."

Re:This teacher should be marked Troll

[SakuraDreams]

Funny thing is, if I was a teacher, that is EXACTLY the type of assignment that I would give to students, because it will help them to THINK: analyze, empathize, question, ...

Empathise with the guys planning to kill as many civilians as possible? They could look at the political reasons behind terrorism but to look at the planning of the tactical operation does not seem to add much but condone on some level the killing of innocent people.

Re:This teacher should be marked Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like it was done with the best of intentions, and it MIGHT be evidence of a cool teacher (or just a screw-brained one), then again teenagers be crazy yo, and I think they probably spend enough time indulging in violent fantasies that you really needn't mandate it. Plus you just need one of these kids to do anything bordering on violent and heat comes done on everyone from the teacher up the chain (with Marilyn Manson and Motörhead thrown in for good measure) from the Tipper Gore PC mafia (or whatever the Australian equivalent is). So the bureaucrats are just acting their prerogatives (hopefully with a wry attitude towards it). As long as the teacher just gets a slap on the wrist and everyone goes about their lives there's nothing to see here, at least compared to grade A, uncut, thought crime hysteria that's quickly being SOP in the US.

Re:This teacher should be marked Troll

[Kyusaku Natsume]

From the article:

Brian Deegan, whose son, Josh, was killed in the 2002 Bali bombings, said the reality of terror plots at home in Australia is exactly why students should learn about terrorism in school. He said the teacher could have been on to a good idea if the end result of her lesson was to extract feelings of regret and sympathy for the victims of their fictional massacre.

"I think discussion about it in classrooms is a bloody good idea, as long as that's the direction it's going in," Deegan told The Associated Press. "If it was intended to teach them about the impact, the effect of terrorism on innocent people and to try and extract sympathy, empathy and regretfulness in the aftermath, then I think that it's a positive move. Anything else and it's plainly stupid."

Hard to put it in a better way. Perhaps I would add in the asignment what countermeasures they could take against their own plot, with emphasis on diplomacy.

Re:This teacher should be marked Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

Empathise with the guys planning to kill as many civilians as possible? They could look at the political reasons behind terrorism but to look at the planning of the tactical operation does not seem to add much but condone on some level the killing of innocent people.

What you put into it is what you get out of it. I'm not sure the course would be as simplistic as the journalism would have you believe (but who knows, this IS high school after-all). Learning tactics alone and of itself isn't necessarily a bogus pursuit either, it all depends on how the exercise is framed, and how the educational experience is mentored.

Such an activity could mean they learn a LOT about history, politics, sociology, psychology, etc. For example, they could learn:

• They could create financing for enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend tactic, which is how Pakistan financed its nuclear weapons program and funded Islamist terrorists (all through the U.S. tax dollars, which were supposed to be going the the Mujahideen)
• They could use religion and custom to create suicide bombers. Example: rape woman and then "convince" them to become suicide bombers because they are now social outcasts. Something which was (is?) common in Chechnya.
• Just let injustice happen naturally, like in Isreal, IIRC a former Prime Minister interviewed many former terrorists in Isreali jails to discover their motivations and found that most of them had their families killed by Isreali soldiers, their houses bulldozed etc. Allowing ethnic cleansing to occur is a great way to spur terrorism.

These are just three examples of how these (high school) "children" can learn what it is like to be a terrorist. It sure beats learning about terrorism on the news.

BTW, I read a LOT (mainly REAL books) and learn from the Internet as well (blogs, Wikipedia, even Slashdot!). I was going to try to find some references for my learning points above but the first thing that came up was this little gem. So I figured I'll let people just do their own Google/research if they want specific references. It's not that hard, and it's a lot more useful than being spoon-fed (and time and laziness are never on my side :P)

- regards,

the OP

Re:This teacher should be marked Troll

[Loki_666]

Yes, its an unfortunate truth that schools are rarely about learning to learn but instead digesting facts and regurgitating them for exams. The good little clones do well and the thinking individuals suffer.

Re:This teacher should be marked Troll

[mjwx]

if I was a teacher

If you were a teacher.

analyze, empathize

analyse, empathise.

realized

realised

The teacher is Australian. (F) please resubmit.

Re:This teacher should be marked Troll

[stdarg]

It would also be interesting to not tell the students who is who. Just tell each one which team he is on. The teams have to find each other.

Re:This teacher should be marked Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm disturbed by the 99% approval of this teacher by slashdot. Would 'Planning the perfect murder' be an appropriate topic as well? How about 'How to vandalize the school'? We just had a heart-breaking school vandalization locally.

Simple:

[Tablizer]

Spook them into fighting in Iraq & Afghanistan.

I'm tired of this...

[Superdarion]

Are we really that easily influenced? I mean, think-of-the-children-people are so affraid that if the kids watch a violent movie, play a violent videogame, listen to violent music and, in general, have any contact whatsoever with violent behavior, even if it's only in the theoretical level, they'll turn into killing machines who beat their wives and rape their children.

Does "thinking like the enemy" really make you the enemy? Are we really so easily modeled that we need to shield our children from being in contact with any type of non-optimal behavior (whatever that is) so that they can be molded into model citizens?

I know this is just anecdotal, but I have had contact with lots of violence, both in paper as in reality, and I have never been violent a single time in my life. I often think about terrorism as an empathy exercise and it doesn't mean I'm actually planning to do it.

Think like the enemy is a good way to empathize. The enemy is made of people, just like us, and just like us they have their issues and problems that drive them to terrorism. Is it really that terrible that a teacher is trying to teach the students about other cultures? Hell, try to think like a suicide bomber. That's a good empathy exercise.

Understanding terrorists might prove to be the only way to stop them.

Re:I'm tired of this...

[sumdumass]

I'm sorry, but I fail to see anywhere in the article where this assignment would teach the students to empathize with the enemy. It was an assignment that required the students to pick a target, plan and attack, and explain why they thought that was the most effect attacks and targets. It had nothing to do with conflict resolution or the struggle of the terrorists. It was more or less a military exercise in how to kill people which is disturbing considering the targets were innocent civilians and the desired outcome was to force an entity entirely different to adopt some political line.

Re:I'm tired of this...

[Anonymous Coward]

Might? It *is* the only way to stop them. There will never be any way to completely kill them all - every time a martyr is created, a thousand more will stand in their place. There is no way, short of a totalitarian police state, that dissent will ever be silenced, and even then, there will be a resistance movement.

The only way to permanently stop a terrorist movement is to co-opt them. Find out what their problem is, and either fix it or smother it in so much cultural noise that it washes away.

Re:I'm tired of this...

[cduffy]

It was more or less a military exercise in how to kill people which is disturbing considering the targets were innocent civilians and the desired outcome was to force an entity entirely different to adopt some political line.

These are good reasons to think about such attacks; what vulnerabilities they would use, how to defend against them, the cost/benefit analysis of such defenses, and the like. How can we expect to be equipped to decide what constitutes a reasonable precaution or an effective security measure if hypotheticals are taboo?

An assignment to work out the logistics of running an attack, beyond being creativity-inducing in and of itself, is certainly going to raise the ethical and moral questions -- at least among any students with the slightest bit of introspection and curiosity.

Re:I'm tired of this...

[Trintech]

Think like the enemy is a good way to empathize. The enemy is made of people, just like us, and just like us they have their issues and problems that drive them to terrorism.

Thank you for bringing this up. Often, if you are able to actually empathize with the enemy, you realize that they are just a symptom of a bigger problem. As of late, our society has spent far too much time trying to treat symptoms (Root out and kill all terrorists) instead of tackling the real underlying problems (why they hate us in the first place).

Re:I'm tired of this...

[wvmarle]

In Dutch we always say "you have to speak the language of the enemy".

In a literal sense (during the war it helped many resistance fighters to speak German, and to speak it well, if only to understand what the enemy is saying to each other),and in a more figurative sense (knowing their tactics and way of doing).

Re:I'm tired of this...

[c0lo]

It was more or less a military exercise in how to kill people which is disturbing considering the targets were innocent civilians and the desired outcome was to force an entity entirely different to adopt some political line.

These are good reasons to think about such attacks; what vulnerabilities they would use, how to defend against them, the cost/benefit analysis of such defenses, and the like.

<sarcasm>Why would you want to think of vulnerabilities, defense, cost/benefit and the like? Kid, you need to learn to obey the laws - and not question them - and your pay taxes - the more the better - to us to defend you.

And, while doing all of the above, we'll eventually let you be proud you are the free and the brave if living in some countries and a terrorist if you are living in some others; even more, it will always be us to decide which are those other countries: if you remember other times it used to be different (like we replaced an elected leader with the shah in some obscure places), you are totally wrong - there weren't such times ever (we were always at war Eastasia).</sarcasm>

Re:I'm tired of this...

[Anonymous Coward]

Are we really that easily influenced? I mean, think-of-the-children-people are so affraid that if the kids watch a violent movie, play a violent videogame, listen to violent music and, in general, have any contact whatsoever with violent behavior, even if it's only in the theoretical level, they'll turn into killing machines who beat their wives and rape their children.

Except that wasn't the complaint in this case. Several people, including people who were seriously injured in the Bali bombings complained that the assignment was disrespectful and offensive to victims of terrorism. (The Australian press is addicted to stories where they can drag out somebody who can say how "shocked and appalled" they are... if they read this post, they'd probably get someone from a drug rehabilitation centre to give a quote about how terrible it is that my post trivialises addiction in such a callous manner...)

Re:I'm tired of this...

[vandan]

Wow ... an insightful post. This is slashdot, right?

Re:I'm tired of this...

[drinkypoo]

Does "thinking like the enemy" really make you the enemy?

No, increasingly fascist governments will make you the enemy eventually, though, and governments don't like it when their citizens are thinking about ways to fight them... or what they will be in the future.

I can't be the only one to notice that the world is becoming more restrictive legally...

Re:I'm tired of this...

[stdarg]

How do you identify the real underlying problems?

I ask because plenty of people do identify what they see as the real underlying problem, and the answer is something like a culture war. So to solve the underlying problem, you have to eliminate the other culture, or their willingness to fight. It amounts to the same thing as treating the symptoms from your perspective. Therefore you obviously don't see that as the underlying problem or you wouldn't have made that comment. So what is the underlying problem to you? And how do you address what you must see as the underlying problem in our own society, namely the beliefs of the people I referenced?

Re:I'm tired of this...

[sumdumass]

How can we expect to be equipped to decide what constitutes a reasonable precaution or an effective security measure if hypotheticals are taboo?

Why don't we simply let adults take care of that instead of making it a graded homework for our children?

An assignment to work out the logistics of running an attack, beyond being creativity-inducing in and of itself, is certainly going to raise the ethical and moral questions -- at least among any students with the slightest bit of introspection and curiosity.

That's fine and all, but I would imagine of that was the intent of the assignment, then instructions to that point would have been made. According to the article, they were supposed to explain why they picked a certain sector or people and why they thought their attacks would be effective. This assignment is not designed to pick anything you mentioned up other then how to kill others. Perhaps I'm missing something with it? Perhaps you are assuming more then what was stated in the article?

