There are all kinds of cancers that "only" kill 1,000 or so people per year that are deemed not worthy of research because they are so rare. But for terrorism, we sacrifice nearly inexhaustible supplies of money and time. We sacrifice our liberty, our privacy. None of it makes any sense.
Terrorism is nothing but fear mongering to effect an increase in power.
> Since 1865, there have been 5,031 deaths and 22,125 injuries caused by terrorism in the United States.
Here's another way of spinning the same data:
There have been more deaths caused by terrorism in the US in last 15 years than in the prior 135 years.
Furthermore, I don't think your comparisons to deaths from car accidents or cancer are completely valid. Those are both phenomena for which induction works well (what has happened previously is a good predictor of what will happen in the future) because the events come from more or less stationary distributions. As illustrated by September 11th attacks, the number of terrorist deaths can double in a single day. There's no reason that this can't happen again with an event with >5k deaths in a single day.
For those who have read anything by Nicholas Nassim Taleb:
Nicholas Nassim Taleb might argue that terrorist attacks are black swan events (impossible to predict, potentially very large impact) and that the comparision of terrorist deaths (a distribution from Extremistan) to motor vehicle deaths is not very valuable.
On the other hand, I don't believe the level of NSA surveillance is appropriate. I'm just trying to illustrate the amount of effort one puts into thwarting something shouldn't just depend on its previous costs, but also on the probability distribution of the event (and your uncertainty in that).
tl;dr: Terrorism is more like pg's view of a startup in that it has potential for explosive growth, while motor accident deaths are more like a well established medium sized business.
If you're going to go by Taleb's logic, your point-of-view is directly contradicted in his later book, 'Anti-fragile'.
With every occurrence of a black swan event, you are made more resilient in preventing an event of a similar kind. So, now that we know that 9/11 can happen, we're now more mentally prepared than ever to prevent something like it if it happens again. Case in point, pilots now carry weapons and are much more likely to thwart attempts of hijacking. Passengers will also react more violently and vigorously now towards any sign of threat. Note that we actually have a few precedents since 9/11 in which hijacking of airplanes were thwarted in this manner.
How does Anti-fragile contradict lightcatcher's point-of-view? I understood him to say, simply, that terrorist attacks are from Extremistan, while car accidents are from Mediocristan, thus they aren't comparable phenomena.
Actually, there are a lot of reasons it's extremely unlikely to happen again with an event with >5k deaths in a single day.
And even if that does happen, so what? Even if an attack happens that dwarfs 9/11, it'll still be insignificant compared to the country as a whole, and not justify anything near the amount of money spent to fight it.
Barring the detonation of a nuclear bomb in a major US city, there's just nothing that terrorists can do that would really count for much, as long as we can avoid a massive overreaction.
As I've said before, I don't get this idea that we should strive to act like that darkly funny scene in Terry Gilliam's Brazil, wherein the patrons and staff at a bombed restaurant attempt to continue dining as if nothing has happened.
Let's suppose that some terrorist group became skilled enough to bomb a major sporting event or other large concentration of people every six months or so. Not big bombs, mind you, just enough to kill a few dozen or a hundred people each.
By the strategy seemingly being argued for here, a "resilient" or "rational" America would just let the existing police do their work as best they can, maybe with some not-too-expensive Federal assistance, and simply accept the added risk of dying at major events, which, after all, is not that much more significant than the risk of dying in a car accident on the way.
Obviously, that is not the response we'd expect, and it's not because Americans are irrational or fearful. It's because this prioritization-by-mortality-rate policy logic is faulty. It matters that there's an agency behind these deaths. One thing our society values highly is justice, and that often requires a disproportionately expensive response to an unjust act, and not solely to buy deterrence.
Well, we have historical examples of both approaches.
The British provide the stereotypical example of my suggestion. The famous "Keep Calm and Carry On" slogan, of course, comes from their experience during the Blitz. (And yes, I realize it was never published in that time, but it still typifies the response.) The Blitz killed 40,000 civilians, but people did basically go on with their lives and let the government handle things, because that was the best way to do it. Freaking out wasn't going to help the war effort.
