There's even stronger arguments that this article doesn't make. Cures last forever (at least until the entropy death of the universe assuming we can become space-faring and continue to exist for ~10^50 years) benefiting incalculable numbers of people. On the other hand, preventing one terrorist attack, has very temporally limited benefits. New knowledge lasts forever.
We aren't giving up liberty to obtain safety. Those in power are using terrorism as an excuse to do what they want to do anyhow, and it's successful enough to provide just enough cover that successful resistance never quite formed.
Educating people out of beliefs they mostly don't have is not going to solve the problem.
I completely agree that we've overreacted, but I've always rejected this argument, and here's why: Terrorism is not about numerical risk, it is about public perception.
That means that it plays in the same game as everything else in the PR world: politics, advertising, social signaling, and so forth. The last thing it has anything to do with is logic.
It would be great if we could tally up all the things that kill us and spend proportionally on those. It's the logical thing to do. Heart disease would come first, then cancer, and so on. But instead we spend and give attention to those things that the public perceives we should: AIDS research, nuclear war deterrence, terrorism.
And if you think about it, that's the way it ought to be. Spending and making laws are all about the consent of the governed, doing things they want. They're not about math or logic.
The problem here is that, with the Cold War over, the defense and intelligence industry saw 9-11 as a call to arms. They're going to go out and do things a good defense and intelligence industry should. And as Americans we have traditionally been forgiving of having our civil liberties temporarily trampled on during times of war.
But you can't have a war forever. A democracy cannot survive this. Instead of the natural overreaction to a war that always happened, we started creating permanent infrastructure to address all terrorism, forever. We're fighting a war with nobody to surrender, and no amount of spending or government monitoring will ever be enough.
The original laws around 9-11 were temporary, and for a very good reason. But somehow politics has gotten to the point where terrorism is the new third-rail: some national politicians might grandstand a bit, but nobody is going to do anything except for give the security state apparatus whatever it says it needs. Otherwise they'd be thrown out of office. Public perception demands it.
Adding up numbers has nothing to do with it, unless you're using them to make some kind of persuasive argument, and then we're right back to public perception and politics. You're in the same boat as those who asked for more cancer research instead of AIDS research. Different people, rightly, see things differently, and everybody deserves to be represented. We're running a country, not an insurance agency.
> Spending and making laws are all about the consent of the governed.
Laws should be about the informed consent of the governed. Security built on a lie is still a lie even if people feel more safe. During the first days of 9-11, the military sent personal down to the airport to reinforce peoples perception of safe travel. What they did not tell anyone at the time, was that the guns did not have any ammunition in them. Instead, the military were basically posing as an "armed force", because having guns with ammunition at airport would then actually create a security issue at the airports.
The security theater of the US feels somewhat like a doctor who has started to only give out placebos to his patients. If anyone feels better, sing praises, and if anyone get worse, give them more sugar pills. Soon, everyone start to get sick on the sugar alone, while the sugar pill manufacturer crave for more sick people.
The security theater from 9-11 has gone on long enough. People are not going to feel more safe from it, and will just get sicker on the solution.
>Security built on a lie is still a lie even if people feel more safe.
Not only that, even if you concede that making people feel safe (as distinct from actually improving their safety) is a legitimate goal, the existing system is an outrageously poor way of satisfying even that.
If the goal is to increase the perception of safety then we could certainly do so without spending trillions of dollars, destroying privacy or enabling dangerous levels of government power. Just bring out the dog and pony show. Tell everyone that there is at least one secret sky marshal on every plane who is trained to assassinate anyone who tries to hijack it and run a bunch of ads about how badass they all are. Permanently station a canine unit at every major airport and let everyone see the cops with the dogs continuously sniffing around everywhere. There are innumerable things like that which don't cost trillions of dollars or bring about any serious cause for objection which allow the public to see that something is being done to address their fears.
Compare this to the NSA surveillance apparatus, which is no doubt costing many billions of dollars in and of itself, creates an enormous high value target for hackers and foreign spies, and couldn't have possibly made anyone feel safer if it had continued to be held a secret as intended because the general public wouldn't have even known it existed.
One of the primary protections against the will of the masses regarding policy was the election of senators by the state legislatures. The Founders saw the value in a House of Lords / upper chamber that was not _directly_ beholden to the whims of the people, but rather to the states themselves.
That's been gone a long time now, and what we've got are more-powerful, longer-termed representatives sitting in the Senate.
I don't claim that abolishing the 17th will fix much now, but it probably would have helped significantly over the last 100 years.
It sure doesnt help if the government constantly exagerates the severity of the issue. This naturally leads to disinformed consent. Not lying so much and not keeping so many secrets would go a long way.
Just a decade ago Clinton faced impeachement for trying to keep an affair secret and then lying about it. Nowadays Obama can just do a "no comment" about how many vitizens he is secretly asassinating.
Informed meaning not lied to, not tricked, not mislead. If the government need to use the tricks of criminals to create new laws, then the government is doing something wrong.
And if you think about it, that's the way it ought to be. Spending and making laws are all about the consent of the governed, doing things they want. They're not about math or logic.
Righhhhhhhhhhhhht.. Let throw out thinking, ethics, and morality just for some "heart". No, this is not how humanity should conduct themselves. Emotion should be calibrated to logics and numbers, not the other way around.
If heart attacks and motor accidents isn't photogenic as terrorism, the response shouldn't be to cater to the terrorism fearing population, but making heart attacks and motor accidents photogenic.
