Essays in the Category "Terrorism"
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Virginia Tech Lesson: Rare Risks Breed Irrational Responses
Everyone had a reaction to the horrific events of the Virginia Tech shootings. Some of those reactions were rational. Others were not.
A high school student was suspended for customizing a first-person shooter game with a map of his school. A contractor was fired from his government job for talking about a gun, and then visited by the FBI when he created a comic about the incident. A dean at Yale banned realistic stage weapons from the university theaters—a policy that was reversed within a day. And some teachers terrorized…
How to Not Catch Terrorists
Data mining for terrorists: It’s an idea that just won’t die. But it won’t find any terrorists, it puts us at greater risk of crimes like identity theft, and it gives the police far too much power in a free society.
The first massive government program to collect dossiers on every American for data mining purposes was called Total Information Awareness. The public found the idea so abhorrent, and objected so forcefully, that Congress killed funding for the program in September 2003. But data mining is like a hydra—chop one head off, two more grow in its place. In May 2004, the General Accounting Office published a …
The Problem With Copycat Cops
It’s called ” splash-and-grab,” and it’s a new way to rob convenience stores. Two guys walk into a store, and one comes up to the counter with a cup of hot coffee or cocoa. He pays for it, and when the clerk opens the cash drawer, he throws the coffee in the clerk’s face. The other one grabs the cash drawer, and they both run.
Crimes never change, but tactics do. This tactic is new; someone just invented it. But now that it’s in the news, copycats are repeating the trick. There have been at least 19 such robberies in Delaware, Pennsylvania and New Jersey. (Some …
Why Smart Cops Do Dumb Things
Since 9/11, we’ve spent hundreds of billions of dollars defending ourselves from terrorist attacks. Stories about the ineffectiveness of many of these security measures are common, but less so are discussions of why they are so ineffective. In short: Much of our country’s counterterrorism security spending is not designed to protect us from the terrorists, but instead to protect our public officials from criticism when another attack occurs.
Boston, Jan. 31: As part of a guerilla marketing campaign, a series of amateur-looking blinking signs depicting characters in …
The Architecture of Security
You’ve seen them: those large concrete blocks in front of skyscrapers, monuments and government buildings, designed to protect against car and truck bombs. They sprang up like weeds in the months after 9/11, but the idea is much older. The prettier ones doubled as planters; the uglier ones just stood there.
Form follows function. From medieval castles to modern airports, security concerns have always influenced architecture. Castles appeared during the reign of King Stephen of England because they were the best way to defend the land and there wasn’t a strong king to put any limits on castle-building. But castle design changed over the centuries in response to both innovations in warfare and politics, from motte-and-bailey to concentric design in the late medieval period to entirely decorative castles in the 19th century…
Refuse to be Terrorized
On Aug. 16, two men were escorted off a plane headed for Manchester, England, because some passengers thought they looked either Asian or Middle Eastern, might have been talking Arabic, wore leather jackets, and looked at their watches—and the passengers refused to fly with them on board.
The men were questioned for several hours and then released.
On Aug. 15, an entire airport terminal was evacuated because someone’s cosmetics triggered a false positive for explosives. The same day, a Muslim man was removed from an airplane in Denver for reciting prayers. The Transportation Security Administration decided that the flight crew overreacted, but he still had to spend the night in Denver before flying home the next day…
Bruce Schneier: Focus on terrorists, not tactics
It's easy to defend against what they planned last time, but it's shortsighted.
Hours-long waits in the security line. Ridiculous prohibitions on what you can carry onboard. Last week’s foiling of a major terrorist plot and the subsequent airport security graphically illustrates the difference between effective security and security theater.
None of the airplane security measures implemented because of 9/11—no-fly lists, secondary screening, prohibitions against pocket knives and corkscrews—had anything to do with last week’s arrests. And they wouldn’t have prevented the planned attacks, had the terrorists not been arrested. A national ID card wouldn’t have made a difference, either…
The Scariest Terror Threat of All
For a while now, I have been writing about our penchant for “movie-plot threats”—terrorist fears based on very specific attack scenarios.
Terrorists with crop-dusters, terrorists exploding baby carriages in subways, terrorists filling school buses with explosives—these are all movie-plot threats. They’re good for scaring people, but it’s just silly to build national security policy around them.
But if we’re going to worry about unlikely attacks, why can’t they be exciting and innovative ones? If Americans are going to be scared, shouldn’t they be scared of things that are really scary? “Blowing up the Super Bowl” is a movie plot, to be sure, but it’s …
We're Giving Up Privacy and Getting Little in Return
Better to Put People, Not Computers, in Charge of Investigating Potential Plots
Collecting information about every American’s phone calls is an example of data mining. The basic idea is to collect as much information as possible on everyone, sift through it with massive computers, and uncover terrorist plots. It’s a compelling idea, and convinces many. But it’s wrong. We’re not going to find terrorist plots through systems like this, and we’re going to waste valuable resources chasing down false alarms. To understand why, we have to look at the economics of the system.
Data mining works best when you’re searching for a well-defined profile, a reasonable number of attacks per year, and a low cost of false alarms. Credit-card fraud is one of data mining’s success stories: All credit-card companies mine their transaction databases for data for spending patterns that indicate a stolen card…
Let Computers Screen Air Baggage
It seems like every time someone tests airport security, airport security fails. In tests between November 2001 and February 2002, screeners missed 70 percent of knives, 30 percent of guns and 60 percent of (fake) bombs. And recently, testers were able to smuggle bomb-making parts through airport security in 21 of 21 attempts. It makes you wonder why we’re all putting our laptops in a separate bin and taking off our shoes. (Although we should all be glad that Richard Reid wasn’t the “underwear bomber.”)
The failure to detect bomb-making parts is easier to understand. Break up something into small enough parts, and it’s going to slip past the screeners pretty easily. The explosive material won’t show up on the metal detector, and the associated electronics can look benign when disassembled. This isn’t even a new problem. It’s widely believed that the Chechen women who blew up the two Russian planes in August 2004 probably smuggled their bombs aboard the planes in pieces…
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.