The British provide another example of the approach with The Troubles. Not so much in Ireland, really, but I think the response to the attacks in Great Britain qualify.
The British approach seems to work well. The American approach got us mired in two unwinnable wars, sank the country deep into debt, and wrecked the economy. I know which one I prefer.
I don't get the analogy with the Blitz. At the time the entire British Empire, military and civilians all, was mobilized to stop the guys who were dropping the bombs. The resources and powers we're devoting to the "War on Terror" are a mere fraction in relative terms to those resources and powers at the disposal of Winston Churchill.
Why would we need to spend hours arguing? Your analogy makes no sense at all there. Nobody is arguing that Americans aren't sufficiently panicky. It's an argument about the resources, powers and attention that should be devoted to fighting terrorism relative to its death count. The Blitz utterly fails as an example of a response proportional to a death count. The ongoing response was massive relative to the "mere" tens of thousands killed.
As to "The Troubles": Are you arguing that the British government gave it proportional attention and resources for number of people killed? I don't believe the death count was ever that high, but it was a hugely important issue for both the Irish and the British, again, for a variety of reasons that go well beyond the death count. Which, of course, is my point.
I don't know if they gave The Troubles proportional attention, but it was at least a lot more proportional than the American response to 9/11, and turned out way better.
The troubles escalated until government ministers were being killed, and two different prime ministers narrowly missed being assassinated. Ultimately the UK capitulated and the terrorist leaders ended up as cabinet ministers in the new Irish government.
Are you really suggesting letting the terrorists win?
If "letting the terrorists win" means getting out of mideast hellholes, ceasing to assassinate civilians with drones, and stopping the continual interference in various places they consider holy, then yes, I'm absolutely suggesting that.
We need to let go of the idea that it's us or them, and that either we win and they lose, or they win and we lose.
Wouldn't an outcome analogous to the modern-day UK and Ireland be great? People getting along well, no violence, reasonably stable governments? I don't see why you paint this as a bad outcome.
I totally agree that US foreign policy is terrible and should change.
However if that happened as a result of terrorism rather than politics then we would just have an escalation of terrorism anyone who was unhappy with the US (legitimately or not) started to use the now proven strategy. The 'police state' tactics we see now are nothing compared to what we'd see then.
You seem to be advocating terrorism instead of campaigning for justice.
By the same logic, ff terrorism under the flag of a cause is seen as an effective disincentive for policy change in a particular direction, then we would just have an escalation of false-flag terrorism sponsored by anyone who wants to avoid particular policy changes (whatever the merits) as they adopted the now-proven strategy.
Your position is no less "advocating terrorism" than the one you responded to. The only way not to encourage terrorism is to evaluate policy changes on their own merits, and not be swayed from acting on the merits of the policy changes themselves by the fact that terrorists have stated goals related to those policy changes, either as a positive or negative factor.
No, because there would be no proof that the false flag terrorism was having an effect, unlike the case where terrorism led to an obvious change in policy, as was the case in Ireland).
I agree totally that policy changes should be considered on their own merits. Therefore we should defend ourselves against terrorist attacks without regard for their stated goals.
> No, because there would be no proof that the false flag terrorism was having an effect
There are certainly ways of assessing why particularly policies are and are not chosen. The impact of "Can't do what terrorists want, so we must vote no" is no more difficult to assess than "Must do what terrorists want, so we must vote yes".
In the Irish case, terrorists achieved their stated objectives by using terrorism. You said that was a good outcome. I don't see how that isn't advocating terrorism.
> If "letting the terrorists win" means getting out of mideast hellholes, ceasing to assassinate civilians with drones, and stopping the continual interference in various places they consider holy, then yes, I'm absolutely suggesting that.
Sounds like ends (violence stopping) justifying the means (letting the terrorists win) to me.
