Schneier on Security

Dirk Praet • December 8, 2010 6:17 PM

Whichever way you turn it, terrorism directed against innocent civilians is a low and cowardly act that cannot be justified in any way. Fear mongering and expensive, retroactive countermeasures invading on basic civil rights of huge amounts of people are a poor answer for more than one reason.

To start with, it’s exactly what terrorists want: creating a climate of fear and hatred with the sole purpose of destabilizing society. In addition to that, doors are set wide open for entities with other agendas than just combatting terrorism, seizing the opportunity to increase their own control over the general public. Last but not least, I just can’t help but feeling highly sceptical about the abysmal degree of creativity displayed by many controls currently put in place. You cannot efficiently fight a disease by just tackling the symptoms.

From where I stand, resilience and determination in the end make for a better stand than many of the questionable “security controls” I see happening today. This, however, does not mean that we should just sit there and let things happen. It stands to reason that every organisation or individual engaging in suspicious activities be followed up on if there are sufficient objective reasons to do so. Although it may prove impossible to stop every lone wolf dead in his tracks, there is a lot that can be done to counter organised terrorism. And in a smarter way.

First of all, the countless intelligence and security agencies both at home and globally need to communicate well and coordinate their efforts in an efficient way (intel, infiltration, dry-bleeding of funds). With what we know today, 9/11 might have been avoided if agencies had worked together instead of on their own. Considering the number of plots thwarted since, serious progress has been made, but there is still massive room for improvement.

In the specific case of islamist terrorism, and in my opinion, the west as a whole is still not doing enough to reach out to moderate muslim communities, try to understand where they come from, find common ground and work together on issues that concern us all. Ordinary, peace-loving muslims are just as much a victim of fundamentalists as everyone else is. It’s about mutual comprehension and collaboration.

This will require substantial efforts from both sides, but eventually will prove the best guarantee to weaken support for extremist minority factions boasting they alone are the voice of the muslim world. Personally, I would also welcome higher numbers of islamic clerics speaking out against suicide terrorists and issuing fatwas against parties inciting such acts.

Again in this specific case, we may even turn to the Holy Qur’an and use it against those fundamentalists lured into believing that by dying as a martyr in the jihad, they will go to Firdaus, the Seventh Heaven. Such individuals might be dissuaded from their actions if by law a terrorist act resulting in mass murder would be punishable by denial of common death rites and remains burried at an undisclosed location, head pointed away from Mekka. If my interpretation of the scriptures is correct, this would effectively prohibit them from entering the afterlife. I do realize that I’m on very thin ice here and that I risk getting flamed by human rights activists, deeply religious folks and others crying out “cruel and unusual punishment”.

Then again, it’s just a hypothetical example of what I call “creative thinking” as a response to unusual and unconventional attacks by individuals that are more concerned with their next life than their current one. And that of others, for that matter. If my assumption would be correct – I’m not a muslim cleric – , it would prove to be a far more efficient measure than much of the stuff we’ve seen to date, at a far lower cost and without any nuisance whatsoever to the general public.

The point I’m trying to make is that you cannot win an unconventional war with conventional means. To do that, we need more out-of-the-box-thinking than is the case today.