I understand the numbers of terrorist-related deaths versus non-terrorist one are staggering as displayed above, but if we stopped funding these security measures at airports (scanners, staff, etc), what could the number go up to?
Are these 3000 deaths so low because of the security measures? If we were to remove/loosen security measures at airports, how could we even estimate the impact in number of terrorist-related deaths?
Are these fears of possible ramp-up of terrorist attacks (if security measures are loosened) unfounded?
The US government was informed about the 9/11 hijackers and the Boston city Marathon bombers etc. But, they get 99.99% false positives, so such information is basically worthless unless it results in conviction. Further the 9/11 hijackers used weapons no more deadly than what people are still allowed to bring on aircraft. If there where enough terrorists to matter they could have repeated 9/11 any time in the last 10 years. The most 'useful' security measure from 9/11 is a 'secure' door that locks which directly relates do another crashed aircraft making even that if anything a net loss. http://www.cnn.com/2015/03/26/europe/france-germanwings-plan...
That said, like the 'war on drugs' it has nothing to do with the actual 'threat' it's all just politics.
Everything else is just a show of force to make people feel better.
Passengers fighting back only works if they know there is a problem and the attackers are in the passenger cabin. Once the attacker is past that door they can ignore them.
What have you got against pink pilots?
US military drones have actual weapons and they are not hacked so that part seems to work well.
[1] http://reason.com/blog/2017/03/29/tsa-punishes-boy-who-left-...
It seems that having some border control is prudent. Just having it in place reduces violence, if I remember correctly. It is kind of like closing your front door and having a lock does quite a bit to reduce property theft.
Outside of taking prudent measures, I'm not sure it helps at all, especially considering most terrorism is homegrown. In fact, there is a chance it makes some relations worse and more likely to produce radicalized individuals - at least as much chance of increasing other terrorism if we stop the screenings completely. If terrorism is indeed the evil we are fighting, perhaps some of the money might better spent to take care of some of the social ills. After all, these are the things shown to help reduce homegrown terrorism.
(Let's not even get into 9/11 because numerous reputable sources have proved beyond doubt that the intelligence agencies had a lot of actionable info months or even years before it.)
And don't pull the card "you never hear about the prevented attacks" too, because the US government is very quick to flaunt and brag about their over-funded agencies catching the occasional boogeyman.
That homeless guy is going to die of hypothermia from being out in the rain? Makes sense. He should try to get out of the rain.
Thousands of women are killed by their ex-boyfriends every year? Makes sense, some guys are crazy. Good thing I don't date guys like that.
Someone might bring a gun into Starbucks and shoot random people? Good lord what is the world coming to! Take all the guns away! Islam! It's those creepy loners again!
Even more strawman fodder: Influenza related deaths spiked to over 40k(50k?) in 2000 & 2004. I don't blame the previously worst President in modern times, although I wish I could.
But I felt bringing death caused by other problems (homeless or even reckless driving) is a strawman. First, terrorism IS a problem, both domestic and foreign. So whether we have more people dying because of hunger or not, isn't going to affect the searching policy in airport. We have to discuss death by drunk driving and death by terrorism separately. Is government prioritizing homeless issues? That's different from is TSA search effective. They are two completely different issues.
At first glance, Chertoff seems to be the poster child of "confict of interest", but he is the new norm, just one of the many who abuse their stations.
and, aside from that, many people really really really hate the notion that a terrorist, often from a foreign country, can kill people in their own territory, a place they consider "safe". people find this particularly disturbing because of the direct human malevolence involved. people are one of the scariest things people can face.
when we simply reduce these types of deaths into counts, we lose some of that human perspective and what makes people live their lives in fear and anger.
Where and how will you spend your money?
95% on problem A and 5% on problem B?
or
95% on problem B and 5% on problem A?
Why are we not addressing the issues that hurt and effect our daily lives the most?
That's been tried before with little success. Some people will choose to use drugs no matter what the government does. Some people will choose to be homeless. Some people are mentally ill and unable to take advantage of government programs. Some people just refuse help.
What program would you suggest, that isn't being done, that would reduce homelessness or drug overdose?
Just one of the 59 cruise missiles fired on Syria yesterday would fund intervening in and saving hundreds of lives - they cost $1.41 million each. Some people may refuse help, many, many people in these situations don't get help. Soup kitchens, treatment for mental illness, shelters, training, are all worthy causes which cost very little to run.
There are so many useful programs that could be funded, which are being defunded this year in order to prioritise spending on the military (already the largest in the world by some margin) and searching social accounts/mobile phones and storing passwords for who knows what reason (it certainly isn't to prevent terrorism).
Great success. Do some research. Spend effort expanding programs that work.
> Later, the Bush administration adopted the model, and cities and states started writing 10-year plans to end chronic homelessness.
...
> And even though many cities in the U.S. have also been doing this for a while, they still come to Utah to study why it's working so well here.
The article mentions several times that it's already being done. This isn't mutually exclusive with efforts to fight terrorism.
Whom we are chasing mostly because of the instability we caused in the region in the first place.
Between bag checks and policing at stadiums, armored cockpit doors on planes, metal detectors, and descent passport checks backed by good intelligence most opportunities for foreign born terrorists evaporate. And practically it's impossible to stop lone, home grown terrorists when a rented van can be used as a weapon. So why search my phone?
I intend only to point out that when some claim "terrorism isn't a serious problem" they're using statistics collected while we do everything we can to prevent it.
No one is ever going to give the terrorists free reign to do what they want for a year so we can collect control data.
So we can only speculate about the consequences of not doing all we can to prevent terror attacks.