Re:I'm tired of this...

[cduffy]

Why don't we simply let adults take care of that instead of making it a graded homework for our children?

Do you expect people to suddenly develop hypothetical thinking capabilities (or, no less important, the ability to perform objective analysis on ideas they may consider uncomfortable) out of nowhere at age 18?

That's fine and all, but I would imagine of that was the intent of the assignment, then instructions to that point would have been made. According to the article, they were supposed to explain why they picked a certain sector or people and why they thought their attacks would be effective. This assignment is not designed to pick anything you mentioned up other then how to kill others. Perhaps I'm missing something with it? Perhaps you are assuming more then what was stated in the article?

I didn't say that I understood it to be anything other than an assignment "to work out the logistics of running an attack". Doing so would involve contingency planning -- meaning working out not only which attacks would be effective, but what countermeasures might need to be defeated. Thinking about how to defeat countermeasures makes someone able to build better countermeasures by its very nature; you don't design a lock without first learning how to pick them, and you can't learn to pick a lock without knowing something about its design.

Even selecting a target involves critical thinking -- being able to put yourself in the shoes of those you want to influence. Do you go for a target with flashiness and political impact, or maximal body count? What's the actual end goal? Any of these discussions have serious ethical considerations, and I would be deeply disappointed if our children were such dunderheads as to be unable to investigate them unprompted.

It's a worthwhile assignment, and something I could see spawning a multitude of interesting discussions over the breakfast table.

Re:I'm tired of this...

[sumdumass]

Do you expect people to suddenly develop hypothetical thinking capabilities (or, no less important, the ability to perform objective analysis on ideas they may consider uncomfortable) out of nowhere at age 18?

Lol.. I expect them to be more capable at age 18. Obviously, I said adults so I'm not just talking about someone over an age, I'm talking about someone who acts like and is an adult- not a juvenile over the age of 18.

I didn't say that I understood it to be anything other than an assignment "to work out the logistics of running an attack". Doing so would involve contingency planning -- meaning working out not only which attacks would be effective, but what countermeasures might need to be defeated. Thinking about how to defeat countermeasures makes someone able to build better countermeasures by its very nature; you don't design a lock without first learning how to pick them, and you can't learn to pick a lock without knowing something about its design.

And children are employed in counter intelligence and counter terrorism task forces why? I mean why are the children designing the lock in the first place?

Even selecting a target involves critical thinking -- being able to put yourself in the shoes of those you want to influence. Do you go for a target with flashiness and political impact, or maximal body count? What's the actual end goal? Any of these discussions have serious ethical considerations, and I would be deeply disappointed if our children were such dunderheads as to be unable to investigate them unprompted.

Get disappointed then. Or perhaps you should have kids and not look at them as if they could do no wrong (because they do, usually more then others when their parents are like that).

Well, perhaps you are right and we should start charging and sentencing children like adults in all cases. I mean why should we have a separate process and lighter sentences if they are fully capable. Clearly society has been wrong throughout all these years and you are right.

It's a worthwhile assignment, and something I could see spawning a multitude of interesting discussions over the breakfast table.

You go ahead and give the assignment to your kids and you deal with them. It's a crap assignment that never should have been issued in a public school. Perhaps in a military academy or something else where extra effort is taken to deal with the ones who can't handle the realities associated with something like this, but not a public school.

Re:I'm tired of this...

[cduffy]

Do you expect people to suddenly develop hypothetical thinking capabilities (or, no less important, the ability to perform objective analysis on ideas they may consider uncomfortable) out of nowhere at age 18?

Lol.. I expect them to be more capable at age 18. Obviously, I said adults so I'm not just talking about someone over an age, I'm talking about someone who acts like and is an adult- not a juvenile over the age of 18.

More mature, certainly. More capable... much of that comes from experiences, and people like you would shelter kids so much they never have any.

I didn't say that I understood it to be anything other than an assignment "to work out the logistics of running an attack". Doing so would involve contingency planning -- meaning working out not only which attacks would be effective, but what countermeasures might need to be defeated. Thinking about how to defeat countermeasures makes someone able to build better countermeasures by its very nature; you don't design a lock without first learning how to pick them, and you can't learn to pick a lock without knowing something about its design.

And children are employed in counter intelligence and counter terrorism task forces why? I mean why are the children designing the lock in the first place?

I can't believe this even needs to be stated: The purpose of childhood is to prepare one for adulthood. One doesn't need to learn the specific skills one will use as an adult, but certainly the general modes of thought. If you want your nation to be known for genius-level lockmakers, you don't forbid its children from playing with lockpicks; much the contrary, you encourage them. Remember the study to the effect that genius-level skill in anything requires about 10,000 hours of practice, and that those hours almost always start in childhood?

Further, what this particular controvercy teaches children is that anything remotely uncomfortable shouldn't even be thought about or considered at all. I can hardly think of a better way to produce a populace susceptible to "but-the-TERRORISTS-will-get-you!" political scaremongering than teaching them early that the only moral thing to do is to turn off their brains when the subject comes up.

Even selecting a target involves critical thinking -- being able to put yourself in the shoes of those you want to influence. Do you go for a target with flashiness and political impact, or maximal body count? What's the actual end goal? Any of these discussions have serious ethical considerations, and I would be deeply disappointed if our children were such dunderheads as to be unable to investigate them unprompted.

Get disappointed then. Or perhaps you should have kids and not look at them as if they could do no wrong (because they do, usually more then others when their parents are like that).

When did I ever say kids could do no wrong? I didn't say that. If I made any assertion that wasn't spelled out in black and white, it's that kids (in the age range we're talking about here) are smarter than most people give them credit for, when they're given the chance and pushed to be. I stand by that assertion.

Well, perhaps you are right and we should start charging and sentencing children like adults in all cases. I mean why should we have a separate process and lighter sentences if they are fully capable. Clearly society has been wrong throughout all these years and you are right.

Separate sentencing is based on responsibility and maturity -- obviously different things than "smart".

It's a worthwhile assignment, and something I could see spawning a multitude of interesting discussions over the breakfast table.

You go ahead and give the assignment

Re:I'm tired of this...

[sumdumass]

More mature, certainly. More capable... much of that comes from experiences, and people like you would shelter kids so much they never have any.

Actually, much more capable. Typically, the frontal cortex of the brain isn't fully developed until a person is about 20-22 years of age. As we know, this is also the part of the brain that deals with processing reasoning and consequences. so while you are right in that experiences will make them more capable too, someone who is an adult will be more capable then a child.

Also, there is absolutely no sheltering here. I have no in any way said we should shelter the kids. There are numerous other ways to invoke the same thought without causing the kids to plan a felony.

I can't believe this even needs to be stated: The purpose of childhood is to prepare one for adulthood. One doesn't need to learn the specific skills one will use as an adult, but certainly the general modes of thought. If you want your nation to be known for genius-level lockmakers, you don't forbid its children from playing with lockpicks; much the contrary, you encourage them. Remember the study to the effect that genius-level skill in anything requires about 10,000 hours of practice, and that those hours almost always start in childhood?

Evidently, your childhood sucked. This assignment will not prepare them for adulthood any better then other assignments could/would and it wouldn't run the risks of the children who are not advanced enough taking it the wrong way. It's reckless, irresponsible, and down right ignorant to claim otherwise. Besides, there is absolutely nothing indicating the children will have learned anything useful in life from this. The assignment was to develop ways to kill people for political purposes and examine how much of an impact their actions would make.

But lets take your statement and play with it a little. "If you want your nation to be known for genius-level terrorists, you don't forbid its children from playing with terrorism tactics; much the contrary, you encourage them. Remember the study to the effect that genius-level skill in anything requires about 10,000 hours of practice, and that those hours almost always start in childhood?" what exactly is your goal again?

Further, what this particular controvercy teaches children is that anything remotely uncomfortable shouldn't even be thought about or considered at all. I can hardly think of a better way to produce a populace susceptible to "but-the-TERRORISTS-will-get-you!" political scaremongering than teaching them early that the only moral thing to do is to turn off their brains when the subject comes up.

Yes, one sided thinking and your side is the only one that is right, right? I mean it's not like they can't read about/study other terrorist attacks (fictional or real) and analyze them without assuming the roles of terrorist and planning a felony, picking the people to murder based on how likely it would be to influence their agenda is there. It's as if the way others have learned throughout history is completely unacceptable in your view or something.

Oh well, like I said, it sounds like your childhood sucked in preparing you for the real world.

When did I ever say kids could do no wrong? I didn't say that. If I made any assertion that wasn't spelled out in black and white, it's that kids (in the age range we're talking about here) are smarter than most people give them credit for, when they're given the chance and pushed to be. I stand by that assertion.

It's that some, but certainly not all kids (in the age range we're talking about here) are smarter than most people give them credit for, when they're given the chance and pushed to be. but there is still no guarantee they are ready for assuming the roles of terrorists, picking victims, deciding how to kill them, and evaluating the

Re:I'm tired of this...

[cduffy]

You're hardly one to talk about rationality. Let's look at all the completely unfounded attacks just in the immediately preceding post:

• It's as if the way others have learned throughout history is completely unacceptable in your view or something -- when I've never sold this exercise as a means of teaching history at all.
• Yes, one sided thinking and your side is the only one that is right -- when at no point have I taken positions regarding the effectiveness of other approaches.
• I'm wondering is you read the article - when I've repeatedly restated relevant portion of the article's contents on all the former occasions when you've made this now-tiring accusation.
• The assignment wasn't about them watching or studying anything concerning terrorism and then discussing it's effectiveness or ineffectiveness (blah blah blah)... ...which is a complete dodge of the question I was asking -- specifically, as to what, specifically, constitute the "realities" to which children are unprepared to be exposed.

Now, that said, let's sift through the debris and see if I can find anything worth responding to:

The assignment was to develop ways to kill people for political purposes and examine how much of an impact their actions would make.

Right -- it's a planning exercise. Now, let's think about some of the things you need to do to successfully complete such an exercise:

• Logistical planning and analysis -- materials, equipment, timing. These skills are needed for anything in life, from managing business operations to planning a party.
• Contingency planning -- anticipating likely impediments and planning around them. Contingency planning is, again, necessary for any kind of business or personal preparedness -- for events ranging from job loss to flooding to being prepared to take advantage of an unexpected opportunity.
• Model and argue the thought process of others -- necessary to argue the political effectiveness of the attack you've selected.

Note that I'm not selling this as a way to learn history; I'm selling it as a way to learn planning. I'm not saying that it's the best possible exercise to be used for this purpose, but I am saying that making a huge controversy over its selection does more harm than good by teaching children that some subjects are immoral to target for analysis.

Are we trying to teach kids that the way to win political battles [..is..] violence directed at totally innocent people[...]?

Are we a member of the ban-violent-media bandwagon too? If you think high school kids can't distinguish between reality and hypothetical or fantasy situations, we'd better not be letting them watch violent movies either.

"If you want your nation to be known for genius-level terrorists, you don't forbid its children from playing with terrorism tactics; much the contrary, you encourage them. Remember the study to the effect that genius-level skill in anything requires about 10,000 hours of practice, and that those hours almost always start in childhood?" what exactly is your goal again?