You have that completely backwards. The means is what you do, and the ends is what happens after. The means here would be ceasing to kill and oppress. That is justified all by itself.
No I am not. I'm getting righteously tired of this ridiculous conversational tactic, in which the other guy takes what I say, then speeds about six thousand light years in a random direction using a warp drive built on speculation and assumptions, then attacks whatever random space junk he finds there.
If you think I said it, then go find it and quote it for me.
You: "Wouldn't an outcome analogous to the modern-day UK and Ireland be great? People getting along well, no violence, reasonably stable governments? I don't see why you paint this as a bad outcome."
That outcome also included dead British cabinet ministers, civilians and infrastructure and decades of fear and hatred.
> One thing our society values highly is justice, and that often requires a disproportionately expensive response to an unjust act, and not solely to buy deterrence.
A disproportionate response of the kind seen on 9/11 is mind-blowingly irrational, even if you call it pursuing "justice".
If you are so in the pursuit of "justice" you inflict a worse injury to yourself than you originally suffered, I'm not sure I can call it "rational" behavior anymore.
Especially if you're not doing it for deterrent effect.
That's not my point. I'm not interested in arguing how far the response to 9/11 was from some policy ideal. I'm trying to dispel the notion that as long as "only" a few thousand people are dying annually, then the rational response is to treat terrorism with no more seriousness than anything else that kills a few thousand people each year, such as ladders. That's an argument that people actually make here with some frequency.
> I'm not interested in arguing how far the response to 9/11 was from some policy ideal. I'm trying to dispel the notion that as long as "only" a few thousand people are dying annually, then the rational response is to treat terrorism with no more seriousness than anything else that kills a few thousand people each year, such as ladders.
My point is that treating it as any other spree or serial killing is rational - we already have mechanisms to deal with these kinds of events, including laws about the use of "weapons of mass destruction", etc.
The whole point of terrorism is to provoke a reaction outside of that normal process and get people to react to the terror... causing an allergy-style overreaction from the populace, much like we saw from 9/11 in the US.
So the rational response IS to simply go "ho-hum" and treat it as just another criminal act. Taking the cowardly path of "something scared me, spite it with full power phasers!" is what the terrorists wants, and is ultimately self-defeating.
Comparing it to more dangerous things - things that are statistically more likely to kill you - is a way to fight against our animalistic panic to smash! kill! destroy! the thing causing fear, and demonstrate that it is just fear we're responding to, rather than a rational danger.
tl;dr: Spending the privacy and civil rights we have on stopping the fear caused by terrorism is the height of cowardice and irrationality.
The comparison to motor vehicle deaths is very valuable: it's a part of how you score what's most threatening, namely, how many people is the topic killing. Another part of that scoring, is potential. Discarding the actual and only focusing on the potential, is every bit as bogus as the opposite.
Nuclear / biological / chemical attacks are the only high threat vector that terrorism presents. That should be the prime focus for anti-terrorism. The secondary focus should be terrorists like the Tsarnaev brothers that can hurt people on the level of the Aurora shooting. Neither of those threats require abandoning the first and fourth amendments to deal with properly.
The odds are strongly in favor of young children, via gun accidents, continuing to kill more people every year than what terrorists do on average.
It has to be noted that 9/11 and Boston both happened solely due to extreme government incompetence. Those two supposed black swan events should have never happened. They were not black swan events, they were sheer incompetence. The government failed at its job in numerous ways in both instances, and that's the nice explanation. Their incompetence was not because they lacked information on Average Joe citizen or because they didn't have my email meta data. They demonstrate that they're wildly incompetent at even basic security in multiple high profile cases, and yet they're given even more power. It's a failed approach top to bottom.
The NSA programs are much like our big security / security theater approach, and they'll be just as useless for the exact same reasons. It's trying to thread a needle with a hammer.
Due to its nature terrorism does not scale well, it's akin to a parasite/host relationship.
It could escalate into civil war though, or even regular war between nation states (especially if one nation selects random nation states to attack as a counterstrike).