Let do what we really want rather than we think we want. Know ourselves, and we will know that pursuing terrorists by losing our liberty should not be our future.
To be safe. It may be more difficult for people to swallow initially (which explains why no administration has or will act that way, gotta maintain that power now), but I think we would all be better off if society were pushing us towards logic-based policy rather than pandering to irrational emotions. We're sociopolitically treading water (or worse, slowly drowning) by continuing that.
Why do we still go to war? Sending our own people to die senselessly by the thousands, for what again? It's 2013 and America is still spending vast sums of money on weapons and war. Utterly ridiculous. But that is what people have done since the dawn of civilization, and despite all of our knowledge and "enlightenment," we're still catering to these primal animal urges.
The nihilist in me says "fuck it, if that's what they want, that's what they get," but the idealist weeps at the thought of the existence we could have built...
You're stretching the risk portion out quite a lot more than the other side. A better question would be would you rather feel 99% safe and have a .001% chance to die tomorrow, or feel 0% safe and have 0% chance to die tomorrow.
Sure, it's worse if you are highly likely to die. But what if you are very unlikely to die? What if you feel you have a 10% chance of dying tomorrow, but actually only have a 0.001% chance of dying?
IMO quality-of-life is worth considering in such skewed cases.
Think about the incentives to the _President_ (whoever that is) to NOT let an attack happen, no matter what the cost. As Daniel says, it's not about numerical risk or objective damage, it's perception. Obama would have done anything not to have an attack during his terms.
And that's the really sad part. Due to the political process, different interests, and so on, the terrorists WERE able to inflict grievous damage to us as a society.
He (linked article) tries a bit too hard to paint Obama as a sympathetic figure who 'must' spy on everybody or else he won't be reelected so he can right all the social wrongs in America. His handling of prosecution of whistleblowers doesn't really show him as 'reluctant' to me.
I agree with you that the post is soft on Obama, and personally I'm disappointed with the Administration in general.
However, I think the main point of the article still holds and is important in our fight towards a stronger rule of law.
There's a political game being played here, and we need to see it clearly. I don't mean to defend Obama at all, but _any_ administration is under extreme pressure to "fight terrorism" and this creates a huge distortion between the actual risks and consequences of an attack compared to the measures taken by the Executive branch to: 1) avoid attacks, and 2) create the perception they're doing all they can to avoid attacks. There are also other players, like the defense industry, federal departments, etc., with their own interests at play.
Remember DFW's commencement speech? [0] In our situation the political game _is_ the water. We need to see it clearly to fight back and keep our societies lawful and free. While logic is important, it's not going to win an essentially political battle.
"The purpose of terrorism is to cause fear and overreaction."
That reminded me of a similar take on that topic from The Economist's latest, which may be worth considering here:
"... conventional terrorism poses no major threat to America or to its citizens. But that's not really what it aims to do. Terrorism is basically a political communications strategy... For the president the war on terror is what the Vietnam War was to Lyndon Johnson: a vast, tragic distraction in which he must be seen to be winning, lest the domestic agenda he really cares about (health-care, financial reform, climate-change mitigation, immigration reform, gun control, inequality) be derailed. It's no surprise that he has given the surveillance state whatever it says it needs to prevent a major terrorist attack."
Computing how many people die from terrorism is completely beside the point. For the terrorists, terrorism isn't about counting up dead enemies. It's about enacting political change. We'd be fools not to understand the war on the terms it is being fought.
Do you honestly believe AQ has been fighting for decades just to get the NSA to take phone records from Verizon? You think Ayman is snickering in a cave somewhere chalking up a tally in the Win column because of that?
They have actual political goals, but they don't necessarily care about what America does internally. Certainly they don't send people to die just to give a farmer in North Carolina "irrational fear". They do it for strategic goals all their own.
In a manner of speaking, a full embrace of all civil liberties plays directly into their hands as it gives them much more freedom of communication and movement while affording the citizens only a very marginal increase in those civil liberties by comparison.
Obviously it doesn't make sense to swing way too far the other way and to restrict our civil liberties so much that they turn into security theatre (like the TSA) without any marginal increase in our ability to deter and defeat terrorism.
But acting like taking any change to deter terrorism "let's the terrorists win" is itself kind of missing the point. That's not even the game they're playing.
>Do you honestly believe AQ has been fighting for decades just to get the NSA to take phone records from Verizon?
As part of a larger strategy, sure. Osama bin Laden stated publicly that his goal was to bankrupt the U.S.[1] The NSA is wasting billions of dollars on this while we run enormous budget deficits.
>In a manner of speaking, a full embrace of all civil liberties plays directly into their hands as it gives them much more freedom of communication and movement while affording the citizens only a very marginal increase in those civil liberties by comparison.
Only if their end goal is to kill people rather than bring about some specific political result. Presumably the killing is a means rather than the goal, and if the goal is made unachievable through attacks because we resist overreactions to them then there will be no incentive to go on killing people.
We actually already have a very good framework for deciding if the number of lives saved by a given program will be worth the expense compared to other things we could be doing with the same money, the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. This isn't applied to defense issues, but I can very much see it being applied to things like terrorism or crime:
There's also the fact that air travel restrictions probably cost lives on net, because the number of people encouraged to drive instead of fly who then go on to die in traffic accidents almost certainly exceeds the number of people they save from terrorist attacks.