If you decide to make a concerted effort towards getting a nation of genius-level lockmakers, you're going to end up enabling a thief or two over the course of the process as a matter of course. On the other hand, that thief's much-more-numerous opposition will be similarly enhanced.

Moreover, you'll get not just lockmakers but also mechanical engineers, watchmakers, precision instruments -- anything which requires complimentary skills.

Let me ask you this hypothetical situation. Let's say you were given a button that would make everyone within 2000 miles of you 5 IQ points smarter. If you would ignore that button because it would make better criminals -- ignoring that it would also make better authors, teachers, inventors, scientists and engineers -- we don't have much to talk about.

Re:I'm tired of this...

[sumdumass]

You're hardly one to talk about rationality. Let's look at all the completely unfounded attacks just in the immediately preceding post:

Lets see, Of the three things you listed, I will simply generalize about, you fist insisted this was a valid assignment for children because it did certain things, I made the comment that there are other ways to achieve that same goal without having children plan the felony murder of innocent civilians. You remain insisting this is a valid assignment because it does what every other lesson on history eventually does but somehow, you insist that planning a terrorist act is valid in doing what can be done otherwise.

I don't think anything is unfounded at all. I also don't consider paraphrasing the obvious stand from the position you are actively taking is an attack. If you think it is, maybe you should take another look at your position.

Right -- it's a planning exercise. Now, let's think about some of the things you need to do to successfully complete such an exercise:

So you created a list of things to do, what's to stop them from doing it? Or better yet, what to stop them from getting someone who is more capable or doing it from doing it?

* Logistical planning and analysis -- materials, equipment, timing. These skills are needed for anything in life, from managing business operations to planning a party.
* Contingency planning -- anticipating likely impediments and planning around them. Contingency planning is, again, necessary for any kind of business or personal preparedness -- for events ranging from job loss to flooding to being prepared to take advantage of an unexpected opportunity.
* Model and argue the thought process of others -- necessary to argue the political effectiveness of the attack you've selected.

And as I said before, this has been competently dealt with in ways other then planning the mass murder of innocent civilians not even remotely involved in the quip. So why is planning a terrorist attack more suitable then traditional ways of teaching the same exact things? Oh yes, please go back and review what you think is screwed up with my statements.

Note that I'm not selling this as a way to learn history; I'm selling it as a way to learn planning. I'm not saying that it's the best possible exercise to be used for this purpose, but I am saying that making a huge controversy over its selection does more harm than good by teaching children that some subjects are immoral to target for analysis.

And I'm saying that you are full of crap. This teaches nothing that cannot be learned in another way without having to resort to the planning of a terrorist attack. It doesn't matter if there are somewhat legitimate goals to it, what matters is that it's inappropriate for the target audience and there is better ways to achieve the same goal. I have never argued that planning the mass killing of innocent civilians in order to forces political opinions with violence instead of speech and idea was not a good way to develop planning skills, I claimed that there were better ways that didn't involve felony acts.

Are we a member of the ban-violent-media bandwagon too? If you think high school kids can't distinguish between reality and hypothetical or fantasy situations, we'd better not be letting them watch violent movies either.

What the hell does violent media have to do with this? Vioolent media is others being presented not you doing as this assignment is. There is a distinct difference here and you know it.

If you decide to make a concerted effort towards getting a nation of genius-level lockmakers, you're going to end up enabling a thief or two over the course of the process as a matter of course. On the other hand, that thief's much-more-numerous opposition will be si

Re:I'm tired of this...

[cduffy]

Well, if there was an imaginary button that could do that, it would be a zero sum gain. You see, for each smarter criminal there will be smarter cops and we all know that criminals succeed only because cops are stupid.

Zero sum gain?! Only if the only people who exist in the world are cops and criminals. Some of us in a world that's big enough, and interesting enough, and safe enough that we can care a lot more about science, and engineering, and art, and industry, and all the other things in the world that aren't crime.

Getting back towards the topic, though, thinking about security can be fun -- it's a game of edge cases just like law or programming or chess, and making it a taboo subject for any law-abiding person to think about makes the world not only less safe but also intellectually poorer. It's the same mindset that took away the chemistry sets that gave us a generation of chemists, the same mindset that would hamstring today's inventors to prevent them from building a device that might possibly be used for (horror!) copyright infringement.

So why is planning a terrorist attack more suitable then traditional ways of teaching the same exact things?

I didn't say it's more suitable than "traditional ways" of teaching logistical skills. I said that banning that kind of exercise is actively harmful, in excess of the harm done by allowing it. Quietly suggest to the teacher that she develop a more tasteful lesson plan next year, perhaps -- perhaps a series of essays analyzing Corey Doctorow's Little Brother, if she wants to keep with the edgy public safety theme (presuming that they're an honors-level class and parental consent is forthcoming) -- but making a public lesson to the children that they aren't considered able to handle hypothetical exercises and need to make a habit of disengaging their brains and going immediately into flag-waving mode whenever the T word is mentioned lest they be considered un-Australian... that's a far worse lesson than the one it replaces.

Having a school require kids to plan how to kill people and use violence instead of speech or ideas to change political opinion does teach kids how to kill people, it does teach them how to commit various felonies.

Only to the extent that GTA4 teaches them the skills they need (much less confers the intent) to hijack cars, or to the extent that an encyclopedia article on nuclear weapons will create students who build them in their basements. The claim that hypothetical exercises -- particularly ones which emphasize the repugnance of the act[1] -- will somehow produce real-life criminals is fear-mongering bullshit and nothing more.

And with that, I'm done; the ad-hominems have gotten to be quite enough.

[1] - an assignment to plan an event which will kill as many "innocent" people as possible most certainly meets this criteria. Terrorists don't call their targets innocent.

Re:I'm tired of this...

[sumdumass]

Zero sum gain?! Only if the only people who exist in the world are cops and criminals. Some of us in a world that's big enough, and interesting enough, and safe enough that we can care a lot more about science, and engineering, and art, and industry, and all the other things in the world that aren't crime.

I'm not sure I understand what you are getting at here. If you apply the same increase in metrics towards an attack and defense, you will have the same outcome. Criminals are the attack, cops are the defense, giving them both a 10 point increase means they are still the same in battle. That is what the point of the button was isn't it? Not using it because it would make criminals more smart? Well, it would make the cops more smart too and it would be a zero sum gain.

Getting back towards the topic, though, thinking about security can be fun -- it's a game of edge cases just like law or programming or chess, and making it a taboo subject for any law-abiding person to think about makes the world not only less safe but also intellectually poorer. It's the same mindset that took away the chemistry sets that gave us a generation of chemists, the same mindset that would hamstring today's inventors to prevent them from building a device that might possibly be used for (horror!) copyright infringement.

No one is making it taboo for any law abiding person. The taboo is about forcing children to do it as part of their grades in a state sponsored institution of education. This is not to mention that the act of conspiring to commit a terrorist attack is a felony already in most jurisdictions (regardless of being a school assignment or not), but they are being instructed to plan several other felonies (acquiring chemical or biological WMDs, planing the murder of innocent civilians, using violence against the government and society) in order to do something that in a democracy, speech and the exchange of ideas have traditionally been more effective.

didn't say it's more suitable than "traditional ways" of teaching logistical skills. I said that banning that kind of exercise is actively harmful, in excess of the harm done by allowing it. Quietly suggest to the teacher that she develop a more tasteful lesson plan next year, perhaps -- perhaps a series of essays analyzing Corey Doctorow's Little Brother, if she wants to keep with the edgy public safety theme (presuming that they're an honors-level class and parental consent is forthcoming) -- but making a public lesson to the children that they aren't considered able to handle hypothetical exercises and need to make a habit of disengaging their brains and going immediately into flag-waving mode whenever the T word is mentioned lest they be considered un-Australian... that's a far worse lesson than the one it replaces.

I'm sorry, I simply cannot conceive of any benefit that committing felonies or the planning of felonies as part of a grade would serve that isn't better served by traditional teaching techniques- even the ones you mentioned. And no, this isn't flag waiving rhetoric, it's about common sense. If the kids came together on their own and thought this through, it would be different, if they were studying someone else' attempts whether failed or successful, it would be different, but this is instructing the children in avenue they are forced to attend by law as well as social-economical pressures to attack the very same government that provides it's own charter.

Only to the extent that GTA4 teaches them the skills they need (much less confers the intent) to hijack cars, or to the extent that an encyclopedia article on nuclear weapons will create students who build them in their basements. The claim that hypothetical exercises -- particularly ones which emphasize the repugnance of the act[1] -- will somehow produce real-life criminals is fear-mongering bullshit and nothing more.

Re:I'm tired of this...

[cduffy]

Have you ever heard of reading for details? The "innocent" descriptor explicitly mapped back to a defense of the argument that the assignment explicitly represented the hypothetical act as repugnant. The "zero sum gain" discussion was arguing that it's only "zero sum game" if you think only in terms of crime rate, and that there's more to the world from that. And while you keep insisting that I'm somehow claiming that this exercise offers benefits over "traditional teaching techniques", I have stated no such claim and do not rest my position on that premise.

And, frankly, I've got more to do with my life than shouting back and forth with someone on the Internet -- debate is fun when both sides actually listen to what the other is saying, but that's clearly not happening here. Ta ta for now; may we meet on better terms in the future.

Re:I'm tired of this...

[sumdumass]

Have you ever heard of reading for details?

Please explain this process to me. Is it where you start to lose an argument then attempt to skirt around the issues by changing the rules of engagement and taking crap out of context?

The "innocent" descriptor explicitly mapped back to a defense of the argument that the assignment explicitly represented the hypothetical act as repugnant.

And you point is what? I simply stated that it doesn't matter what the terrorist think of their targets.

The "zero sum gain" discussion was arguing that it's only "zero sum game" if you think only in terms of crime rate, and that there's more to the world from that.

But there isn't more to the context of the point in which you originally made. You said "Let's say you were given a button that would make everyone within 2000 miles of you 5 IQ points smarter. If you would ignore that button because it would make better criminals" I said better criminals wouldn't matter because it would be a zero sum gain.

Actually, I said "Well, if there was an imaginary button that could do that, it would be a zero sum gain. You see, for each smarter criminal there will be smarter cops and we all know that criminals succeed only because cops are stupid." I'm not sure why you are attempting to inject other crap when the fear of smarter criminals would be negated by the smarter cops and all would be the same on it. But instead of you concentrating on the part of the comment about making people smarter being different then training children to commit felonies, you want to focus on one thing out of context for some reason. Perhaps it's because you know you have lost.

And while you keep insisting that I'm somehow claiming that this exercise offers benefits over "traditional teaching techniques", I have stated no such claim and do not rest my position on that premise.

Then please tell me why you keep insisting that an assignment that requires children to break the law by plotting the murders of groups of people in order to influence the political whims of the government is somehow legitimate when traditional teaching techniques does not require breaking laws or plotting to do so? I mean how can you claim that it is valid and should be kept in practice when traditional teaching techniques achieve the same goals without teaching children to be terrorists and run afoul of the law?

