And don't underestimate the Iranian government, they are not a third-world country like some people imagine out of ignorance - I really feel sorry for the Iranian people getting caught up in this mess.

Err... while I'm not stepping in to defend the TSA, I think that to call the threat imaginary ignores recent history.

Personally I'd rate this class of threat comfortably above asteroid impact or solar flare-type disaster.

Murder victims in 2001: 15,000

Car collision fatalities in 2001: 42,000

Cancer deaths in 2001: 550,000

The only thing that's disproportionate is how we react to terrorism.

(statistics are for United States)

The question is not what's possible, but what's likely and how much it will cost. If the likelihood is low and the cost is small, then you cannot justify extravagant preparation.

An attack against civilian infrastructure is terrorism no matter who does it. It may be a singular event, part of a chain of attacks, or a prelude to a full-scale military offensive. It's still terrorism, because it terrorizes the civilian population.

Irrational fear should not dictate our budget priorities. We can certainly take some precautions, and develop contingency plans. But at the end of the day, if someone is capable and determined enough, it's going to happen, regardless of how many much money and how many contractors and consultants we throw at the problem. The best we can do is take it in stride and rebuild.

Are you arguing that there are eventualities which could be disastrous, and they need not be the product of willful malice? Then of course I agree with you.

Is your point that we can and should take all possible precautions against such eventualities, regardless of cost? That's where I take disagreement. We are, after all, arguing in the context of a larger discussion here.

Our efforts at preparedness must be in proportion to the risk, which is derived from both the potential cost and our best estimate of the likelihood. Bad things happen; it's terrible, it sucks, but it's unavoidable. We can and will bankrupt ourselves trying to swat every fly. It doesn't matter that a disaster could be catastrophic if we create a catastrophe by trying to avert every disaster.

It's easy for people to just pick up a knife at a restaurant and stab someone too. People don't spend an inordinate amount of time worrying about this though because it just doesn't happen that often.

People without any part in the original conflict is getting affected by it and then suddenly they are part of it.

That is the root of problems here.

The sorts of terrorism we are afraid of tends to hype fear over risk. Take anthrax for example. Anthrax has been floated as a biological weapon because it's unlikely to spread back and contaminate one's own area, but experiments with weaponized anthrax shows an abysmally low rate of contracting the disease (between 0.1% and 1%) and so it's nearly exclusively a weapon of fear. The very things that make it attractive as a biological weapon also make it ineffective (no person-person transmission for example).

Similarly when we look at nerve gas attacks and the problems and sole case in history, it's clear these are relatively ineffective terrorism-wise. VX may be more effective than Sarin given high-tech dispersal systems but it's also very sensitive to things like droplet size and it's not volatile. Sarin, OTOH, is volatile meaning you can expect it to dissolve in the air and spread that way. Despite that, Aum Shinrikyo would have been more successful using plain old high explosives than nerve gas, and only one of their two nerve gas attacks (the one under entirely ideal circumstances) resulted in any fatalities whatsoever.

Nuclear terrorism could be significant but I suspect you'd have to blow up a small nuke in a major city every ten years to have an effect similar to car crashes nationally. I am sorry but I just don't see that happening so as long as I don't worry about getting behind the wheel I don't give that a second thought either.

All the above being said, cyberwar by non-state actors is different. Traditional terrorist attacks seek to cripple a society or socially disrupt it by killing people and making them afraid. I don't know that this necessarily has to be the intermediate goal of what people call cyber-terrorism (which is why I don't call it that). Instead it can disrupt society and hold it hostage by, well, disrupting it directly.

Imagine if power blackouts and communications infrastructure was disrupted repeatedly. Imagine if we suddenly the power grid were taken down repeatedly. What would be disrupted? How well could we recover? What if telecomunications infrastructure was attacked as well?

People would die but that's not really the goal. Just as in conventional terrorism deaths are a means to an end, sufficiently successful attackers could hold a society hostage by holding the infrastructure hostage.