I think it would be enormously enlightening to calculate the estimated cost-per-life-saved of various elements of the anti-terrorism budget, and compare it to alternative programs that could have used the money.
When it comes out to be in the billions-per-life-saved range for anti-terrorism while alternatives like cancer and heart disease research and treatment come in at thousands-per-life-saved, maybe people will get the message.
| Spending and making laws are all about the consent
| of the governed, doing things they want. They're not
| about math or logic.
The 'consent' that the public gives here is implicit, not explicit. You can't say that someone agrees with 100% of what their elected official does. It's an impossibility.
And many times this should be about math and logic. Do we really know if all of the measures taken after 9/11 are what the public demanded? What if the politicians went over-board and the the American public just went along with it? What if the American public would have been ok with a much smaller reaction? It's not like there was a poll asking the American public: "How far should we go?"
> Terrorism is not about numerical risk, it is about public perception.
Public perception is driven by media. Why was so much time spent covering the Boston bombing? The event claimed three lives, it should have been a byline on the local Boston news.
If you self immolate, no news outlet will cover it because they want to discourage this kind of behavior. We need to do the same thing with terrorism for related reasons: terrorism makes people irrational. The risks of terrorism are practically non-existent but people get emotional and irrational about it. So the best thing is to just stop covering terrorist attacks.
When the public act like children our response should not to be lauding the misuse of funds because of their unreasonable demands but to educate them. Failing that, we should ignore them and actually do the things that are in their best interests.
The litmus test for me would be this: If I took a sample of the population, thoroughly educated them about the matter to the point where there was no reasonable doubt left, would the majority have changed their position to mine. If so, and if we do not have the resources to teach the public about the nuances of every issue, then acting according to what they would come to believe is ethical.
Furthermore it isn't even that simple. Not only is the public damaging itself, but it is also infringing on my rights. The added likelihood that I will die in a car crash vs a plane crash due to the extra hassle and delays at the airport is unsanctionable, regardless of claims to "consent of the governed".
The never-ending "war" we insist on having is also highly related to the economy. Since WWII, we've essentially propped the US economy up on the defense industry. If you add up all the defense related spending, including contractors and subcontractors, it almost certainly amounts to a hugely significant portion of our economy, and more importantly employs a massive segment of the population.
Folks on the right talk about not wanting to create a welfare state, to have a large segment of the population dependent on the federal government for their livelihoods. Yet those same folks will spend as much as possible on the defense industry, ostensibly doing just that.
If it was just a PR stunt, PRISM wouldn't have needed to be secret.
(OTOH, you could say that all this is a PR stunt and Snowden is being paid to be part of it, but now that would be a conspiracy theory I'm certainly not willing to support)
This article is of course right on the money, and a well-argued version of this argument. But I have to think that everyone in the US has heard this argument a dozen times since 2001, and it seems like it has likely convinced all the people it's going to convince.
Now consider also this: the medical privacy rights have the effect of withholding from research vast amounts of medical data, which would be extremely valuable in, say, cancer research.
How many people did CANCER kill in the US 2001-2012? Roughly 6 million. 6,000,000 people. 2000 times more than terror attacks.
Cardiovascular disease and stroke: roughly the same, and just as likely to benefit from medical data.
I - personally - would much prefer that my medical data becomes known, than my e-mails and telephone conversations. I think that applies to 99+ % of us. Certainly the argument "if you did nothing wrong, you got nothing to hide" applies to medical data - few medical problems would land someone in trouble.
I wholeheartedly agree with the thesis here, and have been saying as much since 2001. An event on the scale of 9/11 happening every other day would still kill fewer Americans than heart disease.
A 9/11 happening every other day would cause $5.5 trillion a year in damage. Possibly much more, if you look at the impact of 9/11 on U.S. stocks.
In any case, looking at just the death toll misses the point. The attack on the World Trade Center was the largest attack on continental U.S. soil since the British sacked the White House. The reaction it engendered was very understandably out of proportion with the number of lives lost in the attack. It was deeply disturbing to a nation that has for nearly its whole history felt secure, being isolated from anyone who would harm it by the world's largest oceans.
As someone from a country with questionable security, let me tell you that you cannot measure the value of safety merely in lives lost. I bet in Bangladesh the violence of hartals (labor strikes) probably doesn't add up to very many lives at all, but the disruptive force of that violence is much stronger. A major terrorist attack just every year would make the U.S. a very different place (see, e.g., Israel).
I didn't say 9/11 happening every other day wouldn't be an awful thing, just that we should keep it in perspective. Most of the damage from such an event - including in the situations you describe - aside from loss of life is due to people not keeping the event in perspective, which is not less of a reason to keep it in perspective.
The public reacts viscerally to terrorism and crime, out of proportion with natural causes that cause the same amount of damage. Accounting for that in public policy is keeping things in perspective.
Also, if you want to be hyper-rational about this: the NSA program probably has incredible bang-for-buck. If it costs $500 million a year, it only has to prevent a 9/11-scale event once or twice a century to justify itself.
Also, if we're "keeping things in perspective" why do you compare lives as if each one has equal value? One WTC worker was probably worth several times as much, in terms of GDP, as the average person who dies of heart disease. 3,000 people dying in Manhattan's financial district == 15,000 people dying in a Kansas City tornado... Obviously I'm being glib with this line of argument. You can't callously compare the two situations in the interest of "keeping things in perspective." So to can you not compare people dying in a terrorist attack to people dying of heart disease.