Unfortunately I think those statistics are unreliable. I fully agree that outsiders (e.g. Al Qaeda) have done miniscule damage in comparison to, say, the tobacco industry.
But if you want to look at the history of terrorism in our country, don't look to Al Qaeda or whatever. Start closer to home, with the Ku Klux Klan. They were unequivocally a terrorist group; indeed, their entire raison d'etre was terrorism.
As I pointed out in a thread yesterday, here [1] is an example of homegrown terrorism, absent from your list. Ben Tillman [2], who played a leading role in the murders (or, at least, who claimed to; perhaps he was too chickenshit to do his own dirty work) was rewarded for his efforts by election to the South Carolina governorship and, later, the United States Senate.
African-American participation in voting in the South was virtually nil from around 1880 to the 1960's. Why? Terrorism played a major role.
I can't really find any ground on which it feels like this argument has any bearing or weight in the overall discussion. Anything can be redefined to terrorism by your measure as hindsight is apparently blind to context.
"Terrorism"! Just the word strikes fear into the hearts of many Americans. It has led us to suffer indignities at airport lines, spend billions on ill-conceived wars, and spy on everyone's internet communications.
And yet, terrorism has been an extremely widespread and common phenomenon throughout our history, even on our own shores, which has been aided, abetted, and welcomed by government. It is, in some ways, easy to overlook because privileged Americans were not targets. But African-Americans have endured terrorism in this country on an overwhelming scale and with far-reaching consequences.
Although I dispute the statistics in the link I mentioned, ultimately I agree with the basic point: to be excessively frightened of terrorism, in its current guise, shows a lack of perspective both on statistics and on our nation's history.
>Anything can be redefined to terrorism
Wikipedia defines terrorism as "Terrorism is the systematic use of terror, often violent, especially as a means of coercion." Do you dispute that the KKK systematically engaged in this?
Leaving out the major premise that the Wikipedia definition is to be accepted. There is no definition of terrorism: UN resolutions to the effect are regularly overturned. Different branches of US military use different definitions. Short a definition, your qualification argument is meaningless.
I do not wish to diminish the horrors the KKK afflicted on the US, in particular the blacks. However, gun violence amongst the inner city peoples has brought death and fear beyond anything the KKK could have hope for.
The KKK wasn't just one peculiar agent of white supremacy: it was the keystone that made it so effective.
If you were a black man engaged in any kind of political, economic, or social organizing, you stood a decent chance of being murdered by the KKK, which was implicitly supported by the white-dominated State. This created a system where people were too scared to even begin organizing, leading to all kinds of disempowerment and social malaise.
Those inner city gun deaths have the KKK in their genealogy.
I agree with you, but there is no such thing as gun violence. A gun is just a tool. The violence in most cases that hurts blacks is caused by the insane, racist, never-ending war on drugs specifically designed to put brown people behind bars.
The overall level of crime and violence in the USA has dropped dramatically over the past few decades despite the prevalence of guns. End the war on drugs in America and the place would be one of the most peaceful places on the planet.
I can't speak for anywhere else, but I know that in Chicago, most gun violence is about settling scores, not about drug trafficking. Ending the war on drugs would keep a lot of non-violent offenders out of jail, but when teenagers who have never been to jail in the first place are shooting each other, you have to take a different approach.
Just last night -
"A 17-year-old boy was shot in the 2100 block of North Mulligan Avenue about 9:50 p.m. He was taken to Advocate Illinois Masonic Medical Center in good condition with a wound to his thigh, Police News Affairs Officer Ron Gaines said.
Another 17-year-old boy was shot in the back near 70th Street and Perry Avenue about 8 p.m. He was taken to Stroger Hospital, where his condition was stabilized."
The KKK was actually formed for the purpose of protecting women's rights iirc. There were black members in some area's and they lynched Caucasians occasionally.
edit: Still terrorism and what they did was despicable, just saying that it wasn't their original purpose.