I don't think it's fair to the families of the victims, to the people of NYC, or any peaceful, healthy person who has that threat in the back of their mind when minding their own business in public, to equate a cancer death with a death caused by a crumbling skyscraper, a burning skyscraper, or jumping out of a burning, crumbling skyscraper. I know cancer can be just as ruthless and indiscriminate, but it never has struck in such a concentrated, evil manner.

The only thing that's disproportionate is how we react to terrorism.

Are you implying that we shouldn't react disproportionately?

That's not to say I agree with the current level of disproportionateness or that we shouldn't be spending billions of public dollars combatting a disease that's claiming more and more people because they are now living long enough to acquire it.

The Stalin quote about "a single death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic" comes to mind here. I understand your point that terrorism is the result of direct, willful action by people with malicious intent, whereas cancer is just a force of nature. But you have no real control over either, so why make such a big deal of the former?

Not true. Even thought they need to be much smarter about it, people with guns, whom our tax dollars fund and who's power and number I fear and would like to limit, can reduce the likelihood of a terrorist ruining my life. Scientists can do the same for cancer, but unfortunately, we have more people who can fight terrorism that who can fight cancer.

We can elect leaders are vote in the marketplace to shift resources one way or the other, or be a better cancer or terrorism fighter if we are in those fields. Our individual control might be negligible, but not society's.

Our ridiculously outsized counterterrorism efforts are akin to putting a shroud around the Earth to block out cosmic background radiation. It would cost more money than we can fathom, and in the end we probably couldn't even measure the benefit. Meanwhile, the radiation you absorb from living near a nuclear plant or an old testing site is orders of magnitude greater, and yet you probably won't ever suffer a harmful effect from it.

My argument isn't that terrorism isn't real, or it isn't a threat. My argument is that it's such an insignificant threat that it fails to justify our existing efforts, nonetheless ever-more-expensive new efforts.

Also, I grew up with several major terrorist attacks against the United States, in New York (1993), Oklahoma (1997), Africa (1998), against the USS Cole (2000), and finally 9/11.

The death toll from all these incidents barely breaks 4000. More people died last week of cancer.

How many dissidents a year do you think you need to kill to suppress any opposition?

I would say that even when you factor in malicious intent we still react disproportionally, and that this is an inherent problem.

Any individual involved in any security-related field will have to work with the concept of acceptable risk at some point. The damage that terrorists can cause us is not that high compared to the way we victimize ourselves to try to prevent very modest harm.

Our reaction has become comparable to a cytokine storm in reaction to a flu virus, really. That can't be good.

Edit: As a side note, our reaction is such that it allows for what I call "grey-terrorism" vulnerabilities. If we define terrorism to only include acts which are violent or directly dangerous to human life, then leaving cardboard boxes marked "do not touch" in airport restrooms around the nation is not "terrorism." The act is not dangerous to human life. The act is not violent. The act however may be very disruptive to our airports, and it may be very good at inspiring terror.

That's not entirely true. There were ~3000 terrorism-related deaths, but the point of terrorism is that it victimizes an entire society by creating a culture of fear and uncertainty. That's what differentiates terrorism from (conventional) murder.

I just disliked the "imaginary", which clearly is not true.

I'm not following you.

Nor am I saying that I think the TSA is a good thing or an appropriate response to the threats.

A power hiccup is not a problem. A systemic power failure is a catastrophe!

1. http://www.onesecondafter.com/ 2. http://EMPCommission.org/

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2012/06/solar-storms/ferri...

It wouldn't matter: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutually_assured_destruction

MAD doesn't prevent anything, it at best postpones things and at worst forces both sides to escalate to the point where they feel they can completely destroy the other even given significant losses (i.e. building significantly more bombs than they need to destroy the planet).

Iran is probably the worst country on the planet when it comes to supporting terrorism.

Consider that democracies in general seems to go crazy when they have active terrorism problems and throw out human rights and the law book. E.g. Germany, USA, Israel, Great Britain, Italy, Spain, etc. (The only exception afaik is India.)

It is logical because the whole point with terror is to scare civilians -- and politicians wants to be elected again. They have to solve terror problems, no matter what.