And, frankly, I've got more to do with my life than shouting back and forth with someone on the Internet -- debate is fun when both sides actually listen to what the other is saying, but that's clearly not happening here. Ta ta for now; may we meet on better terms in the future.

Well, feel free to bail out on this. Your right, it's clearly not happening here. However, I strongly suspect is isn't on my side.

Re:I'm tired of this...

[cduffy]

I mean how can you claim that it is valid and should be kept in practice when traditional teaching techniques achieve the same goals without teaching children to be terrorists and run afoul of the law?

Not "should be kept in practice". Rather, "should be quietly modified rather than shouted down, as the shouting-down process itself does more harm than good". Think of it as a correlary to the way an adult's shocked reaction to a bit of bare breast in public can make a far deeper impression on a child who happens to be present than the initial stimulus; the point I'm making is that the act of publicly sanctioning the teacher for posing a hypothetical exercise is more dangerous than the exercise itself. That doesn't mean that I support the exercise being replicated and reproduced in the future.

And yes, that's a modification from my original stance -- but one I've made explicit in my last few posts on the subject, if you'd bothered to read them closely. Part of the point of debate, after all, is discovering areas in which one's views are subject to refinement.

Re:I'm tired of this...

[sumdumass]

Not "should be kept in practice". Rather, "should be quietly modified rather than shouted down, as the shouting-down process itself does more harm than good". Think of it as a correlary to the way an adult's shocked reaction to a bit of bare breast in public can make a far deeper impression on a child who happens to be present than the initial stimulus; the point I'm making is that the act of publicly sanctioning the teacher for posing a hypothetical exercise is more dangerous than the exercise itself. That doesn't mean that I support the exercise being replicated and reproduced in the future.

That's a tad bit different of a stand then I gathers from out communications. I can see that position as valid but I think that some publicity needs to be made in order to stop another teacher from doing the same stupid crap.

And yes, that's a modification from my original stance -- but one I've made explicit in my last few posts on the subject, if you'd bothered to read them closely. Part of the point of debate, after all, is discovering areas in which one's views are subject to refinement.

No, you did not make it explicit. Not in the least with the previous impressions floating around. It wasn't until this post that is became clear and no amount of reading would have changed that.

Security without thought...

[Anonymous Coward]

Not thinking about vulnerabilities is the best way to address security! Thought crime nonsense.

school

[bakamorgan]

One of my HS teachers had us write a report on how we thought we would performe a school bombing/shooting if we went off the deep end. Which was right around the columbine shootings. A couple kids got pulled into th deans office since their plans were a little too detailed. haha. I think they were just trying to get a feel on how the students felt on that subject, but who knows. Why one teacher does something compared to another is like comparing apples to oranges.

What's wrong with that?

[Cosgrach]

Personally, I think that there is nothing wrong with this sort of assignment. In order to anticipate just such attacks, you must think like a terrorist. It may actually increase the safety of the people by getting them to raise their situational awareness. Nothing wrong with that. However, our wonderful government really dislikes the idea of people actually thinking for themselves, especially in this area. Just what do you think would happen if everyone suddenly realized that all the 'security' at the airport does not mean a damn and if everyone also realized that their civil rights have been stripped away and agencies like TSA and DHS really don't seem to have much in the way of limits... The best security on an airliner are the passengers - the likelyhood of another 9-11 type attack is less likely than finding a snowball in hell. Unless they figure out a way to gass all the passengers before making their move. Oh shit! I must be a terrorist!!! I'm fucked now.

Re:What's wrong with that?

[vux984]

EXACTLY!

The biggest epiphany one would get from this sort of exercise is just how pointless the security theatre is.

As soon as you run through an exercise like this, its impossible to reconcile it with there being a need for millimetre wave radar at airports... you can kill just as many people by detonating in the backed up line waiting to go past the damn machine as you can getting on a plane.

Or go to any of 1000 other venues where people gather... from a county fair to the line up to see a shopping mall Santa.

Re:What's wrong with that?

[Anonymous Coward]

An airplane can have hundreds of people on it. Suicide bombers with man portable bombs can take out tens of people, if lucky. Killing masses of people with people aware of suicide bombers can be pretty tough.

Re:What's wrong with that?

[pehrs]

An airplane can have hundreds of people on it. Suicide bombers with man portable bombs can take out tens of people, if lucky. Killing masses of people with people aware of suicide bombers can be pretty tough.

Yes and no. Sure, you can kill more people with the same amount of explosives if you bring down an airplane, but you forget that the attackers can change their tactics if they don't need to go through security, and large bags are common in an airport. Detonating two 50kg bags of explosives in a crowded airport can easily bring the death-toll into hundreds.

Terrorists are adaptive. Don't expect them to be stupid and play the game the way you want them to.

Re:What's wrong with that?

[GameboyRMH]

But taking down a plane is much scarier and leads to more airport security theater, worsening the lives of the people in the target country and serving as an enduring reminder of your attack. Here's how to do it:

Get fat and then store plenty of C4 between your fat rolls so the millimeter wave scanner can't see them. After all very few airports have sniffer machines, and the guy at the scanner will want to move your flabby ass on as quickly as possible. Then take an aluminum 2.5 hard disk enclosure (or other small consumer product with enough metal to hide something inside of it) and put your detonator equipment in there (you could even hook up a microSD and small electric motor inside so that it works, feels and sounds just like a real external HDD). Then as soon as possible after takeoff (so that the plane will crash on land and near a city for maximum terror) squeeze your fat ass into the bathroom and assemble the bomb (use a bluetooth detonator so you can set it off from your phone, without looking suspicious). Return to your seat (maybe near the cockpit to maximize the chance of knocking out flight controls) hiding the bomb parts in your fat rolls and let 'er rip.

Re:What's wrong with that?

[vux984]

But taking down a plane is much scarier

Its really not scarier at all. People are already nervous about air travel... planes crash all the time. From birds to weather to bombs to faulty landing gear... terrorists are just one more in the list, and really terrorists aren't all that common.

You want to scare people, hit places they think are safe, that they go to daily.

and leads to more airport security theater, worsening the lives of the people in the target country and serving as an enduring reminder of your attack.

Our lives are only worsened because too many of US are idiots. We should have secured the pilot's cabin to prevent planes being used as weapons in the future. And then just gone on with our lives.

The daily show actually made a really good point on this line of reasoning last night.

To paraphrase:

If we build the mosque the terrorists will celebrate and be emboldened leading to greater risk to the US. If we don't build the mosque the terrorists will be outraged and further embittered leading to greater risk to the US. If we endlessly discuss and debate building the mosque the terrorists will be celebrate the divisiveness its causing. No matter what we do or don't do the terrorists 'win'. Maybe we should stop concerning ourselves with what 'the terrorists will think'.

Didn't know

[gmuslera]

... in Australia there is a Murphy's Law Doctorate?

Alex, I'll take hypocrisy for $1000

[Anonymous Coward]

Terrorist attacks being acted out on TVs and movie screens for entertainment purposes: perfectly acceptable

High school students thinking rationally about hypothetical terrorist attacks for educational purposes: Offensive and dangerous?

There's a Sun Tzu quote for that

[RichPowers]

"So it is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you can win a hundred battles without a single loss.
If you only know yourself, but not your opponent, you may win or may lose.
If you know neither yourself nor your enemy, you will always endanger yourself."

-Sun Tzu, The Art of War

I propose we ban the discussion and analysis of hypothetical terrorist attacks, military invasions, and network breaches because they're insensitive to victims of terrorism, veterans, and poor blokes like me who've had their medical records compromised.

Well, duh

[gman003]

First, you grab the BFG. Then, make a run for the enemy flag. Circle-strafe and rocket-jump when you need the elevation. It's that simple. You could probably gib the entire Pacific that way.

I mean, seriously, it's so obvious!

Filter

[mavasplode]

See this is exactly the kind of thing we need to protect our children from with the internet filter.

Re:Filter

[deniable]

What, Conroy's claiming it stops bombs now? At least Gillard's muzzle order includes him so we'll have some peace this week.

Re:Filter

[mjwx]

What, Conroy's claiming it stops bombs now? At least Gillard's muzzle order includes him so we'll have some peace this week.

It's the lack of muzzle on Tony Abbott that's getting to me. Here's one thing you can do for Australia Tony, Shut The Fuck Up for a week or two.

Re:Filter

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the lack of muzzle on Tony Abbott that's getting to me. Here's one thing you can do for Australia Tony, Shut The Fuck Up for a week or two.

He'd die of constipation, mate, we need to let them unload the excrements his mind produces - of course, this would be a sign of compassion for those less fortunate, sort-of a "Give him a fair go" (except that the guy doesn't seem to take the chance and... you know?...just go and leave us).

This is creepy

[mysidia]

It seems to fly in the face of civility and is kind of creepy, to ask students to "plan" a criminal act. While this can definitely have educational value. It is outside of societal norms, and is of a nature that some people would criticize it.

Professional educators should respect that and not attempt to conduct this kind of activity with children, at least not without specific prior parental consent.

Unless of course this is a university, in which case, there should be no problem with this activity, as long as the educator is clear they aren't condoning executing a plan, and their overall effect is not to condone terrorism.

It is also possibly dangerous, in that, some people have bad intentions and they might be facilitated, or later claim this lesson convinced them to go ahead. The activity might be regarded as less harmful if the lesson included not only "plan a terrorist attack", But also "make a plan that could be used by law enforcement to thwart or prevent terrorist attacks of that type"

Re:This is creepy

[sjames]

Some friends and I planned an attach on N.Y. City when we were about that age. Naturally it was just a thought exercise, none of us actually had anything against NYC.

Re:This is creepy

[mysidia]

Yes... but noone forced you to do this, did you?

This was a mandatory assignment. And some of the students had been effected by terrorism.

According to the article, one of the students had lost her mother in the Bali bombings.

The teacher could probably have devised an assignment that would have accomplished the same objectives without showing so much disrespect / insensitivity to the feelings of her own students.

Re:This is creepy

[sjames]

Actually, TFA said one of the student's mother had lost a relative.

Since it didn't say the student lost a relative, I'm guessing HE didn't know them well.

Either way, if it was that difficult, one student could certainly have been excused.

I was once required (for a physics test) to compute a course correction and a time to drop a paraquat bomb on a commune (referred to in the test as a happy hippie haven) :-)

Maybe the teacher just needed some time off...

[Just_Say_Duhhh]

I doubt there's a teacher on the planet who thinks they can get away with something like this, so I'm guessing this teacher just needed some time away

While I don't think assignments like this should be taboo, I do worry that if a student aces the assignment, he'd either be under constant surveillance, or he'd get enough attention that the real terrorists in the school might avail themselves of his services.

Of course, these students might want to enlist the help of The guy with the laser cutter. It might not get the most kills, but it sure would make a statement!

Promote this teacher!

[Lord Kano]

This is the kind of thing that teachers should be teaching. The world can be an ugly place. It's important to teach high school students what kind of things they'll experience in the real world.

