Entries Tagged "fear"
Page 20 of 23
Is Everything a Bomb These Days?
In New Mexico, a bomb squad blew up two CD players, duct-taped to the bottoms of church pews, that played pornographic messages during Mass. This is a pretty funny high school prank and I hope the kids that did it get suitably punished. But they’re not terrorists. And I have a hard time believing that the police actually thought CD players were bombs.
Meanwhile, Irish police blew up a tape dispenser left outside a police station.
And not to be outdone, the Dutch police mistook one of their own transmitters for a bomb. At least they didn’t blow anything up.
Okay, everyone. We need some ideas, here. If we’re going to think everything weird is a bomb, then the false alarms are going to kill any hope of security.
EDITED TO ADD (3/3): If you’re having trouble identifying bombs, this quiz should help. And here’s a relevant cartoon.
Movie Plot Threat in Vancouver
The idiocy of this is impressive:
A Vancouver Police computer crime investigator has warned the city that plans for a citywide wireless Internet system put the city at risk of terrorist attack during the 2010 Winter Olympic Games.
The problem? Well, the problem seems to be that terrorists might attend the Olympic games and use the Internet while they’re there.
“If you have an open wireless system across the city, as a bad guy I could sit on a bus with a laptop and do global crime,” Fenton explained. “It would be virtually impossible to find me.”
There’s also some scary stuff about SCADA systems, and the city putting some of its own service on the Internet. Clearly this guy has thought about the risks a lot, just not with any sense. He’s overestimating cyberterrorism. He’s overestimating how important this one particular method of wireless Internet access is. He’s overestimating how important the 2010 Winter Olympics is.
But the newspaper was happy to play along and spread the fear. The photograph accompanying the article is captioned: “Anyone with a laptop and wireless access could commit a terrorist act, police warn.”
Song Parody
EDITED TO ADD (1/8): This post has generated much more controversy than I expected. Yes, it’s in very poor taste. No, I don’t agree with the sentiment in the words. And no, I don’t know anything about the provenance of the lyrics or the sentiment of the person who wrote or sang them.
I probably should have said that, instead of just posting the link.
I apologize to anyone I offended by including this link. And I am going to close comments on this thread.
TSA Security Round-Up
Innocent passenger arrested for trying to bring a rubber-band ball onto an airplane.
Woman passes out on plane after her drugs are confiscated.
San Francisco International Airport screeners were warned in advance of undercover test.
And a cartoon.
We have a serious problem in this country. The TSA operates above, and outside, the law. There’s no due process, no judicial review, no appeal.
EDITED TO ADD (11/21): And six Muslim imams removed from a plane by US Airways because…well because they’re Muslim and that scares people. After they were cleared by the authorities, US Airways refused to sell them a ticket. Refuse to be terrorized, people!
Note that US Airways is the culprit here, not the TSA.
EDITED TO ADD (11/22): Frozen spaghetti sauce confiscated:
You think this is silly, and it is, but a week ago my mother caused a small commotion at a checkpoint at Boston-Logan after screeners discovered a large container of homemade tomato sauce in her bag. What with the preponderance of spaghetti grenades and lasagna bombs, we can all be proud of their vigilance. And, as a liquid, tomato sauce is in clear violation of the Transportation Security Administration’s carry-on statutes. But this time, there was a wrinkle: The sauce was frozen.
No longer in its liquid state, the sauce had the guards in a scramble. According to my mother’s account, a supervisor was called over to help assess the situation. He spent several moments stroking his chin. “He struck me as the type of person who spent most of his life traveling with the circus,” says Mom, who never pulls a punch, “and was only vaguely familiar with the concept of refrigeration.” Nonetheless, drawing from his experiences in grade-school chemistry and at the TSA academy, he sized things up. “It’s not a liquid right now,” he observantly noted. “But it will be soon.”
In the end, the TSA did the right thing and let the woman on with her frozen food.