Terrorism ISN'T a serious problem, compared to homelessness, obesity and other health issues, lack of access to healthcare (see: obesity and other health issues), minority rights (especially for Muslims and Mexican immigrants), labor rights, poor public transportation, etc. It just isn't. God, if people cared 1/10th as much about some of these issues as they did about "being hard on terrorism", imagine how much we could get done. Instead we're groping ten-year-old boys at airports in the name of "safety".
Edit: add source.
[1] https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/pa798_...
And most people take precautions to avoid being hit by lightning.
A one in a million risk of death is easily enough to inspire action to reduce the risk.
If you do not take a balanced approach at protection, you risk losing out the mind war. The result? The US becomes a closed country, no longer the land of the free much less the brave. The ultimate goal of terrorism is achieved.
My reference for correct behavior towards terrorism is the UK during the IRA campaign. Security was handled as a serious affair, but as silently as possible. Some fatalities were deemed innevitable, and reported as such by the media.
While these groups are less sympathetic than the IRA, early ANC, or ETA(to an extent), it's a mistake, I think, to view them as wholly different, or less human.
*Edit to clarify, these guys are definitely assholes and we need to have strategies to counter their goals.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_suicide_bombers_in_the_I...
But if we actually followed their advice, terrorists would be an enormous threat because we'd take no steps to protect ourselves.
I feel as if you might be making my point for me.
If terrorists know you don't search children, they'll place bombs on children.
It's little use locking the front door while leaving the back door wide open.
Additionally I think you are vastly overestimating the number of terrorists out there trying to carry out these attacks. We didn't do much at all in the 1970's and 1980's beyond signals and human intelligence and attacks were very rare then. And this was when we were engaged in several proxy wars with Russia. There just aren't that many people out there that are both willing, interested, and capable of attacking US civilians in spectacularly deadly ways.
You are fear mongering. You are part of the problem, and people making you arguments are destroying our freedom of movement and freedom from unreasonable search and seizure.
To quote Franklin: "They that can give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety."
Perhaps I'm misinformed, but I thought pat-downs were only used on people who refused to go through the back scatter machines.
And I haven't seen sniffer dogs or explosive detection swabs routinely used on all passengers.
Insult me if you wish, but at least try to be honest about reality.
And my main point was the even before the security theatre, at the height of post WWII global violence, terrorist attacks in the US were exceedingly rare and they still are. This suggests that we likely didn't buy anything for the sale of individual liberty.
Do they have the operational capacity to carry out thousands of attacks like this a year? You might as well say: "if we only lock cockpit doors, but don't weld them shut, well then they'll cut through them."
We make exceptions all of the time based on feasibility and cost/benefit.
They don't have operational capacity to carry out thousands of attacks per year outside their primary area of strength by any means, and this isn't really all that relevant to attacks in that area.
So the question is: how much of an impact on their operational capacity to strike into, say, the US would it be to do this. Doesn't seem like it would be much.
Do terrorists have bombs? They seem to know how to make them with extremely limited resources.
What do you think they're missing?
The Brits had special golf rules drawn up for playing through the Blitz. We need to grow up.
I'd say its a reasonable assumption. ISIS's goal is to actually succeed, not to get caught by surveillance before an attack.
> We need to grow up.
And stop trying to prevent terrorism? That's not growing up. While the Brits were playing golf during the Blitz, they were also investing vast amounts of money and lives into shooting down German planes.
later edit
In case this actually needs to be said: in the course of prosecuting a war against terrorism (itself a spectacularly bad idea, lending itself as it does to a perpetual state of war), we've invaded and more or less conquered Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, and are in what any reasonable person would call a state of war with Syria and Yemen. You can look at a map of west Asia to see what that adds up to.
We haven't conquered Libya. In fact, the Obama administration pulled out and left the country in chaos and more vulnerable than ever to terrorism.
Mine was simply that it's ridiculous to claim that the US has taken terrorism less seriously as a military objective than the UK took theirs.
Then what was the point of saying that the Brits had rules for golf during the Blitz?
Only "societal and public policy responses" can stop terrorism. What "mature" response are you suggesting?
I've had similar experiences and I'm not a Muslim and CBP would have no reason to believe I was.
And I resent you trying to use claims of racism to derail a discussion about reasonable precautions.
Sometimes, they don't even check the details, as when they pushed the story of an Olympian who was detained due to Trump's travel ban without realizing it happened under Obama.
Looks to me like we're looking for bogeymen inside our country. This is what countries suffering hard times with poor leaders do when the real outside enemies are hard to find or don't actually exist.
We forget that we hired these people to run the government, when was the last time we fired someone? I think its about time.
Home team vs visitors
Republicans vs Democrats
Christians vs Muslims
Protestants vs Catholics
Hutus vs Tutsis
Walmart vs Target
It's adverserial programming 101. Is xenophobia really surprising given how many divisions our cultures cling to?
my current working theory is that US citizens have helped their Govt hone the tactics earlier. The propaganda machine was then turned at other countries( US enemies and even allies)
And US citizens fully supported it then and even now.
Instead of fixing the real issues this country has: poverty, homelessness, joblessness, hunger, drug abuse, health care accessibility, affordable housing accessibility - we prefer to look for a boogeymen outside of the country.
Around 500-1000 Homeless Americans die from hypothermia per year, 2000-4000 Americans die per year from hunger, 35000 people on average die from drug over dose, over 500,000 people die from heart desease so in the last 15 years we lost just to these causes - around 8million people!
According to a September 2016 study by Alex Nowrasteh at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, some 3,024 Americans died from 1975 through 2015 due to foreign-born terrorism. That number includes the 9/11 terrorist attacks (2,983 people) and averages nearly 74 Americans per year.
8million+ people dead vs. 3000? So where are the real issues?
Why do we allow the government propaganda machine to fool us?