Unfortunately, terrorism is the kind of thing that these young people might experience. Maybe if New York's public schools had done an exercise like this, fewer people would have died on 9-11.

"Class. If you're on 61st floor of a skyscraper and it and the building next to it are struck by passenger jets, do you 1) Stay at your desk and keep working. 2) Get out of the building and go home for the day."

I'm giving a lighthearted take on this, but I'm being completely serious. Thank God for teachers like this one.

LK

Re:Promote this teacher!

[nickdwaters]

I agree. Teaching children to subvert the dominant paradigm! \m/

Re:Promote this teacher!

[shermo]

Really? Get some perspective. About 3000 americans were killed by terrorists in the past ten years. In that same period about 300,000 died from suicide, while about 350,000 died on the roads.

If you dedicate 2 hours to 'terrorism danger' in a school year, you should dedicate 3 months to suicide and traffic safety.

I'm not in anyway trying to belittle the emotional impact of 9-11, but in terms of "thing[s] that these young people might experience" you'd be better off putting your efforts elsewhere.

Re:Promote this teacher!

[Lord Kano]

~3000 Americans died in the 9-11 attacks. How many Iraqis and Afghans died in the wars that were launched in a misguided response to 9-11?

Clearly the odds of a 9-11 style terrorist attack are infinitesimal compared to the odds of getting into a traffic accident or even being the victim of a robbery.

That's not my point. I'm saying that it's important to get people thinking about how dangerous the world can be. A brainstorming session like this where someone thought up the idea of taking boxcutters on airplane could very well have saved hundreds of thousands of lives.

LK

Re:Promote this teacher!

[justinlee37]

I think the parent had a good point that he expressed poorly.

Basically, while most of us will never experience a terrorist attack, we may experience a home invasion, carjacking, bank robbery, kidnapping, or any other number of hostile actions that are perpetrated against innocents all around the world every day.

Being able to ask yourself, "how would an assailant plan a crime against me?" is a useful skill as it will naturally lead one to think of ways that they could defend themselves against the crime.

Furthermore, this sort of project may inspire some students to pursue a career in counter-terrorism. Inspiring children is one of the primary goals of education. Most of us won't go on to be doctors or engineers either, but that doesn't mean we should start cutting our biology and physics programs.

Re:Promote this teacher!

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the kind of thing that teachers should be teaching. The world can be an ugly place. It's important to teach high school students what kind of things they'll experience in the real world.

No, not yet promoted, the teacher should learn a bit more: she didn't teach defense, but only attack. The better way would be to divide the class in two, some to act as terrorist, the others to act as defense against. Better than, pick the "terrorist" group so that the defense wouldn't know the attackers identity.

Re:Promote this teacher!

[Anonymous Coward]

About 3000 americans were killed by terrorists in the past ten years

About 3000 were killed on 9/11, but that is not the total number of americans killed by terrorists in the last decade, its less than half.

Re:Promote this teacher!

[stdarg]

I was thinking along the same lines about Afghanistan. What do you think of the idea of arming the entire population? Most polls show high opposition to the Taliban, but the Taliban have bombs, RPGs, AK-47s, etc. The typical Afghan farmer might have an old rifle. The Afghan army doesn't really get the concept of fighting for others, so why don't we try arming everyone and letting them fight for themselves?

Re:Promote this teacher!

[westlake]

Really? Get some perspective. About 3000 americans were killed by terrorists in the past ten years. In that same period about 300,000 died from suicide, while about 350,000 died on the roads.

350,000 traffic deaths.

The full weight of which is carried by 300 million people spread across an entire continent.

No single incident is likely to involve more than one or two deaths or have any long term economic or political consequences. Death on a retail scale is something we've known how to deal with for thousands of years.

The population of the WTC complex at mid-day was something like 100-150 thousand.

16 acres of Manhattan Island. Ten million square feet of office space in the twin towers alone.

This being Manhattan, the tenants included some very important names in global trade and finance. There are very few cities strong enough to recover from an attact on such a scale. The only mistake the terrorists made was one of timing.

Re:Promote this teacher!

[Anonymous Coward]

somehow I think getting the class imagining ways to suicide wouldn't be much useful.

Re:Promote this teacher!

[Lord Kano]

That is a fair point. My response would be that maybe the teacher didn't get the chance because of the uproar. Can you really teach defense without first teaching attack?

After you get all of the students' ideas for attacks, you start brainstorming defenses.

LK

may we make a suggestion

[Anonymous Coward]

Today's educators need leading edge terrorism education tools.
Electronic Arts is proud to present Medal of Honor for the PC, 360 ,and PS3.
An intense, immersive Taliban simulation, which your students plot the overthrow of decadent western infidels.
Available to educators at bulk rate pricing, and just in time for the start of school and the end of Ramadan.

Reminds me of "Kill the President" teacher

[Anonymous Coward]

linky

Teacher gave students an assignment to compose an email with the words "kill the president". Huge fuss about that as well.

Off-topic, but he suddenly died a year later...

Zombie Apocolypse

[hoggoth]

The teacher should have de-politicized it and asked the students to make plans for surviving an upcoming zombie apocalypse. As a side benefit many geeks would already have their plans worked out.

Re:Zombie Apocolypse

[roman_mir]

double tap

(oh, and don't kill Bill Murray, he's sad enough.)

Re:Zombie Apocolypse

[jbrohan]

The most important thing about terrorism and car-jacking and home invasions is WHY. If we keep our heads in the sand about why people fly planes into big buildings then we will make little progress to persuade them not to, or even stop them once they start to plan it. John

Re:Zombie Apocolypse

[Anonymous Coward]

WHY? What if you don't like the answer to that question? Would you entertain the criminal's or terrorist's reasoning even if it might be complete nonsense? Nature hasn't produced a better machine for producing justifications and post-rationalizations than the human, after all.

I am aware of the need to understand one's enemy, but there are some differences (or root causes if you prefer) that are simply too expensive to address due to the immense cost in time, money, freedom, and life, depending on the solution chosen.

Likely, people have been asking why anyone does anything atrocious for as long as we've ever been in conflict, and nowadays none of us can agree on the answer why. God only knows, and since there is no god, the questions will forever have answers manifold.

In the mean time until we have the answers to everything, I will prefer to have carjackers and home invaders locked up, because it benefits me to have them so.

Re:Zombie Apocolypse

[Sarius64]

I like the merit of this proposal. Developing detailed defense plans against an overwhelming zombie force would require just as much development as any terrorist plan. Kind words didn't cleanse Germany of Nazi party members. Who gives a crap what they thought, either? The same people griping about this teacher possess the same sentiment that throws (any of) us into a war and then refuses to let (any of) us win. At least the teacher can reflect on the reality of tactics vice some bullshit about love solving every problem. You wouldn't see this in American as our government is full of too many wimps that believe diplomacy wins hearts and minds, and tiddly winks I suppose.

Re:Zombie Apocolypse

[16K Ram Pack]

In some cases this is valuable. Why do over 1/3rd of home burglaries take place in the UK? To fund heroin addictions. Why do they need so much money? Because heroin is illegal which pushes the price up. On the other hand, you can get something like the Oklahoma bombings where you can do almost nothing to prevent someone wanting to do it, you just have to accept that it's going to happen.

How's This?

[The Wild Norseman]

My idea is to broadcast an announcement that a fourth Crocodile Dundee movie will be filmed and the resulting furor and rioting should pretty much take out all of Sydney.

Now, I understand that this announcement probably wouldn't match the huge bomb that was Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles, but a threat of this magnitude would almost certainly be considered a crime against humanity, so that's a bonus.

Re:How's This?

[Just_Say_Duhhh]

Wait...are you saying there was a third Crocodile Dundee movie? I must've missed that while I was recuperating from #2.

Re:How's This?

[The Wild Norseman]

Yeah, I kid you not. I had to look it up just to be certain myself.

Government Idiots

[waltmarkers]

I couldn't disagree more vigorously with Ms. O'Neill, it's exactly what I expect of a professional educator. Mature thought is supposed to make us challenge our current assumptions, not change them, but at least think about them.

This teacher is making people think. And on a completely different note, this is standard practice in a security audit. Think like the bad guy.

Move along, the only story here is an administrator acting stupidly and hindering someone trying to practice their profession well.

Re:Government Idiots

[stdarg]

Really, so you would be totally fine with a teacher in America who made assignments related to brainstorming about how to achieve negative social outcomes like killing Obama, inciting racism and hate crimes against Muslims, etc?

"Class, what's the best way to kill a black person to make other black people scared?"

"Class, if you owned a bank, what tactics would you use to deny black people loans while evading government regulations about discrimination?"

I mean come on. Schools are not parents. If you want to make those decisions for your own child, okay you have the freedom to be weird on your own, but schools need to take a moral and social middle ground that is acceptable to the mainstream.

Ender's Game

[Israfels]

Sometimes you have to play as the enemy. Otherwise it's just a bunch of people in an empty arena and nothing to do.

This is probably the reason that people start to think that the only way to solve ALL problems is to sit around a campfire and sing songs and share out feelings.

I really hope that this was a 2 part project. Where you have to also come up with a cost effective way at avoiding such attacks.

Re:Ender's Game

[im_thatoneguy]

I really hope that this was a 2 part project. Where you have to also come up with a cost effective way at avoiding such attacks.

The headline would have read:
"Teacher Suspended after entire class fails assignment."

This isn't too bad.

[Niris]

Orientation for a job I had as a security guard required this as an exercise during our two week training. It's an interesting exercise, and really gets you thinking.

Re:This isn't too bad.

[Anonymous Coward]

Australia is an interesting 'target' too. While I assume that it was selected on distance from the US alone, there are some interesting factors:

1. Australia is vast. If you're invading via land, your supply lines can be disrupted very easily by very small guerilla style skirmishes.
2. Government is based in one city, but for the vast majority of the time, politicians are dispersed all over.
3. There are no significant structures in AU that would merit concentration for an attack (Sydney Harbour Bridge, etc, while maybe impressive, won't get casualties)
4. No shared utility services, like heating, cooling, etc

I think the best, and most acheivable vector would be via the water supply...

Sun Tzu

[PinkyGigglebrain]

Over 2000 years ago said (in the translation on Wikiquote);

"It is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles;
if you do not know your enemies but do know yourself, you will win one and lose one;
if you do not know your enemies nor yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle."

If you have not read it, "The Art of War" by Sun Tzu. His words are as applicable today as they were when they were written and are valid in all levels of conflict.

Another great thing about Sun Tzu, he also said "To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.". Pity more of today's National leaders don't take that more to heart.

This thinking is needed to understand security

[gweihir]

It is therefore something that should be taught to every voter. This would prevent countless instances of fear-mongering, ineffective but costly security measures with negative impact on freedom, etc.

Obviously, understanding the enemy and what it can do is not something that is desirable from a political point of view. It would be far too easy to spot incompetence and hidden agendas (such as less freedom and giving a lot of money to the industry for very little in return) with this understanding.