Perceived Risk vs. Actual Risk
I’ve written repeatedly about the difference between perceived and actual risk, and how it explains many seemingly perverse security trade-offs. Here’s a Los Angeles Times op-ed that does the same. The author is Daniel Gilbert, psychology professor at Harvard. (I just recently finished his book Stumbling on Happiness, which is not a self-help book but instead about how the brain works. Strongly recommended.)
The op-ed is about the public’s reaction to the risks of global warming and terrorism, but the points he makes are much more general. He gives four reasons why some risks are perceived to be more or less serious than they actually are:
- We over-react to intentional actions, and under-react to accidents, abstract events, and natural phenomena.
That’s why we worry more about anthrax (with an annual death toll of roughly zero) than influenza (with an annual death toll of a quarter-million to a half-million people). Influenza is a natural accident, anthrax is an intentional action, and the smallest action captures our attention in a way that the largest accident doesn’t. If two airplanes had been hit by lightning and crashed into a New York skyscraper, few of us would be able to name the date on which it happened.
- We over-react to things that offend our morals.
When people feel insulted or disgusted, they generally do something about it, such as whacking each other over the head, or voting. Moral emotions are the brain’s call to action.
He doesn’t say it, but it’s reasonable to assume that we under-react to things that don’t.
- We over-react to immediate threats and under-react to long-term threats.
The brain is a beautifully engineered get-out-of-the-way machine that constantly scans the environment for things out of whose way it should right now get. That’s what brains did for several hundred million years—and then, just a few million years ago, the mammalian brain learned a new trick: to predict the timing and location of dangers before they actually happened.
Our ability to duck that which is not yet coming is one of the brain’s most stunning innovations, and we wouldn’t have dental floss or 401(k) plans without it. But this innovation is in the early stages of development. The application that allows us to respond to visible baseballs is ancient and reliable, but the add-on utility that allows us to respond to threats that loom in an unseen future is still in beta testing.
- We under-react to changes that occur slowly and over time.
The human brain is exquisitely sensitive to changes in light, sound, temperature, pressure, size, weight and just about everything else. But if the rate of change is slow enough, the change will go undetected. If the low hum of a refrigerator were to increase in pitch over the course of several weeks, the appliance could be singing soprano by the end of the month and no one would be the wiser.
It’s interesting to compare this to what I wrote in Beyond Fear (pages 26-27) about perceived vs. actual risk:
- People exaggerate spectacular but rare risks and downplay common risks. They worry more about earthquakes than they do about slipping on the bathroom floor, even though the latter kills far more people than the former. Similarly, terrorism causes far more anxiety than common street crime, even though the latter claims many more lives. Many people believe that their children are at risk of being given poisoned candy by strangers at Halloween, even though there has been no documented case of this ever happening.
- People have trouble estimating risks for anything not exactly like their normal situation. Americans worry more about the risk of mugging in a foreign city, no matter how much safer it might be than where they live back home. Europeans routinely perceive the U.S. as being full of guns. Men regularly underestimate how risky a situation might be for an unaccompanied woman. The risks of computer crime are generally believed to be greater than they are, because computers are relatively new and the risks are unfamiliar. Middle-class Americans can be particularly naïve and complacent; their lives are incredibly secure most of the time, so their instincts about the risks of many situations have been dulled.
- Personified risks are perceived to be greater than anonymous risks. Joseph Stalin said, “A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.” He was right; large numbers have a way of blending into each other. The final death toll from 9/11 was less than half of the initial estimates, but that didn’t make people feel less at risk. People gloss over statistics of automobile deaths, but when the press writes page after page about nine people trapped in a mine—complete with human-interest stories about their lives and families—suddenly everyone starts paying attention to the dangers with which miners have contended for centuries. Osama bin Laden represents the face of Al Qaeda, and has served as the personification of the terrorist threat. Even if he were dead, it would serve the interests of some politicians to keep him “alive” for his effect on public opinion.