I think he might be referring to the WKKK (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_of_the_Ku_Klux_Klan) but its still a far fetched leap to claim that the KKK was founded for the sole purpose of protecting women's rights. That most certainly is not true.
What's even worse is that there is an extremely simple, cheap, and constitutional way for US leaders to dramatically reduce the risk of terrorism: stop engaging in aggressive wars and stop supporting corrupt foreign governments.
That surveillance systems of unprecedented cost and scope are built while this option is not even considered demonstrates very clearly that the proponents of both militarism and surveillance are not genuinely interested in preventing terrorism but in increasing their own power.
While I agree with you, it's important to note that every government is corrupt to some degree and the US is forced to participate in these wars as, since the end of WWII, it's been looked upon as the de facto police force of the western world. The US can't simply turn a blind eye to the middle east and let oil prices be used to wage an economic war with all western nations(likely a war we'd lose). And I'm sure there are similar concerns with every other conflict in question.
Unfortunately, like all this related to politics, the situation is complicated.
So in order to avoid losing a hypothetical future trade war, we'll bankrupt ourselves with military spending, kill a couple million people, lose our civil liberties, and create 1000x more new enemies. Sounds logical!
No one's bankrupt(relatively speaking). The USD is still the world currency and western economies are still as a whole better off than China or Russia. The guys running the show know exactly what they are doing and what they are doing is keeping those other two countries out of the middle east.
What politicians say publically versus what they actually agree to are two totally different things. It's simply vogue to complain about American led international conflicts right now. It's just a big show to drum up votes. One has to look no further than the recent press surrounding the nsa, echelon and other programs to see just how complicit other western countries are with American imperialism. Heck, even if they didn't want the US involved in the middle east, no one else is going to stand up to China or Russia if the US was to leave. So, everyone maintains status quo.
The question also arises: how effective is the mass surveillance recently revealed? Probably have to wait to see but would a group of intelligent news-aware persons with terrorist intent choose to plan or discuss their malevolent actions via electronic media?
It's like saying Fort Knox has never been broken into, so let's stop wasting money protecting it
I disagree. It's not a black and white "protect Fort Knox" or "Don't protect Fort Knox". It's more like saying Fort Knox has never been broken into, so let's evaluate whether we need 240,000 employees to protect it (number of employees in Department of Homeland Security). Let's evaluate whether we need to pat down everyone at an airport to see if they have plans to rob Fort Knox. Let's evaluate whether we need to eavesdrop on everyone on the Internet and record information about their phone calls to see if they're planning on robbing Fort Knox. Let's evaluate whether we need to invade two countries because people from one of those countries actually were able to steal a tiny fraction of a fraction of the gold in Fort Knox.
Our response to terrorism is unique and we treat no other problem like it, going even further than the "war on drugs".
I just remembered reading an article [1] mentioning indirect impact of combination of fear of flying caused by 9/11 and annoyance caused by TSA (which one has bigger impact?) that pushed more people to travel by cars. That is less secure than flying and number of fatalities on roads increased by hundreds a month because of that.
The way I see it this is one example of how war on terrorism can kill more people than terrorism itself. I am beginning to believe that the best strategy to win the war on terror would be to basically just ignore terrorism and do only the most basic and least intrusive things to avoid terrorist attacks.
And I think it's not only about whether the cost of protecting Fort Knox is not bigger than the value that can be potentially stolen from Fort Knox. The so called war on terror is not without consequences - it alienates people all over the world and sometimes it even creates hate against the US.
I am not only talking about drone attacks which I believe might create more new terrorists than it kills. All that spying is going to cost you many friends in Europe and the rest of the previously US-friendly world and alienating all your friends is not the best strategy when you want to be safe.
I don't have any hard data on this (how could we measure that?) but I personally believe that those claiming to protect US from terrorism do more harm than any terrorist could ever achieve.