On the other side, teaching this type of thinking does not make us less secure. Any good engineer and most good scientists can design, plan and execute devastating attacks. Practically none do, since these people also understand that terrorism is not an effective way to reach a goal and typically only serves the power-fantasies of the terrorists. This in turn means that the only effective protection from terrorism is not to make it hard to do (as it is not and cannot really be made so), but to make people understand its characteristics. Even less people would then consider terrorism as a way to "fight". The main problem is that understanding that, it becomes quite obvious that politics is either incompetent in this regard or has been lying shamelessly to us for about a decade now.

Site note: I also think that the political outrage at terrorism has nothing to do with civilian casualties and anything to do with politics regarding terrorism as competition.

Just to make this perfectly clear, I regard terrorism as ineffective, amoral and completely unacceptable. It is just that the other side (politics) has started to not look much better over the last few years.

Re:This thinking is needed to understand security

[luther349]

terrorism is effective look at your history. terrorism has always been used when a people or country are oppressed to the point of terrorism that leads to a uprising or civil war. in the case of the middle east its due to 2 religions fighting out pretty much sense the beginning of religion. they have fought so long they both no longer have the resources to have any kind of official war. and the usa getting involved is just a wast of are time and resources. we will never stop there fighting we cant win. all we can do is keep them away from us.well we can win but nobody is willing to go to those extremes of just wiping the entire area off the map.

Re:This thinking is needed to understand security

[khallow]

in the case of the middle east its due to 2 religions fighting out pretty much sense the beginning of religion. they have fought so long they both no longer have the resources to have any kind of official war.

I honestly have no idea what you are talking about here. The only real long term fighting among religions in the Middle East has been between European Christianity and Islam and perhaps some Sunni/'Shi'ite conflict. Neither strikes me as being able to fill the role described above. Further, it doesn't usually take that long to recover from most wars well enough to start another (a key counterexample is that Afghanistan has yet to recover from the Mongolian invasion of the 13th Century).

Re:This thinking is needed to understand security

[gweihir]

Terrorism is effective for one thing: Power-grab, i.e. causing a revolution. And that does only sometimes work and the new system is almost always a totalitarian one.

This gives the one true motivation of terrorists: They do not care for the people, they just want to be the ones in power instead of the ones that are now in power. The new system has to be a totalitarian one, otherwise they would give up the power they fought so hard for. Smart people and people educated in how terrorism works, do realize this and do realize that democracy offers ways for change that are much better and have a change to actually work (unless you _want_ a totalitarian regime...).

So I stand by this: Teach people (and best students) how terrorism works. Also teach them what the main problems with terrorism are. It is rather blatantly obvious that terrorists do not care about or respect individuals, and if that was the point the teacher wanted to make (my a circular route that allows the students to see that for themselves rather than being told) I can only applaud her good sense and skill.

As I said in on another site...

[flimflammer]

I personally think the assignment was a good one but I probably would have handled it differently. I would have split the class up into two teams, then I would have had one side be the terrorist and the other side be the counter terrorist, who tries to defuse the situation. It gives the "high-moral" students the ability to not feel like they're evil for working on the assignment.

Re:As I said in on another site...

[GameboyRMH]

The only problem is that it might encourage the children to run with knives.

Let me be the first to say

[bytesex]

Teach the controversy !

Ya, We should avoid the subject totally

[Anonymous Coward]

The teacher should have used a different title like "explore various weapons of mass destruction and their usage" and slip in on how terrorism can be a form of wmds then get them to plan an attack. Obviously the teacher is an amateur compared to GWB.

This subject have to be taught but with better PR. Kudos to the teacher for even attempting.

I would like my son to do this assignment

[thewb005]

This sounded like an amazing assignment. When you choose a side in a debate for class, you are asked to think of every tactic the opposite side will try to use against you. I don't see how an assignment like this would be considered overly insensitive unless it was assigned out of the blue. If it was suggested in the class syllabus and had good justification as a learning experience, then I don't see why it should fly. Wouldn't it be one hell of a learning experience to have your student experience 24 hours in jail to learn about risk and consequence? Wouldn't it be just as valuable to write a report thinking like a terrorist? I think radical assignments like this impacts a student's learning more then any other ho-hum history report would. Wake up parents and look at the world. People spend their lives (and giving them freely) planning to commit terrorist acts. By sheltering our children from reality, they may end up believing everything they see on TV and not KNOW the real world.

To the people that condemn this

[Anonymous Coward]

I have reasons to be anonymous.

Anyone who thinks that this in any way encourages the actual act of terrorism and killing innocent people, is the same kind of people that can't make proper and rational inferences, and why this nation can not advance. In what way did the teacher imply real-life terrorism should be encouraged ? In what way was the teacher trying to insult all the unfortunate victims ? Is penetration testing morally unacceptable now ? Without looking at a problem from a different perspective you can never grasp the full picture. Glad that the people in the past weren't as dumb in this regard and didn't make armors WITHOUT looking at how newer weapons might break them.
In fact Australia has always seemed to make the most stupid decisions based on emotions alone. It's where everyone craves popular support, faking a moral panic over an imaginary threat seems to be the name of the game (I can't even stress this point enough, the media is basically enamored with these stories), and everyone cares about the children, right ? This is what the worship of political correctness and fake virtues in a world of popular rule, together with decades of craptastic speculative fiction where emotions trump reason has led us to. Let me be frank, this only offends you if and only if you refuse to use your brain to determine the purpose of this exercise.

But let me guess, after reading this, some schmucks will invariably still think I'm somehow an advocate of indiscriminate violence, rape, genocide, and terrorism. After all how dare I condemn the offended victims right ?

It all hinges on ...

[CannonballHead]

How the instructions were prevented. Did they know they were doing this because they should be able to think this way in order to prevent it?

Thinking "like the enemy" is nothing new at all. But most people, when thinking "like the enemy," know they are doing that. As long as what was right (prevention) and wrong (the attack) is clear, and as long as they are clear WHY they should pretend to plan this way (to think like the enemy), fine. If that was not clear, then ... there's a really unclear picture being presented...

Re:It all hinges on ...

[CannonballHead]

Doh. That's presented.

Or ...

[justinlee37]

Maybe the student who aces the assignment would be a prime candidate for recruitment into his or her country's counter-terrorism agency.

Part of preparing to defend against an attack involves considering how the attackers might plan their operation ...

Making a fuss for nothing

[2Bits]

In this society, it is not possible to learn something, or teach something, without other people making a fuss over it. In the previous few years, I was interviewing candidates for quite a few security engineer positions. We want to hire someone junior who has the potential, and we would train him/her to do the work.

So we asked the following question during the interview: We know that A is sending a very important email to B. Your job is to get your hand on that email, no matter what. Show me the different ways of getting that email.

We were trying to find out if the candidate could come up with a plan to solve the problem. If he/she could come up with an attack matrix, it would be even better. But our goal is to find out if the candidate could consider the problem from all angles.

The funny thing about this experience was that, one of the candidate who didn't get hired, reported the experience to the Public Safety Department (i.e. Police in China), saying that we are recruiting crackers, probably for some unspeakable purposes. We got a few visits (you know whom!), and I was to be specifically "interrogated".

Garden of Eden

[Anonymous Coward]

Because some knowledge is forbidden.

Send 500meg Eggs

[grolaw]

And poison the majority of the population with Salmonella. Now, that wasn't all that hard. Just watch and learn from US Business - the folks who have created the fast-food nation diet that kills.

What, this was supposed to be faster?

Schneier's Movie-Plot Threat Contest

[swm]

It's been done.

Schneier on Security
A blog covering security and security technology.
April 1, 2006
Announcing: Movie-Plot Threat Contest

For a while now, I have been writing about our penchant for "movie-plot threats": terrorist fears based on very specific attack scenarios. Terrorists with crop dusters, terrorists exploding baby carriages in subways, terrorists filling school buses with explosives -- these are all movie-plot threats. They're good for scaring people, but it's just silly to build national security policy around them.

But if we're going to worry about unlikely attacks, why can't they be exciting and innovative ones? If Americans are going to be scared, shouldn't they be scared of things that are really scary? "Blowing up the Super Bowl" is a movie plot to be sure, but it's not a very good movie. Let's kick this up a notch.

It is in this spirit I announce the (possibly First) Movie-Plot Threat Contest. Entrants are invited to submit the most unlikely, yet still plausible, terrorist attack scenarios they can come up with.

Your goal: cause terror. Make the American people notice. Inflict lasting damage on the U.S. economy. Change the political landscape, or the culture. The more grandiose the goal, the better.

Assume an attacker profile on the order of 9/11: 20 to 30 unskilled people, and about $500,000 with which to buy skills, equipment, etc.

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/04/announcing_movi.html
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/06/movieplot_threa_1.html

Re:Schneier's Movie-Plot Threat Contest

[Idarubicin]

You know, I was about to write a post mentioning Bruce Schneier's movie-plot contests.

One of the most important questions we ought to ask about this project is whether or not the teacher in question was actually prepared to address the implications of this sort of assignment, and particularly how this sort of thinking about painfully specific-but-scary plots distorts proper, rational security thinking. Schneier obviously gets it, but I'm not sure that the teacher here has nearly the same degree of clue. The assignment called specifically for a biological or chemical attack, despite such attacks representing a vanishingly small fraction of total terrorism attacks or deaths. Given that the project was to be evaluated based on the "students' ability to analyze information they had learned on terrorism and chemical and biological warfare and apply it to a real-life scenario", I fear that the assignment would have exactly the wrong effect on students' thinking.

The project is almost certainly a bad idea not because it 'teaches children to be terrorists' (or some similarly-worded alarmist tripe), but rather because it teaches children to unnecessarily fear terrorists. Imagining a class set of superficially-plausible worst-case scenarios involving deadly chemical and biological agents being used to "kill the MOST innocent civilians" in "an unsuspecting Australian community" then describing in detail "what effects the attack would have on a human body" seems tailor-made to promote irrational terror: visceral fear and revulsion, rather than rational thought and analysis.

My idea for a terrorist attack

[Anonymous Coward]

I would frame about four dozen teachers for paedophilia. And the reaction in the country would be so severe that public school systems would be unable to educate children. Then my plan will be realized as the new a generation grows up to be a collection of overprotected and uneducated idiots. I would basically throw their rich nation back into the 7th century in a single simple attack.

There's always a special kid.

[SlurpingGreen]

I agree with the sentiment that the assignment is good for getting student brain activity going and for learning about critical thinking.

However, I've also worked with high school students and the opposing argument is not entirely without merit. There *are* those kids who don't understand sarcasm, don't follow even the most basic logical arguments and may not understand that discussing terrorism does not imply becoming a terrorist. Slashdot posters who breezed through high school should understand that many people barely passed (hell, many people fail).

And obviously, school administrators don't want to get the angry phone call from a parent "you're teaching my kid to be a terrorist!" so they have to say they don't support it even if they could care less.

Re:There's always a special kid.

[panda]

Trouble with that is these students are then set loose on the world and allowed to vote. Maybe they should be taught to understand sarcasm and understand logic. Assignments such as this one are a great way to do that.