- People underestimate risks they willingly take and overestimate risks in situations they can’t control. When people voluntarily take a risk, they tend to underestimate it. When they have no choice but to take the risk, they tend to overestimate it. Terrorists are scary because they attack arbitrarily, and from nowhere. Commercial airplanes are perceived as riskier than automobiles, because the controls are in someone else’s hands—even though they’re much safer per passenger mile. Similarly, people overestimate even more those risks that they can’t control but think they, or someone, should. People worry about airplane crashes not because we can’t stop them, but because we think as a society we should be capable of stopping them (even if that is not really the case). While we can’t really prevent criminals like the two snipers who terrorized the Washington, DC, area in the fall of 2002 from killing, most people think we should be able to.
- Last, people overestimate risks that are being talked about and remain an object of public scrutiny. News, by definition, is about anomalies. Endless numbers of automobile crashes hardly make news like one airplane crash does. The West Nile virus outbreak in 2002 killed very few people, but it worried many more because it was in the news day after day. AIDS kills about 3 million people per year worldwide—about three times as many people each day as died in the terrorist attacks of 9/11. If a lunatic goes back to the office after being fired and kills his boss and two coworkers, it’s national news for days. If the same lunatic shoots his ex-wife and two kids instead, it’s local news…maybe not even the lead story.
What the Terrorists Want
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. The next day, a Port of Seattle terminal was evacuated because a couple of dogs gave a false alarm for explosives.
On Aug. 19, a plane made an emergency landing in Tampa, Florida, after the crew became suspicious because two of the lavatory doors were locked. The plane was searched, but nothing was found. Meanwhile, a man who tampered with a bathroom smoke detector on a flight to San Antonio was cleared of terrorism, but only after having his house searched.
On Aug. 16, a woman suffered a panic attack and became violent on a flight from London to Washington, so the plane was escorted to the Boston airport by fighter jets. “The woman was carrying hand cream and matches but was not a terrorist threat,” said the TSA spokesman after the incident.
And on Aug. 18, a plane flying from London to Egypt made an emergency landing in Italy when someone found a bomb threat scrawled on an air sickness bag. Nothing was found on the plane, and no one knows how long the note was on board.
I’d like everyone to take a deep breath and listen for a minute.
The point of terrorism is to cause terror, sometimes to further a political goal and sometimes out of sheer hatred. The people terrorists kill are not the targets; they are collateral damage. And blowing up planes, trains, markets or buses is not the goal; those are just tactics. The real targets of terrorism are the rest of us: the billions of us who are not killed but are terrorized because of the killing. The real point of terrorism is not the act itself, but our reaction to the act.
And we’re doing exactly what the terrorists want.
We’re all a little jumpy after the recent arrest of 23 terror suspects in Great Britain. The men were reportedly plotting a liquid-explosive attack on airplanes, and both the press and politicians have been trumpeting the story ever since.
In truth, it’s doubtful that their plan would have succeeded; chemists have been debunking the idea since it became public. Certainly the suspects were a long way off from trying: None had bought airline tickets, and some didn’t even have passports.
Regardless of the threat, from the would-be bombers’ perspective, the explosives and planes were merely tactics. Their goal was to cause terror, and in that they’ve succeeded.
Imagine for a moment what would have happened if they had blown up 10 planes. There would be canceled flights, chaos at airports, bans on carry-on luggage, world leaders talking tough new security measures, political posturing and all sorts of false alarms as jittery people panicked. To a lesser degree, that’s basically what’s happening right now.
Our politicians help the terrorists every time they use fear as a campaign tactic. The press helps every time it writes scare stories about the plot and the threat. And if we’re terrified, and we share that fear, we help. All of these actions intensify and repeat the terrorists’ actions, and increase the effects of their terror.
(I am not saying that the politicians and press are terrorists, or that they share any of the blame for terrorist attacks. I’m not that stupid. But the subject of terrorism is more complex than it appears, and understanding its various causes and effects are vital for understanding how to best deal with it.)
The implausible plots and false alarms actually hurt us in two ways. Not only do they increase the level of fear, but they also waste time and resources that could be better spent fighting the real threats and increasing actual security. I’ll bet the terrorists are laughing at us.