"The public reacts viscerally to terrorism and crime, out of proportion with natural causes that cause the same amount of damage. Accounting for that in public policy is keeping things in perspective."
My argument was very much not "there are more deaths by X than terrorism, ergo we need to deal more with X". However, I think most people are not at all aware of the staggering difference in the levels of risk they bear from various sources, and pointing out the radical differences helps to keep things in perspective. A narrow counting of the dead is absolutely not the only correct perspective. At the same time, telling people they need to worry more because other people will be worried is only making matters worse. Better that they refuse to be terrorized (http://www.schneier.com/essay-124.html); that they recognize that by bearing in mind the actual relative threats they can legitimately feel safer.
"Also, if you want to be hyper-rational about this: the NSA program probably has incredible bang-for-buck. If it costs $500 million a year, it only has to prevent a 9/11-scale event once or twice a century to justify itself."
That is not what rational means.
"Also, if we're "keeping things in perspective" why do you compare lives as if each one has equal value? One WTC worker was probably worth several times as much, in terms of GDP, as the average person who dies of heart disease. 3,000 people dying in Manhattan's financial district == 15,000 people dying in a Kansas City tornado... Obviously I'm being glib with this line of argument. You can't callously compare the two situations in the interest of "keeping things in perspective." So to can you not compare people dying in a terrorist attack to people dying of heart disease."
There are so many things wrong with this.
First, you pick a metric that is most emphatically not just counting lives, find it ick, and conclude that you can't just count lives. Which isn't really here nor there - my intent with number of lives was never to be precise but to give a sense of scale; adjust according to whatever perceived value you place on the respective lives.
More importantly, you're making an emotional appeal that is frankly absurd: yes, comparing certain things can seem crass, but resources we're spending on "fighting terrorism" aren't being put to other use and liberties we're giving up for "fighting terrorism" are enabling abuses (now or down the line), and we need to make comparisons if we're going to make any decisions. Making decisions anyway is implicitly making those same comparisons, just with less care, and people's lives are at stake!
Its hard to imagine the negative effects of terrorism are greater than those of disease. After all, many more people die of disease than die of terrorism. Its pretty easy for people to move away from terror zones. I could just move to the country if I was afraid of terrorism. When people spread out, terrorism becomes more difficult. Except very few people do this.
On the other hand, if there was a magical place where all diseases would be cured, I imagine there would be a mad scramble to get in.
I also made a crude estimate for economic impact of disease in another comment of ~$250 trillion per year.
I said the negative effects of a death due to crime or terrorism is greater than that of a death due to disease.
Look at e.g. Chicago. 500 or so murders a year, dwarfed by the number of deaths from heart disease, etc, and people freak out. But that reaction has an economic cost--it's harder to get middle class people to move into and stay in the city when they fear crime.
Maybe people shouldn't be so unnerved by crime and terrorism, but they are. 1,000 traffic deaths a year in Illinois does absolutely nothing to curb car culture. 1,000 terrorism deaths a year in Illinois would gut the economy of the state as people fled to saver environs.
A. I don't understand the comparison. Crime is different than terror. For example some of the highest value terror targets are where the highest density of people are. Obviously people aren't moving away from city centers. Crime on the other hand is associated with poverty and is not committed by terrorists. People who are capable move away, sometimes just a few miles away.
B. I don't undestand the following types of argument:
1. people are ignorant of something and have irrational fears about it.
2. Lets spend a bunch of money so they feel better.
You're overanalyzing my post. My point is simply that you can't count up number of deaths to compare two problems. One murder puts a far bigger strain on the social fabric than one old person dying of heart disease. The fact that people in a city of almost 3 million people freak out over ~500 murders, compared to probably thousands dying of heart disease, a year is evidence of that fact.
Perhaps, but how do you know it puts a far bigger strain? Certainly the family of the victim freaks out, but the communities stress response is unknown to me. A sudden onset illness to a close family member is also calamitous.
I'm also not saying its as easy as the numbers I threw together. Its just a ballpark estimate, until someone comes along and gives a better estimate.
Are you ignoring the 500 point drop from August 28 to Sept 10? (Did the market forecast the events of 9/11? Did Goldman Sachs have access to data from the White House that the NSA+FBI failed to act on?)
Instead of comparing the US to obvious outliers, how about a comparison to some industrialized non-participant in the GWoT. Is their terror problem worse than ours? Do they benefit from greater freedom and less economic drag from war and a security state?
For the record, I don't think that the U.S. response to the GWoT is justified, largely because the cost of the various wars vastly outweighs their security value. That's not my point. My point is that you have to appreciate that one life lost in a terrorist attack has a much greater impact on the social fabric than one life lost to heart disease.
Well, sure. America should do the right thing because it's the right thing to do.
But I would like to stress that it's actually possible that America might make different choices about e.g. foreign policy issues than other nations and it still be a reasoned, deliberate policy choice and not 'tyranny and oppression'.
The easy example is how freedom of the press in the U.S. naturally conflicts with the Islamic prohibition against depictions of the Prophet Muhammad. I can only imagine how well freedom of expression would have went over during the ancient battles between iconoclasts and iconoblasts.
So many people are preconditioned now into opposing what America does for no other reason than that America did it. China or Iran spies on their citizens and filters what they can see? Who cares, they're China and Iran, we expect them to be totalitarian; but because they do what we expect we give them a free pass! Why? Instead we buy stuff from China and Iran even while we're busy boycotting the USA? Uh huh, OK.