Of course, as one of my friends, who is a retired school teacher put it in a school board meeting, "By the time these kids get to us [high school teachers and administration] they're already fucked up." That is, by the time they get to high school, it is too late to educate them, particularly the kids who come from homes where education is not valued and the parents do not take an active role in their children's education. My wife is also a high school teacher and deals with the apathy of parents and students on a daily basis. I had contempt for public education in America when I was run through it as a child, and my contempt has only deepened as I've seen it from the outside and heard the stories of my wife's experiences.

Re:There's always a special kid.

[MozzleyOne]

There *are* those kids who don't understand sarcasm, don't follow even the most basic logical arguments and may not understand that discussing terrorism does not imply becoming a terrorist. Slashdot posters who breezed through high school should understand that many people barely passed (hell, many people fail).

So because some people don't/can't understand it, the argument has merit? I'd hope we were going for a higher level of reasoning than lowest-common denominator consensus.

Trying to understand is demonized

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems in our age, understanding of subjects classed as unsavory is demonized and hard to justify.

Western civilians seem to all pat each other on the back with their "Terrorists are all evil, end of discussion". Everybody says so, so how dare you question them! The same applies to other subjects. This keeps people unquestioning of the laws, and makes them good little civilians.

People love to think they're right. So if 99% of people are unquestioning followers of the herd, then 1% raising an unsavory question falls not only on deaf ears, but on angry ears closed to consideration of an alternative view.

Slavery was once such a subject.
Gay rights still is.
As is terrorism.

People don't blow themselves up for nothing, they really REALLY want what they have to say to be noticed by the herd.

Calvin and Hobbes ?

[ProgramErgoSum]

Get the children read Calvin and Hobbes. Then, trying breaking the reality gently to them. Example : http://all-that-is-interesting.com/post/499738698/calvin-and-hobbes-on-war/

Terrorists existed back then too...

[denzacar]

They were called resistance fighters, partisans and commandos back then.

There was recently even an American Oscar winning movie glorifying such terrorists.

Re:Terrorists existed back then too...

[IICV]

They killed Hitler though, so it was all good.

It's the future of warfare

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

"Non-state" actors using remote-controlled bombs to attack states and to get them to comply. The attack is simply against individuals (with the flimsy rationale that in a democracy "everyone" is guilty of the "crimes" of the state (such as not stoning women, or not killing gays, not giving up territory, ... whatever tickles your fancy)). The obvious advantage being that you can start up this warfare directly ... well anywhere. You could do it in New York, or even Washington.

Besides, what we're seeing now as terror is just the beginning. New technology will always favor the terrorists. Firstly because attacking is so much simpler than defending, not to mention that the area that needs to be defended by the average state is ridiculously huge. Secondly because the populations of most western states doesn't even accept the presence of cameras (obviously necessary if you want to have any hope of covering large territories without millions of police officers or soldiers), and what might be called "due process" (making nearly all pre-emptive interventions by the state illegal).

This is the future. No doubt about it.

Re:It's the future of warfare

[stdarg]

You may be right because it doesn't take too many terrorists to start a war. And I think the more it happens, the less public resistance there would be to war. But states are getting their own bonuses from technology, such as UAVs and robotics. I'm looking forward to a world where we can seal off a country that harbors terrorists and impose curfews, trade sanctions, etc, all without sending any troops anywhere. In the right environment, duties could be outsourced to non-military civilians even. If we establish a no-man's-land between Afghanistan and Pakistan, and make it legal to kill anybody entering it, why not let regular people help patrol it from the skies? Especially in the future you're talking about where terrorism has become more common.

Re:It's the future of warfare

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

for what reason would these people restrict their wars to those regions ? Especially with the "progressive" view on immigration prevalent these days. (funny how progressives evolved from 'kill all foreignors' to the exact opposite in about 40 years, yet claim that there has never been a change in their position and that their past consists of people totally alien to them that deserve to get shot on sight)

For example

Other than outlawing freedom of religion, and directly attack and destroy any ideology causing "too serious" problems, I have no clue how you could get a solution to this.

'Non-credible' threats

[dugeen]

If this had happened in the UK, the terror authorities would have seized on the chance to construct a misunderstanding. The teacher would have been falsely arrested for conspiring to commit terrorist acts, then subsequently released without charge but served with a civil ban from airports. The authorities would then claim that they have to react to all threats, even 'non-credible' ones.

Pussies

[garompeta]

I wonder what Spartans would have thought about this news. We are alarmed because of an hypothetical mind exercise for 15yrs old kids when 2500 years ago these kids would have been already married and battling in the field.
Spartan wives and mothers said their goodbyes by saying "with the shield or on the shield" which meant "come back victorious (holding the shield) or dead (on the shield)". These days we are becoming too soft and psychologically weaker. Really? We are overprotecting the kids from stress at all cost with these neurotic worrying over videogames, movies and creative teachers who break canons. Our society is full of mediocres and pussies, I am sick of it.

Re:Pussies

[boxwood]

there are plenty of countries in africa with child soldiers. So why don't you just move there? Or are you too much of a pussy to live in a country with child soldiers?

Re:Pussies

[garompeta]

That's not the point.

We did this in school

[DedTV]

We did this same exercise in school in History class. We were studying some history thing where one side used terror tactics against the other and had to come up with a method that would work in the present day. The assignment was printed in the book so there had to be quite a few classes doing this same exercise all across the country. No one threw a fit. Of course, that was the early 90s and people weren't anywhere near as uptight.

I don't remember what the conflict we were studying was, but I remember the exercise because it was thought provoking. Although frankly, I'm glad real terrorists haven't decided to use some of the ideas we came up with.

The Wave

[slonik]

It reminds me of a very insightful German movie "The Wave" (original German title "Die Welle") http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1063669/

A history teacher proposes to his students an experiment about dictatorship. See what comes out of it.

Re:The Wave

[xtracto]

Yeah but... on that movie the teacher goes very far away pushing his students.

And of course, the only thing you get from there is that if you pus a crazy lonely guy who needs psychological help, then he will can do terrible things.

That same guy (the character depicted in the movie) could have attempted on the life of a president just to impress some random actress (sounds familiar?).

school shooting?

[Anonymous Coward]

I share the views of most commenters here, that this could be seen as a reasonable exercise.

But what about this one - an assignment to plan a school shooting.

A bit more creepy, right?

Online game/simulation

[MorbidBBQ]

Pandemic 2 is an online game (google it) that allows you to create a virus (parasite, bacteria ect) to be as deadly as possible.

Not quite related, but this article made me think of it.

empathy is not sympathy

[nten]

In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him.

        * Ender Wiggin

I disagree with Ender. I think you can understand someone very well and not even like them. You may comprehend their motives without agreeing with their choices.

Re:empathy is not sympathy

[kalirion]

I grok you. Now prepare to be blinked out of existence.

Re:empathy is not sympathy

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but Ender's love is what made him the greatest commander the Earth ever saw ;)

Sounds Like Chess to Me

[Hercules Peanut]

Isn't that kind of like what they teach you in chess? Think about the opposing players moves in advance. Are they going to shut down the chess club or is it because he used the "T" word.

What if he had suggested that they plan an attack on an aggressor nation causing the most collateral damage in order to demoralize the enemy? Would that have been OK?

It's about prevention, not about weak points

[Chemisor]

Compare this to the reasoning behind gun laws. One person can kill many very quickly by using a gun. Therefore we should prohibit people from purchasing a gun. Thinking about terrorist acts can lead someone to committing a terrorist act. Therefore we should prohibit people from thinking. If you accept the premise that anything prohibited by law does not happen, these arguments make a lot of sense.

It doesn't matter

[Moraelin]

It doesn't matter. The "problem" starts not when you agree with their choices and ideology, but basically when they stop being a faceless mass of rampaging monsters.

Basically empathy is enough. It's the main problem, even. That's why everyone historically went to great extremes to dehumanize their enemies. Because as long as you feel empathy, it also feels wrong to go kill a few. We're hard-wired that way. (See, mirror neurons.) But when they become something that's hardly even human, and certainly not like us, suddenly bombing a few villages starts to sound actually ok.

You don't even have to _like_ someone for empathy to kick in. E.g., I remember all the guys wincing instinctively when I showed them a pic of some football player getting a mighty kick in the crotch. None of them knew or had any reason to like that player. Recognizing him as a human is enough to get those mirror neurons firing.

Plus, if you had the plebs actually comprehend the opponents' motives, that would in itself be a problem. Because then they'd also know that the bullshit propaganda about their motives is a lie. It's harder to motivate someone to bomb country X if they know that the motives of X are something like "they just want their land back" or "they're pissed off at our continuous heavy-handed bullying them around" than when you can sell them some bullshit like "they hate us for our freedoms".

The Pretender is back

[Drakkenmensch]

That was the premise of the dead tv series The Pretender. A genius was asked to create theoretical terrorist attack scenarios so that the government could "stop them from happening" while in fact it just carried them out exactly as he had written them out. Were the children promised their favorite candy for coming up with a plausible scenario too? Were they being held in a dank and somber underground facility where a weird professor was carrying out experiments in twins behavior?

What about....

[hesaigo999ca]

When you want to be a disaster proof architect, you think with disaster in mind, and in this case, you would consider how to build your building in case of terrorist attacks, in such a way that maybe it would not affect the buildings around it, only itself, thereby limiting damage done, as well, maybe you would also have for special buildings (FBI) kevlar reinforced mesh gyp rock, so that if a grenade went off, it would probably not even affect the walls...etc...

To think of the defensive posture to an attack, you have to know what the attack could be. Seeing as this was a school project, I should think people would be wise enough to realize that in the course, abc needed to be answered using xyz, if xyz lands you in jail, then either don't have courses on abc, or make sure the students AND teacher don't get in trouble for doing the course.

What if someone is trying to build a software that locates child p0rn, they would need to test it, it becomes a catch22, that party now becomes guilty of possessing child p0rn to test their software, so let's not create these things or do any sort of legal case, because all the lawyers would be held accountable for possession too....makes no sense this logic!
Also, I remember years ago, we would learn about things in school that today seems off limits, why was it ok back then, but not today???

That's all? I got to nuke Norfolk in college

[edremy]

Back in the late 1980s, I took a course in weapons of mass destruction. My all time favorite assignment read something like:

"You have a 1 megaton nuclear weapon and your choice of delivery systems. Destroy Norfolk, Virginia. Explain where you targeted the bomb and why. Estimate casualties and diagram the fallout patterns." Best. Assignment. Ever, even if the professor turned down my request for 4-250KT bombs instead. I just couldn't manage to wipe the city off the map with a single bomb.

Amusing fact- I ended up using the hospital where my #2 son was born many years later as my target. Central to the city and I figured the helipad would make a nice bullseye.

...So What?

[lunatic1969]

One of my college FORTRAN programming assignments was to write a program that given wind speed and direction would plot the spread of a poisonous gas cloud set off by a group of terrorists on campus. Now, this was 20+ years ago - but I doubt anyone in the class actually went on to use this knowledge to become an actual terrorist.

I better cancel my electrical engineering site...

[Bill_the_Engineer]

It's called phasebook.com (joke... if it does exist it is by coincident).