Another thought experiment: Imagine for a moment that the British government arrested the 23 suspects without fanfare. Imagine that the TSA and its European counterparts didn’t engage in pointless airline-security measures like banning liquids. And imagine that the press didn’t write about it endlessly, and that the politicians didn’t use the event to remind us all how scared we should be. If we’d reacted that way, then the terrorists would have truly failed.
It’s time we calm down and fight terror with antiterror. This does not mean that we simply roll over and accept terrorism. There are things our government can and should do to fight terrorism, most of them involving intelligence and investigation—and not focusing on specific plots.
But our job is to remain steadfast in the face of terror, to refuse to be terrorized. Our job is to not panic every time two Muslims stand together checking their watches. There are approximately 1 billion Muslims in the world, a large percentage of them not Arab, and about 320 million Arabs in the Middle East, the overwhelming majority of them not terrorists. Our job is to think critically and rationally, and to ignore the cacophony of other interests trying to use terrorism to advance political careers or increase a television show’s viewership.
The surest defense against terrorism is to refuse to be terrorized. Our job is to recognize that terrorism is just one of the risks we face, and not a particularly common one at that. And our job is to fight those politicians who use fear as an excuse to take away our liberties and promote security theater that wastes money and doesn’t make us any safer.
This essay originally appeared on Wired.com.
EDITED TO ADD (3/24): Here’s another incident.
EDITED TO ADD (3/29): There have been many more incidents since I wrote this—all false alarms. I’ve stopped keeping a list.
Last Week's Terrorism Arrests
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.
Instead, the arrests are a victory for old-fashioned intelligence and investigation. Details are still secret, but police in at least two countries were watching the terrorists for a long time. They followed leads, figured out who was talking to whom, and slowly pieced together both the network and the plot.
The new airplane security measures focus on that plot, because authorities believe they have not captured everyone involved. It’s reasonable to assume that a few lone plotters, knowing their compatriots are in jail and fearing their own arrest, would try to finish the job on their own. The authorities are not being public with the details—much of the “explosive liquid” story doesn’t hang together—but the excessive security measures seem prudent.
But only temporarily. Banning box cutters since 9/11, or taking off our shoes since Richard Reid, has not made us any safer. And a long-term prohibition against liquid carry-ons won’t make us safer, either. It’s not just that there are ways around the rules, it’s that focusing on tactics is a losing proposition.
It’s easy to defend against what the terrorists planned last time, but it’s shortsighted. If we spend billions fielding liquid-analysis machines in airports and the terrorists use solid explosives, we’ve wasted our money. If they target shopping malls, we’ve wasted our money. Focusing on tactics simply forces the terrorists to make a minor modification in their plans. There are too many targets—stadiums, schools, theaters, churches, the long line of densely packed people before airport security—and too many ways to kill people.
Security measures that require us to guess correctly don’t work, because invariably we will guess wrong. It’s not security, it’s security theater: measures designed to make us feel safer but not actually safer.
Airport security is the last line of defense, and not a very good one at that. Sure, it’ll catch the sloppy and the stupid—and that’s a good enough reason not to do away with it entirely—but it won’t catch a well-planned plot. We can’t keep weapons out of prisons; we can’t possibly keep them off airplanes.
The goal of a terrorist is to cause terror. Last week’s arrests demonstrate how real security doesn’t focus on possible terrorist tactics, but on the terrorists themselves. It’s a victory for intelligence and investigation, and a dramatic demonstration of how investments in these areas pay off.
And if you want to know what you can do to help? Don’t be terrorized. They terrorize more of us if they kill some of us, but the dead are beside the point. If we give in to fear, the terrorists achieve their goal even if they were arrested. If we refuse to be terrorized, then they lose—even if their attacks succeed.
This op ed appeared today in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.
EDITED TO ADD (8/13): The Department of Homeland Security declares an entire state of matter a security risk. And here’s a good commentary on being scared.
CATO on the Risks of Terrorism
Terrorists can be defeated simply by not becomming terrorized—that is, anything that enhances fear effectively gives in to them.
EDITED TO ADD (8/7): Commentary from BoingBoing.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.