The U.K. and Sweden manage to out-do even the USA in public and net surveillance? Whatever, they're European, they're the "good guys". Nary a whimper anywhere in the world.
So if people want to hate America than whatever, but at least stop acting like they're applying the same standards to the USA that they do to the rest of the world.
I might say "killed with guns" rather than "by" - I'm not sure that I'd normally nitpick but when contrasting with "killed by terrorists" it seems more glaring.
To be fair, it's a legitimate argument that "doing something about shootings" should be preferred to "doing something about terrorism" if they are likely to have a similar (proportional) effect and similar costs (in resources or liberty). It's still a few steps to get from there to "therefore we should ban guns", but he's not overtly saying that anyway.
It's the new liberal cause du jour. You can be sure they will win the language war. See the "global warming" -> "climate change" switch after 15 years of stable temps or the studious avoidance of the word "baby" during the media coverage of the Kermit Gosnell trial.
Guns are gaining agency and killing people. Better ban 'em.
I find it a little ironic when people talk about how rare and possibly over-stated the terrorism threat is and then go on to freak out over the NSA snooping with a bunch of "what if" arguments ("what if they do [this|that|the_other_thing] with my data?") that are likely to be just as rare and over-stated.
Even if it doesn't really concern me too much, I can respect your concern over it. But if you turn the NSA snooping into some doomsday thing, I won't really listen to you for very long.
I think the concerning thing for me is trends. I don't think that, all other things being equal, acts of terrorism increase in frequency just by their nature. An intelligence agency, on the other hand, is going to seek for more and more power as long as it is unchecked. What scares me about the NSA is now what they're doing now, but the direction they're clearly headed in.
It's short-sighted to assume that fighting terror is the only goal these governments have. One of the main benefits of a surveillance society is self-censorship and other "panopticon" effects (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon#The_panopticon_as_me...). Fighting terrorism is, in my opinion, actually just a pretext.
While I dislike mass surveillance as much as the next guy, the OP's particular argument against it strikes me as myopic. The risks which PRISM purportedly addresses do not cap out at the 3000 deaths by terrorism in 2001. One nuclear device detonated in a major city (let's say in a RORO container awaiting inspection in New York's harbor) could kill millions. Does inclusion of that number in the math make PRISM rational?
Sent this letter to Conor Friedersdorf (article author):
The trouble with the idea of "terrorism" is it doesn't distinguish between Boston Bombings and a 500k+ casualty attack from a nuclear device. The former can and should be dealt with within the normal rule of law and using normal law enforcement. In the case of the latter, we hope and expect that the full national security apparatus is directed toward preventing the event, and that a suspension of the normal rule of law could probably be appropriate.
The problem is, like the 2008 financial crisis and the 2009 Gulf oil spill, the probability of these massive impact "black swan" events is much higher than naive statistical modeling and intuition would suggest. That is, the distribution of these events is "heavy-tailed": the probability of an extremely bad thing happening cannot be easily extrapolated from looking at the frequency with which less bad things have actually happened.
I think people may have a sense that the distribution of terrorism events is "heavy-tailed", making our reaction not entirely irrational (though much of it is). The real problem is that the word "terrorism" conflates normal garden-variety shootings, bombings, and ricin-laced-letter-mailings with the events that could kill millions. If the NSA is only working on preventing the latter, then I think most people would be happy to let them read everything. But when peace activists are called threats to national security (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/20/peace-activists-nuc...), and people in the IC joke that Glenn Greenwald should be "disappeared", it's hard to have faith that our national security apparatus is appropriately allocating its resources.
The thing about nuclear terrorism is that it has nothing to do with terrorism and everything to do with capturing loose nukes. Al Qaeda isn't going to build a nuclear bomb. States can barely manage it. Which means as long as you keep the nukes locked up you don't have to worry about what Al Qaeda would do if they got one.
Also, given that the most rational reason to steal a nuclear weapon is to sell it, it goes a long way to just be the highest bidder. And Uncle Sam is going to outbid Al Qaeda every day of the week. There is a reason that terrorists have never detonated a nuclear weapon.
Come back when the government stops ordering service providers to provide information and insert intercept technologies whether or not they want to and whether or not you've contracted with them not to.
I have a problem with the author's use of comparing the quantity of people killed by terrorists with the quantity of people killed by guns.
The media isn't fearmongering off 'death by planecrash'. Why can't he use something more direct like 'mistakenly-shot a family member that forgot their keys', or drive-by shootings, accidental-discharge-of-a-firearm-while-it-was-being-cleaned deaths? Unlocked gun cabinet related deaths?
Right: (1) the chance of being murdered for any reason is very low, (2) the chance of being murdered for a political reason (a.k.a "terrorism") is extremely low, and (3) the chance that a multi-billion dollar, multi-yottabyte info dragnet can save you from (2), or is even designed to do so, is also very low.
Americans always seem to be boasting how they are better at things than everyone else. Well now they can add 'killing Americans' to the list. As Homer Simpson would say: USA, USA, USA :-)
Hindsight is 20/20, so I am not looking to place blame when I ask - how much better off would we be if we put the money we spent on the "war on terror" to just about any other use?
There are some monumental things that can be done for a trillion dollars (see http://costofwar.com/ which doesn't even include the TSA or other homeland security operations).
I don't think it has anything to do with hindsight. Even if you were, at one point, for spending every dime on the "war on terror" and now you are opposed, what does that mean? You're in the same exact place as you were. All worked up with yet another opinion. You're not a corporation with a lobbyist. You mean nothing.
