Schneier on Security

Nick Lancaster • February 7, 2008 11:33 AM

@LC:

Sometimes i feel as if people on this
blog are on their side instead of
ours.

What you are actually feeling is called ‘fear.’

My father served during the Korean War, as did my father-in-law. An uncle was decorated for valor in World War II. And yet, you see fit to accuse me of being on the side of terrorists because I want people to start THINKING about security?

Security is about sensible decisions, not armed response.

You people are so ingrained with your > stupid “orwellian 1984” rhetoric of the > government one day taking over and
this whole thing becoming a police
state, that you can’t see yourself
being raped right in front of your own > eyes.

Raped by whom? The hordes of terrorists lurking about New York subway platforms?

And if they’re THERE, then hasn’t the whole, ‘we’re fighting them there so we don’t have to fight them here’ line a bunch of hooey?

If militant Islam wants to take America, they’ve got to take all of it, and cross an ocean on either side to get here. Then they have to take every street in every neighborhood, from major cities to small towns. They have to destroy our government, render law enforcement ineffective, and essentially become the provider for necessary services.

Instead, and perhaps more deadly than ‘Orwellian’ fantasies, is this irrational fear that you’ll suddenly wake up to the muezzin calling you to prayer, your wife and daughters will be in burkahs, and 225 years of American freedom will be replaced by Shari’a law overnight.

Or maybe what it will take for some of > you is for a stupid taliban f**K to blow > himself up and kill your family. Then
your going to be down at the precinct > asking them to give you an AK-47.

Threatening my family does not make your arguments any more sound in their reasoning.

It makes you just like the terrorists.

Or perhaps you would be a lot safer if > our government didn’t care enough
and just let them run free through our > streets.

Where is this “THEM”? Who are “THEY”?
To date, the major arrests have been a bunch of clowns who couldn’t figure out where to buy camouflage BDU’s and had to be coached in a loyalty oath by an undercover FBI agent; a guy who wanted to trade stereo equipment for automatic weapons; and a bunch of wannabe jihadists who took their ‘training video’ to Circuit City for dubbing.

You’re positing a threat of such magnitude that it requires officers to patrol with assault weapons, that there are no civil liberties to be respected, that anything is reasonable in the face of constant fear of an attack. That even having taken the fight to Afghanistan, Iraq, and casting a critical eye on Iran, Lebanon, Syria, and North Korea, that we still need to be fearful.

Vigilance is not the same as living in fear.

So all in all, it doesn’t bother me one
bit. Why should police officers with
automatic rifles scare me? I have
nothing to hide.

On the other hand, you’re afraid that someone else on the subway platform is a closet jihadist who has either snuck into this country (showing how ineffective our security/immigration policy is) or been here in hiding as a sleeper cell since before 9/11 (showing how ineffective our security/foreign policy is), and waiting to off a hundred people and convert America to an Islamic puppet state in a single stroke.

We won’t be made safer by being afraid. The discourse here is about making informed decisions, not blindly thinking more guns = more safety.

Nick Lancaster • February 7, 2008 1:35 PM

BobS:

I’m wondering how you get from my disapproving of police armed with assault weapons patrolling a subway platform to thinking that ‘do nothing’ is my chosen response to terrorism.

One of the goals of any good military offense is to hassle your opponent and prevent them from thinking rationally, I find it laughable that you’re discounting rational thought as an effective solution.

Is there a threat? Most certainly. Are there hordes of secret terrorist cells waiting for the call to jihad? Highly doubtful – the time for such an attack would have been after 9/11, while we were still struggling to cope with the impact of that event.

Will having officers equipped with assault weapons stop anything? Also highly doubtful – we’re looking at an enemy that routinely conducts attacks by stealth (improvised explosives) and more direct means (suicide bombers). Even a shooter armed with an Uzi could wreak substantial havoc in a matter of seconds, so armed patrols are already working on the likelihood that they’ll be looking in the wrong direction and having to make tactical decisions among a panicked crowd.

The goal is to develop systems that protect the populace to the best extent possible even if the terrorists manage to place a shooter or bomber in a crowded area like a subway platform, not indulge in FPS (first-person shooter) fantasies of taking down the bad guy amid panicking commuters. Real life isn’t Rainbow Six: Vegas.

Nick Lancaster • February 7, 2008 2:18 PM

Rich:

One of the problems is that a battlefield in Somalia isn’t the same as the New York subway. In addition to that, civilians have a built-in bias to their perceptions that is hard to combat.

Case in point, there was a Reuters photographer who was shot by American troops in Iraq. Cue appropriate outrage. I remember trying (and not having much success) to explain that the soldier saw a man with a bulky shoulder mounted object, and a second man holding a reload.

To everyone else, It Was Obvious that it was just a camerman and a sound guy holding a mic, and I couldn’t get through the wall of perception – the soldier sees a threat because it’s within his experience and training; we see a camera guy and an audio guy because that’s OUR experience.

I don’t know that there’s any amount of training that prepares you for a firefight amid a crowd.