You don't have to like this, in fact no one except companies earning money doing security likes it. All choices in the real world also has disadvantages, even democracy.

Maybe you want to update your knowledge and find out what is the worst country. You will surprised to see the so calle "best" democracies there.

http://blog.amnestyusa.org/us/shocking-facts-about-whos-armi...

Every powerful country uses violence to advance it's political goals. Every powerful country kills the civilians/citizens of other countries, publicly expressing varying amounts of regret.

I might stand corrected, there.

>>Every powerful country kills the civilians/citizens of other countries

To explicitly target civilians is serious because it breaks the laws of war, etc. Democracies generally don't do that.

The "Democracies" of the world kill many innocent civilians, an order of magnitude in fact than any terrorist related event if you really want to compare the two. Not because the people running them are cartoonishly evil or anything, it simply reflects the massive imbalance of military power between us and whoever the terrorist are supposed to be. It's cloaked in talk of noble intentions and euphemistically referred to as collateral damage. I doubt it makes a difference to the populations affected whether they were an intentional target, or the gps on the smart bomb that just leveled your house glitched out.

You're wrong.

If an airliner (or even a weapon) goes astray and kills my family, I am going to be angry, no doubt about it.

If you've deliberately targeted my family, my anger is going to be greater by several orders of magnitude.

For example, this case that was in the news today:

http://www.startribune.com/lifestyle/156366185.html

Suppose the phosphorous did get there through some type of negligence on one of the nearby bases (seems plausible, at least).

Are the woman and her family going to be angry? You bet. Are they going to file a monster lawsuit? Almost certainly. Are they going to declare war on the United States, or (try to) kill a few Marines? Not a chance in hell.

Intent matters.

I do think intent can matter at times. Perhaps what I'm more zeroing in on is that idea that I don't find saying you didn't mean to, when you repeatedly kill civilians in very large numbers, such that certain countries have a long history of being on the receiving end of American collateral damage, as an acceptable rational/excuse. (This last part is why I think you're examples are not particularly apt)

Your intent just stops mattering as much when the body count gets to a certain number and you show no signs of changing the behavior.

How about if a junta relies on that a democracy don't want to pay those prices and creates a situation where blood will flow if they don't get their will?

Arguably, both Japan 1945 and Saddam Hussein are cases of that.

Do you REALLY want dictators to rely on using their own people's suffering to get out of e.g. sanctions or surrender? I doubt it...

Sorry for coming in late. I bother writing these answers because I used to have similar opinions as you before my hair started to fall out. You are a standin for a young berntb, I guess.

Got the answer: "kill many innocent civilians"

Sigh, it is illegal to target. In a war, civilians will die. My point was that some sides do try to avoid civilan casualities. You didn't argue against my point, you made a spin.

Then, someone isn't morally right by being weaker, so different strength have nothing to do with it.

The nuclear bombs over Japan was 1: a long time ago, 2: a complex choice (e.g. military production in cities, different standards in WWII, the target selection process, etc, etc). You condemn without discussing that.

And so on.

I am sorry, but I must say that you write simplified propaganda. Please increase quality, I want a better HN. :-(

You place a lot of emphasis on intentionality. While it's an aspect worth considering, I don't find it as nearly as persuasive as you seem to. Many military actions are undertaken knowing full well the result with be civilian causalities, often many, and they are done anyway. Like I said earlier, I don't think your distinction means much to the victims whether they were intentional targets or not.

> The nuclear bombs over Japan was 1: a long time ago,

Uh, not really. It's still within living memory for many. And I think highly pertinent when discussing current issues of nuclear weapons/proliferation.

> 2: a complex choice (e.g. military production in cities, different standards in WWII, the target selection process, etc, etc). You condemn without discussing that.

I didn't get into those aspects in the interest of brevity, and because it veers a bit too off topic. I have considered them all at length, and ultimately find them unconvincing from a moral standpoint. Also notice how any actions taken by our society, or those representing it, immediately become complex and a hundred shades of grey. I'm sure those supporting acts of terrorism make similar rationales. No one buys it in that case, and I think we should be highly skeptical when our leaders seek to justify it in ours.