Terrorism prevention spending is an easier pill to swallow/get behind/comprehend/profit from/ compared to any other type of possible "thing" tax dollars can be spent on. The government needs to spend money on something. The economy depends on it. But what?
People are obese. They have long lists of health problems and are plagued by the high cost of healthcare. But somehow the one thing that can help them directly (healthcare) alludes them. How is that such a difficult problem?
But mention terrorist or the potential of an attack and people will usually get behind all kinds of different programs and spending. We'll fight these damn terrorists together. Hand in hand! For FREEDOM and DEMOCRACY. We might have to give up a few things. Want to read my emails? Eh, they're mostly just funny pictures of cats...so I guess that's fine. Oh you need money to fight terrorists? Here's a trillion dollars. If we get some cool gadgets out of it afterwards, then that's awesome! Just as long as it has a spill guard because you know I'll be sucking down some soda when I use it.
Cost of entire NASA program is pennies of the war cost... unfortunately there is more money to make at war, than at creating/maintaining peace and continuing humankind progress.
In addition to the direct costs you have to add risk: At the same time war spending was peaking, the financial crisis strained the nation's ability to respond to the limit. I am amazed the economy survived and some would say it is still at risk from this strange variant of "guns and butter." Doing both at the same time strikes me as recklessness on a monumental scale.
Do you think the NSA spying operation in the US is only for terrorism ? This sounds so much like the pedophile argument when talking about internet privacy.
The premise is completely off. If the author actually compared the totality of the impact of 9/11 on the country, instead of just comparing the number of people who die each year to various diseases, they would surely see the importance of fighting terrorism.
- The destruction of major buildings in the World Trade Center with a replacement cost of from $3 billion to $4.5 billion.
- Property and infrastructure damage: $10 billion to $13 -billion.
- Federal emergency funds (heightened airport security, sky marshals, government takeover of airport security, retrofitting aircraft with anti-terrorist devices, cost of operations in Afghanistan): $40 billion.
- Direct job losses amounted to 83,000, with $17 billion in lost wages.
- Losses to the city of New York (lost jobs, lost taxes, damage to infrastructure, cleaning): $95 billion.
- Fall of global markets: incalculable.
Keep in mind the reason terror attacks have been successful here is that the terrorists use our own laws against us in order to gain an advantage. The lax immigration laws allowed many of the 9/11 hijackers to set up shop here. Keep in mind a large number of illegal immigrants being stopped at our southern border are middle eastern:
"A 2006 congressional report on border threats, titled “A Line in the Sand: Confronting the Threat at the Southwest Border” and prepared by the House Committee on Homeland Security Subcommittee on Investigations, indicated that 1.2 million illegal aliens were apprehended in 2005 alone, and 165,000 of those were from countries other than Mexico. Approximately 650 were from “special interest countries,” or nations the Border Patrol defines as “designated by the intelligence community as countries that could export individuals that could bring harm to our country in the way of terrorism.”
It's a tough balancing act. You don't want to give the bad guys an advantage, but when you keep the laws relaxed and reduce the amount of money being spent on this, all you do is play into the hands of the people who want to kill Americans.
> Homeland Security Subcommittee on Investigations, indicated that 1.2 million illegal aliens were apprehended in 2005 alone, and 165,000 of those were from countries other than Mexico.
Sounds pretty scary! 165,000 non-Mexicans, I bet there are tens of thousands of terrorists coming this way!
> Approximately 650 were from “special interest countries,” or nations the Border Patrol defines as “designated by the intelligence community as countries that could export individuals that could bring harm to our country in the way of terrorism.”
Oh. Less than a thousand -- .05%
Hmm.. I guess if they were all from Saudi Arabia or Pakistan or something, what counts as a 'special interest country'?
> Cuba (712), Iran (14), Syria (5) and Sudan (5), as well as Somalia (9), Afghanistan (9), Pakistan (37), Saudi Arabia (5) and Yemen (11).
So when you said: "Keep in mind a large number of illegal immigrants being stopped at our southern border are middle eastern"
You really meant, out of 1.2 million stopped, approximately 50 or 60 were middle-eastern.
Really? If you look at the DJIA over the period from mid-September of 2001 on, you will see that the fall lasted all of about one month. Within weeks it rebounded right back where it had been.
Ever heard of the economic impact of chronic disease? Its in the trillions per year (CDC, WHO, others). Ever consider the economic value of a human life? Its around $5 million. Since around 50 million people die each year from disease we can estimate the societal burden of disease to be ~$250 trillion dollars per year. If you do an full analysis, I would have a hard time believing you'd find the societal burden of terrorism is greater than the detrimental impact of disease.
US agencies place a $5-10 million value on an American life [1]. This is not the value of a life anywhere, though. For example, part of the valuation comes from discounted earnings calculations, which is lower in lower-income countries.
Furthermore, just because problem A is worse than problem B (measured in dollars) doesn't mean we should spend more money fighting problem A. Money should be spent where it has the greatest impact.
Most people don't make over $1 million dollars in a lifetime. I like to think the value comes from the desire to compensate a family member for a lost loved one. Some manner of putting a dollar value of the pain of the loss.
Also the greatest impact of spent dollars comes from investing in knowledge creation since new knowledge benefits everyone who will exist in the future, and we are extremely close (on the earth time scale) to our species becoming effectively permanent (space faring). So any minor new discovery can have enormous benefits, or at least benefits that are many orders of magnitude greater than stopping any number of different terror attacks.