FAIL

[DarthVain]

OK I am sure the smart students came up with some great devious well thought out ideas, but I am more interested in the students who got a failing grade in the class and what they came up with...

Probably looked something like this:

Make bomb using internet recipe, my own limited understanding of basic chemistry, and whatever I can find in my kitchen.

and

Put bomb in my shoe, walk on plane.

or

Put bomb in my underpants, walk on plane.

In either case, hide personal features using an obscuring Al-Qaeda beard.

Links to Wikileaks "U.S. exporter of terrorism"

[chrb]

For those who haven't seen it yet...

Wikileaks - CIA Red Cell Memorandum on United States "exporting terrorism"

Telegraph article - CIA memo on United States as 'exporter of terrorism' published by Wikileaks

government work

[neo0983]

Correct me if I am wrong but isnt this "project" similar to what the military pays people to do all ready? Think up different attack vectors and then think up how to prevent them from happening. Has anyone read the art of war? So it is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you can win a hundred battles without a single loss.

I had a professor do somethin similar

[bsDaemon]

When I was in Uni my senior year, I had a "Sociological Problems" class. On the first day, doing introductions one of the questions we were asked was "if we were a terrorist, what would we attack in the US to try and strike fear into the most people?" The rationale was to see what we thought was most emblematic of the US and what we would be the most shocked and horrified to see attacked.

Everyone except for me said they'd attack either the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Build, or the Lincoln Memorial. Mostly the Statue of Liberty.

I said I'd launch a coordinated car bomb attack at random points around Kansas City, probably on a Thursday morning. Of course, this caused everyone to freak out. But that just proved me point -- if everyone's expecting the Statue of Liberty to get hit, then no one is going to be surprised when it happens, unless they were there when it went down.

My answer was the only one that got an emotional response out of the class, because my target was the only one that would have had people believe "if it can happen there, it can happen anywhere!"

In Australia, it'd be the difference between the Sydney Opera House and some podunk burg in Tasmania.

If you don't really understand terrorists, how can you hope to defeat them, either militarily or rendering their tactics ineffective through rising above? You can't. Good for this teacher, of course most of the kids probably came up with the same, lame-ass plans that never would have actually terrorized anyone, just like my classmates did.

The experiment!

[Drakeness]

This actually makes me think of this experiment many years ago. In the USA I think, where a teacher makes their students realize that even after the WWII (and all the Nazi issue), the possibility of an autocracy still existed. There is a recent movie based on that experiment, I think from 2008, german: Die Welle (The Wave), very good actually. Maybe this gives the movie's screenplay writers a new idea =O.

Actually, this COULD be useful

[WindBourne]

The Aussi' DHS equivelence most likely has not thought about all the possibilities. Yet, AQ has thought through loads of them. I think that getting kids to think about IS useful. BUT, you also have to combine it with critical thought and some morals. The problem today is that teachers and parents no longer wish to instill morals.

We used to play "TAG"

[karlandtanya]

Back when the USSR was the bugaboo, we were told the enemy was a cloak & dagger type. So, we played TAG.

Now, we're told the enemy is a mad bomber. We should be playing TTG.

Maybe you have 1 team of "defenders" (team D) vs. "attackers" (team A). Members of team D are chosen from the student body by popular vote or faculty appointment.

Team A can be anyone from the student body, (including members of team D), students, faculty, or students from other schools. There is no process for joining team A, and members of team A do not need to say that they are on the team.

Victory requirements for team A involve placing gravel-filled bright red containers at in a public place.
The gravel is a clearly harmless simulated bomb, as the squirt guns used in TAG. Revealing the red surface of the container means the bomb has been set off and the points are awarded.

More gravel or more public or more sensitive places score more points.

Bonus points for getting anyone to say they are afraid of a "terrorist".

Victory requirements for team D are to get elected again.

Every time the team A scores a point, each member of the student body has to pay team D a nickel.

If any single event scores team A a lot of points (team D decides what is "a lot") then the recess time, gets shortened by 1 minute. This must be announced as "reducing exposure to attack." Whenever this happens, each member of the student body must pay team D a dollar.

Members of team D can use the collected money however they want but if any of them directly pockets the money, they are subject to a penalty to be decided by the rest of team D.

They're just afraid

[Anonymous Coward]

They're just afraid the kids will point out all the obvious problems with today's "security" that at best only protects us from stupid terrorists.

Summary not misleading enough.

[Minwee]

"The teacher [...] was attempting to have the students think [...] This is not what we expect of professional educators" said Sharyn O'Neill, director-general of the state's Department of Education.

On a slight tangent, Taylor Mali has a few words to say on the subject of making students think.

My English written examination...

[Anonymous Coward]

... was possibly the most twisted story i have ever read, worse than even something like Saw considering the rape scene, then necro-rape scene near the end.
Same age range as the class from the fine article above.
I got a pass and only that. I never got the delight of a psychiatrist at the door or anything else.
I wrote a similar, saddening story for a written test in classroom too.
The teacher was really impressed with the story and the mindset used in writing it.

Why should one not be allowed to teach via perspective-taking and empathic methods?
It is one of the best ways to teach about certain subjects, especially if you are taught to take in to consideration every entity in the equation.
Is it because there is a risk that someone could end up turning wrong?
Considering how those chances are pretty much standard in almost every year anyway, it is a non-issue.
Almost every year has someone who snaps and falls in to crime-controlled lives.

It isn't exactly hard to make up a crime and get away with it. But to have the mindset to go ahead with it is different.
It usually only manifests when a person is in awful conditions in life, or hangs out with the wrong group. Those people can be given priority in help when it comes to it.
But considering the standards of most average educational institutes, not bloody likely.

Missing the bleedin' obvious

[gfreeman]

an Australian teacher had her class plan a terrorist attack that would "kill as many innocent Australians as possible."

SELECT * FROM australians WHERE innocence > 0;
0 rows returned

I would bomb...

[Cosgrach]

law schools and pubs where lawyers hang out. But that could hardly be called terrorism.

Oops- guilty of thoughtcrime just yesterday

[Anonymous Coward]

A customer who is currently studying EE and I happened to blunder into the subject of The Anarchist's Cookbook yesterday, and he dismissively opined 'anyone who knows what I do could do a lot of damage even without that'.

My answer: "Any local yutz with a lawnmower gas can or who can pick up a bottle of brake fluid at NAPA has the means and knowledge to do 'a lot of damage'".

As long as one cave man can cause a rock slide that takes out the other group of cave men, humans will always have a METHOD of killing a bunch of folks, and we need to get the hell over it. What's more critical is exploring MOTIVE.

This school exercise sounds like a great opportunity to think more deeply about these issues.... but, alas, we must think FOR the children. They may as well get used to it if powers that be don't want us thinking as adults either. Just be afraid... very, very afraid.... and stick with The Man as he's our only protector and savior. Oh, and be a patriot and buy his shiny product while you're at it.

Another way to skin a cat...

[Anonymous Coward]

I like the assignment but I'd phrase it another way. "Find a weakness in society and create a detailed plan of a terrorist attack which would cause maximum damage and loss of life. Then analyze your attack and list steps that you and society can do to prevent and/or minimize the effect of the attack." It would achieve the same academic goals but would be more socially acceptable. After all, we're all supposed to be finding ways to stop terrorism. Right?

So which is the next Tom Clancy?

[DutchUncle]

Isn't this exactly what most techno-thrillers are? And a lot of (loosely-named) science fiction?

Educational, and humanizing

[Anonymous Coward]

This sort of activity is definitely educational, as it teaches us just how vulnerable and frail *WE* are, as well as making us question *why* someone would want to attack us.

Next they will ban the chess club.

[niftymitch]

Next they will ban the chess club, followed by Go, followed by Monopoly... jut do not tell them about Stratego(tm).

Any strategic board game teaches the concept of attack and defense.

It's called Philosophy

[xwizbt]

You see, what we do is we try to think without the safety net. You use logic and intelligence rather than gut feeling and instinct. You can think like a criminal and not be one. You can think like a murderer and not be one. Read a Thomas Harris novel and shut the 'uck up.

I fully understand this

[Anonymous Coward]

Although the teacher does have a very good idea I think the age is not appropriate. 10 year is about 15 to 16. Being someone that has dealt in counterterrorism I will say this. One of the first things taught is how to carry out terroristic acts. After 9-11 I lived in a community clsoe to a very large arab population. Since on inactive duty and home I was called on to volunteere my expertise to review some of the locations in the area that would be potential targets. The first thing I was asked was How would I attack the Place.. My First question was the goal they wanted first. Death toll or mass destruction. The reaction I got was kind of odd but more so was when I explained all the points of failure and the type of impact it could have. Estemated death tolls and such. I was later pulled aside and questioned on my ability to do so. The problem is to be able to break something like that down requires a very special mindset. It not something you take very lightly. and the thought and envisioning required to do so can have very hard side effects. I deal with regular horrors and nightmares just about the ideas that I have had to provide in such issues. We wont even think of the Moral implications of this either. Yes this kind of out the box thinking is good. But the psychological implications are very deep. When you think about it your are planning the death and destruction of hundreds top thousands of lives. And were not talking just a video game either. Plus for them we are looking to a more localized envrionment to. meaning in many cases they would be envisioning a way to kill possibly friends and family.

I Do think the teacher had a good idea but the execution was somewhat flawed from a psychological standpoint

This is not a bad question

[NSN A392-99-964-5927]

Being trained in Arctic, Desert, Jungle and Urban Warfare SFSG (Special Forces Support Group) including later SBS (Special Boat Service) By Sea, By Land, By Air. You will always find "holes in the system" and with my knowledge I could wreak more havoc than you could shake a stick at. One has to understand the complexities of terror, but this at least gets people thinking about possible outcomes. Usually your common soldier and people who work in security are not that smart. It costs the British Government around £2 Million Pounds up to £5 Million Pounds to train certain people like me. Terrorists are quite often ill equipped and "Blowing things up", or oneself for that matter "Suicide Bombers" is classed as just minor disruption or diversion. A lot of people involved in terrorist activities use very low tech solutions, but there is an evolution in the pipeline like "Breast Implants" to blow up more planes. It is pointless writing a manual of how to's but the question asked by this Teacher is just Observation of the Obvious. I should finish this post and remind you, people who incite terror are NOT that bright. Look at them as inbred bastards, morons who tax the decent people of the world who are friendly and harmonious..... yours humbly NSN

My plan for a terror attack. By Billy.

[shavedlummox]

How about you look up the public schedules for passenger trains, then go to a big, tall bridge and pry up some tracks? Don't forget to jumper a fat wire across the break, as many trains use electric track monitoring systems. Not only will a train full of passengers plummet to their death, but now countries like the US will panic, and install thousands of monitoring stations covering every mile of track. The economic cost will be staggering and passed onto the train companies, in turn, raising prices dramatically. Shipments and rail travel will grind to a halt, crippling the economy even further. Terrorist WIN! Just like china bankrupt itself building the great wall (only to be taken down by one poorly paid, inept guard), the US will spend so much time and money being paranoid it will crumble and fall. (yes, i know Australia has next to no rail service)