> I am sorry, but I must say that you write simplified propaganda. Please increase quality, I want a better HN. :-(

I'm not sure how to respond to such hyperbole. Everything I've stated is factually true. You can disagree with my interpretation, or the implicit conclusions I've drawn, but labeling it as simplified propaganda is just silly.

You are in a very small minority there. Sorry.

I'm fine with that.

One last point worth considering - exactly what is the evidence that it is unintentional? None as far as I can tell other our leaders assert it constantly. And then turn around and do it again, repeatedly. To be clear, I don't think likely almost ever is. There's simply no advantage to it, especially in the modern information age. It's willful disregard in my opinion, which is debatably marginally better, but only marginally.

And the reason I focus on the actions of my society, the US, boils down to partly because it's my home, and there's no where you care more about than your own home. As much as I condemn the actions of Iran, or any other state, there's zero I can do about it. I'm not Iranian. I can, however, affect change here, again in the most powerful state, where it matters most. And the most fundamental principle of any moral framework is that you hold yourself to the same standards you seek to apply to others. More stringent ones, in fact, if you're serious about it.

A few levels up, I noted that democracies in general tend to go bat-shit crazy at terrorism -- and that it is probably built into the concept of democracy.

It should also be noted that modern democracies don't fight wars with each others, not even the USA. The best solution for making a better world is to work for democracy, especially in places like China which already has started to push a bit against neighbours.

It is quite unusual in not seeing a difference with killing someone by losing control of your car on the way to hospital with a hurt child -- and shooting an unarmed civilian in the face...

>>Many military actions are undertaken knowing full well the result with be civilian causalities, often many

Most westerners do believe in war laws. Here is an US-critical article. Compare it with e.g. the militias in Iraq or Hezbollah. They shoot artillery at cities, etc.

You see no difference in that -- as was noted, it makes you not only in a minority, but also arguing the same position as people that really murder children point blank. You ignore all other laws too?

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v25/n04/michael-byers/the-laws-of-war-u...

They do. In practice someone is often seen as morally right just because he is stronger than his oponent (politicaly or military or in some other way).

Democracies generally try not to publicize doing that. Unless it's done with drones apparently, then you brag about it.

Because the definition of militant explicitly includes civilians in the area surrounding the targets and this was recently highly publicized I tied the two together in a flippant comment.

But I suspect you knew that already and now want to argue about the US use of drones. I'll save you the time, it's terrorism dressed in Orwellian doublespeak and it's pointless to have internet arguments about it.

If you would want to be serious (somehow I doubt it), either (a) argue against the war laws or (b) argue that usa breaks them.

Note that in this case, the terrorists target civilians and seem to use their own civilians as shields. You have no problem with that?

And Norway didn't go nuts over the Breivik attack either.

Oh, and are you aware that Israel backed Jundullah, which is a Pakistani AlQaeda?

Command of the facts helps avoid embarrassment.

The UK gov't instituted a number of very harsh laws that severely curtailed the rights of UK citizens.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prevention_of_Terrorism_Acts

"This part allowed for the arrest of individuals without a warrant and on reasonable suspicion that they were guilty of an offence under the Act or otherwise "concerned in the commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism""

Thanks for the link, I didn't know the name of the law. Also, there were some ... cough ... controversial interrogation methods in the 70s, until there was too much human rights criticism.

Anyway, I'm not an expert on the UK and IRA, but believe/assume part of the inspiration for the wonderful T Gilliam movie "Brazil" came from this.

Do you still believe in Jewish conspiracies controlling media?

Or that T-shirts of some individuals prove something about a heterogeneous country -- and are as bad as official policies in another state?!

Ah wait, you refused to touch that "logic" of yours in comment after comment...

Breivik was an individual crazy/nazi/xxx. There are hardly realistic threats for more attacks in Norway. I argued about fear of terror, not mourning after one attack.

(Edit: It is really fun that you condemn Israel for working with unpleasant groups where they have common interests -- all countries with physical threats do similar things -- but previously refused to criticise similar groups.)

And so on, sorry but I can't take you seriously.