You also have biological terrorism to worry about. Both natural (new severe viral outbreaks as in 1918 virus) and man made threats, which are not included in any estimates of the toll of disease.
> but when you keep the laws relaxed and reduce the amount of money being spent on this, all you do is play into the hands of the people who want to kill Americans.
That is an incredibly unwarranted assumption. Spending less may in fact drastically reduce the threat to Americans.
Food for thought: Why do you think people want to come over here and kill Americans, as opposed to people similar to us in other countries? Might it be correlated to the amount of money we spend doing unfriendly things to non-Americans?
Read again. What you are saying is that "Doing less unfriendly things to non-Americans means doing unfriendly things to Americans."
Do you honestly think that way? I'm sure you don't.
And I agree with the grandparent here -- there's something which draws US to be the hotspot target for terrorism, and that terrorism originates from certain areas of the world with strong US military presene. Could it be that the best way to avoid the total amount of terrorism on US targets is to actually try to play nice towards non-Americans? Kind of like rest of the western countries like to do apart from US-led operations.
Ditch the War on Terror, and fix the problem at the root rather than try to brute-force through it. It is my claim that for some people this solution means "surrendering" and as such a knee-jerk reaction would be to not consider such options. Just imagine he PR failure for the president and congress who would even mentio that "hey, what if we're at fault...".
Personally, I wouldn't mind a little more return to isolationism... pull out all our foreign troops (outside of embassy protection details), limiting our near-foreign presence to our naval operations (for the most part). I'd also like to see some of the stupidity behind the war on drugs stopped as well.
The worst thing about terror is the social and cultural effect it has. America swung hard to the theocratic right after 9/11-- ironically the same ideology as the terrorists more or less (except Dominionist Christian instead of Wahhabist Muslim... basically a branding difference).
The purpose of the institution is to protect the institution. This has about as much to do with terror as it does with aliens from another planet. Nothing at all. It's about protecting the US government from all threats. And they feel threatened by US citizens so they react with the subtleness of a titan. I sometimes wonder if this is the natural evolution of all governments, to overreact and slide into a delusional world, thinking complete control can be attained.
"Terrorism" is simply the most popular contemporary propaganda used as cover for any type of state overt or covert military action or agenda. In other words, use of extraordinary force must be justified by circumstances of mythical proportions. The real reasons for going to war or surveillance of citizenry, like the desire to acquire territory and resource control, or to suppress dissidents or political opposition domestically, are not ethical or marketable.
While I agree with the article's main point, keep in mind that most of the comparative examples given do not threaten the legitimacy (or the aura thereof, if one wishes to distinguish between the two) of the government. That in itself should explain why the government pays so much attention to it.
Why ordinary people seem to obsess over terror probably stems from all of the coverage an attack (or even a foiled plot, for that matter) gets. Which shouldn't surprise once one remembers how cozy the media is with the government.
It seems that no one who brings this argument up acknowledges the possibility that terrorism doesn't seem like a big threat precisely because of the extreme precautions taken to stop it.
Comparing traffic related deaths to terrorism related deaths is invalid since we don't spend the same resources or give up comparable liberties to prevent traffic related deaths.
Any analysis that doesn't seriously consider that cannot be taken seriously.
As the Boston Marathon Bombing showed us, it's very easy to create a lot of destruction and disruption and fear with very mundane items (gunpowder and pressure cookers). If it's so easy to accomplish, why doesn't it happen more? Either terrorism is genuinely not a serious threat or our security organizations are very good at what they do using the tools they have at their disposal.
I would be in favor of our security apparatuses 'taking a break' or scaling back spying operations for about 5 years just to see what the result would be and if the American public would be able to tolerate it. Bombs going off every week in a major shopping mall or in an airliner or in a bus (like in Israel in the 90s) would probably not be acceptable to the American people.
Alternatively, we would discover that terrorism is not a big threat and the debate about giving up liberties to prevent terrorism would be a very simple one.
If it's so easy to accomplish, why doesn't it happen more?
Maybe because outside of Vince Flynn and Brad Thor novels, and Hollywood summer blockbusters, there aren't actually that many people who: A. are motivated to conduct a terrorist attack, and B. equipped / able / willing to do so.
It seems that no one who brings this argument up acknowledges the possibility that terrorism doesn't seem like a big threat precisely because of the extreme precautions taken to stop it.
The problem with this line of reasoning is that it's not falsifiable. I mean, here ya go: I have a Tiger Proof Rock I'll see you. It absolutely protects against tiger attacks. How do I know it works? Well, in 39 years, I have never once been attacked by a tiger.
Anyway, this whole line of discussion shows exactly why we need more transparency and less secrecy from our government. We don't know if what they're doing works or not, because we largely don't know what they're doing. And this is not how a free, open and democratic society is supposed to work. We should not be a nation of secret laws, secret court systems, and shadowy government agencies operating in the dark.
I explicitly acknowledged this in the very next sentence. The difference is that you assert this as a fact (for which you have no evidence) and I state it as a possible explanation.
> The problem with this line of reasoning is that it's not falsifiable.
And for the same reason the claim that terrorism is not a problem due to lack of sufficiently motivated terrorists is also not falsifiable. Hence my suggestion that the government scale back their anti-terrorism [spying] operations and see what the outcome is.
