Schneier on Security

Skeptical • January 30, 2014 10:29 AM

The article is written by someone very sensitive to the subject of security, and it’s read here by people very sensitive to the subject of security. And everyone agrees that we’re deluged in being told about the dangers of the world and of terrorism – because if you’re reading lots of stuff about security, and perhaps about the NSA, then you’re also going to hear a lot about terrorism.

Stepping outside the circle of people who spend hours each day reading about security, security programs, and terrorism, however, terrorism as a public policy concern ranks behind the economy, health-care, and other issues (though terrorism continues to be perceived as an important issue) for most. Indeed, even just after the Boston bombings, <a href=http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/04/18/us-usa-explosions-boston-poll-idUSBRE93H00620130418″>Americans feared random violence more than terrorism.

The tired comparisons of the number of deaths due to terrorism and the number of deaths due to (cancer, motor vehicle accidents, etc.) are meant to argue that we spend too much time on terrorism, and that our shock at 9/11 should occur each time we encounter something that causes an equivalent number of deaths over a year.

And the comparisons are silly. We spend nearly 20% of our GDP on health-care – or nearly 3 trillion dollars a year. We spend huge sums on motor vehicle safety each year, ranging from training and testing new drivers to requiring manufacturers to make products to certain specs to designing and testing roadways to maintaining roadways to inspecting vehicles to enforcing traffic laws.

When your main topic of conversation is “the security state”, then via the availability heuristic it will be easy for one to suppose that public thoughts are dominated by the “security state” and that we’re all much too focused on it.

But, if you look at what we actually spend most of our money and time on, that’s actually not the case. We’re all much more concerned about our family’s health, our health, our bills, our employment, etc., than terrorism.

At first I was a bit bemused by the author’s perceptions, and found them interesting purely from a psychological vantage, but then he took a turn into paranoid territory:

He writes: As Scahill describes the results, the United States Special Forces kill lists of seven targets gave rise to kill lists of hundreds, which in turn gave rise to kill lists of thousands today. Does it not occur to the United States that the drone strikes and assassinations are creating more terrorists than they are neutralizing? Perhaps it has, but the calculation has been made that it does not matter. The newly minted enemies can be used to gin up more fear, more restrictions on our freedoms, and so the cycle goes.

This is a fairly bizarre diagnosis of the use of targeted killing, that the US knows it will create more terrorists than are neutralized, but the US doesn’t care because the US wants to sustain a war on terror because… I don’t know, POWER.

The air strikes the author speaks of occur in countries where the government has lost control of some of its territory; from within those areas, certain groups plan, prepare, and execute attacks on local/host government forces and officials, and often on American and allied forces and officials. Policymakers have an array of choices, ranging from “do nothing” to “offer lots of money for the attacks to stop” to “launch invasion.” None of those choices is a silver bullet. A campaign that focuses on disrupting key networks and knowledge holders by targeted strikes, while, to the extent possible, encouraging host governments to extend rule of law and aid into the uncontrolled areas (often funded by US dollars), is about the least bad choice available to them.

But it has nothing to do with deliberately fostering fear in order to continue a war.