> we need more transparency and less secrecy from our government
I explicitly acknowledged this in the very next sentence. The difference is that you assert this as a fact (for which you have no evidence) and I state it as a possible explanation.
I actually meant to end that with a question mark, but I mistyped it and didn't notice until I saw your reply. I definitely don't mean to assert that as fact, but just floating it out there as a scenario worth considering.
And in fact, a few people have mentioned that the intelligence agencies had a bit of forewarning about Major Hasan (at Ft. Hood) and Tamerlan Tsarnaev and somehow still missed the key point: The fact that the intelligence agencies were able to know anything at all means that what they're doing is working. In fact the only thing that had kept those agencies from taking early action was our civil liberties and the need to employ due process, and the fact that there are still too many false positives.
Can a system like PRISM reduce the false positive rate? (Probably not, for domestic terrorists-to-be). If so, is it worth it? The answer might be "No", but it might be "Yes", too.
Another point to consider: If the intelligence agencies were able to get intel on the worst case scenarios (essentially "lone worf" budding terrorists) then how effective have they been in situations that play more to their strengths (which is to say, identifying and disrupting "cells" before they can proceed with an attack).
Sen. Udall has said that PRISM is completely redundant in stopping these attacks, but that doesn't mesh well with PRISM's prominent usage in the President's Daily Briefings. If PRISM isn't actually redundant, how useful does it have to be before we think it would be worth using?
And intelligence knew about the 9/11 bombers before 9/11, and failed to stop them.
If we already have enough data to predict criminal acts, and we are still failing, how is collecting more data the solution?
[Note, Fiction:] My smoke detector did a create job ringing when my house caught fire, but the fire department trucks didn't get to my house in time to save it. Why should I buy more smoke detectors?
Imagine a smoke detector that could note the presence of conditions known to lead the fire and pre-alert the fire department to be ready to respond quickly...
You're using the lack of an attack as proof that the system works, but it's proof of nothing. If I start using a special scented soap while travelling in India, can I come back and state that the use of the soap prevents tiger attacks because I was attacked 0 times while I was there? What about a shark repellent spray? I've been to the ocean many times and never been attacked by a shark because of my special spray!
| it's very easy to create a lot of destruction and
| disruption and fear with very mundane items
| If it's so easy to accomplish, why doesn't it happen more?
| Either terrorism is genuinely not a serious threat or our
| security organizations are very good at what they do using
| the tools they have at their disposal.
Prior to the powers given to the executive branch post-9/11, anyone could have executed the Boston Marathon Bombing, but it didn't happen. Timothy McVeigh could have launched his attack in the 1960's (provided he was alive then), but no one made such an attack. We didn't have:
| Bombs going off every week in a major shopping mall or
| in an airliner or in a bus
either.
| I would be in favor of our security apparatuses 'taking a break'
| or scaling back spying operations
You're treating this as a all-or-nothing approach. Either we have all-knowing spy agencies that can spy on anyone anywhere without any oversight, or we have spy agencies that are effectively shuttered.
Why can't the middle ground just be that we have spy agencies that obey the law, and the limitations as defined by the Constitution of the United States?
I don't think anybody is suggesting curtailing all intelligence gathering, but even if they just cut the program back to deal with extranational phone calls, you're now spying far less on your own citizens, and are indeed spying in a way less likely to generate as many false positives and that are more easy to justify an express reason for.
I'm not suggesting that's a valid fix, because I still wouldn't find that acceptable, but definitely it is preferable to what we have now.
We expend enormous resources preventing traffic deaths. From driver education to advanced safety systems costing thousands of dollars (in every vehicle sold!). There are (approx.) 15 million cars sold in the U.S. each year. Each $1000 of safety equipment is $15 billion spent mitigating traffic injuries and reducing deaths.
Maybe $15 billion looks silly in comparison to hundreds of billions, but it at least starts to look pretty comparable.
If you are going to include the safety equipment people willingly pay for in their cars, you need to include the billions of dollars people spend on guns to protect themselves as well.
I think the second paragraph of my comment makes it clear enough that I wasn't trying to make a complete comparison. The goal was more to establish that just dismissing spending on things like traffic safety is a bad argument.
But it still isn't a bad argument. First of all, the spending is off by an order of magnitude, and secondly, the amount of money spent per death is many orders of magnitude different. Spending 20x the money to save under 1/10 the lives?
It seems that no one who brings this argument up
acknowledges the possibility that terrorism doesn't seem
like a big threat precisely because of the extreme
precautions taken to stop it.
Then on the one hand, the FBI and CIA would regularly, and very publicly, celebrate the apprehension, or otherwise prevention, of would-be terrorists, with some non-detailed description of the realistic terrorist attacks they were planning to undertake.
It would increase morale at those agencies, increase their standing with the public and discourage other would-be terrorists. Not much is given away if we are told the 4 people apprehended 'planned to plant a bomb at a plane in JFK airport by sneaking past security'.
Instead, we only get the occasional apprehension of delusional people with ludicrous plans.
On the other hand, if there really were many terrorists with actual plans, there would occasionally be a successful attack. Even at an unbelievable 99% prevention ratio, some would come through. An illegal immigrant loner building pipebombs in his cabin-in-the-woods could easily escape detection.
The much simpler explanation is that there simply aren't many terrorists with realistic terrorist plots. If anything, this surveillance should be defended by appeals to 'stopping the next mass shooting': that's an example of a crime that occasionally happens, while also many are prevented.