If you're going to do a quantitative analysis of the effects of terrorism you'd need to analyze effects other than deaths. 9/11 caused the loss of 430,000 jobs, $40B in insurance payouts, damage to lower Manhattan that still isn't fully repaired, $100B losses in the financial exchanges, probably close to $1T in economic losses total, even before taking into account the misguided wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Likewise, the Boston Marathon bombing was far less devastating than 9/11 but still caused an estimated $333M in damage.
It does suck that more people die in car accidents but no single car accident can cause a billion dollars in damage.
This is the most ironic comment I have read in months.
You are effectively saying, "You must include X when considering A." You then completely ignore X when considering B.
9/11 caused the loss of 430,000 jobs
35,000 people die per year in car accidents. 9/11 happened 12 years ago. That means 420,000 DIED. That's worse than losing your job.
$40B in insurance payouts
Progressive alone pays out about $12B per year in auto accident claims. They're only the 4th largest insurer in the United States representing 8% of the market. If the ratio holds out there are approximately $150B per year in auto accident claims but admittedly I couldn't find a direct source for that. $40B in the last 12 years is a drop in the bucket.
I could go on and calculate the rest, but I hope you get the point which is your cherry picked (and made up) statistics don't hold a candle to other problems we have and relatively ignore.
Sure, but I'm saying a single event caused this. You're talking about the sum total of all auto accidents over 12 years. Even 12 years of auto accidents don't add up to one major terrorism event. I'm not saying I agree with the way the USA handles terrorism, but it does seem like something you want to avoid. If there was another 9/11 or a Boston bombing happened every year, the country's economy would be massively screwed. My numbers are all from wikipedia's page about the economic aftermath of 9/11 and a Boston Herald article about the Boston bombing.
The Banqiao Reservoir Dam failures in 1975 cost an estimated 171,000 lives and made 11 million people homeless. That was a single event too. By your line of reasoning that makes 9/11 pretty much irrelevant and we should all care about dam security instead, ignoring that it was an extreme outlier, and that aggregate deaths from other causes quickly outdistanced dam failures again.
Clearly there are psychological issues at play that makes us care greatly about large disasters, but that still does not make it rational to compare individual events to decide what resources to use to fight a type of event as a whole over long periods of time.
You mentioning 'psychological issues' reminded me of the (super interesting) book Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. In that book there is something about our ability to asses risk and emotionally perceive danger that is biased by dangers that typically occurred during many thousand years of human evolution - physical violence is evolutionary very old and that's why we react to it strongly. On the other side there are things that might be more dangerous (like obesity which kills way more people than terrorism) but evolutionary these are relatively new and we have yet to develop the 'sense of danger' to them.
[I am just paraphrasing that book - any mistakes made here are mine and Daniel Kahneman is totally innocent in this.]
You're talking about the sum total of all auto accidents over 12 years
I'm talking about the sum total of all auto accidents over 12 years an the sum of all terrorist attacks over 12 years.
Even 12 years of auto accidents don't add up to one major terrorism event.
How so? 420,000 people died in car accidents. 2,700 people died in the biggest terrorism event to ever hit the U.S. So that's deaths. Economic impact - no brainer, car accidents have bigger economic impact. By any measure, car accidents have a bigger impact in aggregate than terrorist attacks in aggregate.
If there was another 9/11 or a Boston bombing happened every year, the country's economy would be massively screwed.
I don't even know what to say to someone that writes this.
Comparing the Boston Bombing to 9/11 doesn't really make sense. The OKC bombing, that's a much better comparison.
Attacks on the level of the Boston Bombing happen every day in various countries around the world. But something like 9/11 or OKC, that kind of stuff doesn't happen every day. One of those was by far the most incredible act of terrorism in the modern world. Heck, even car bombs that kill 100+ seem to happen every couple months.
The harm of terrorism or the harm of our irrational response to terrorism?
Obviously 9/11 didn't start the Iraq War, President Bush did. He may have done that in a state of belief that the two were connected, but we should not repeat his mistake.
It seems odd to me to lump in how much we poured into terrorism over and above the direct damages, and not to lump in with car accidents how much money we pour into auto safety, road maintenance, and so on.
The general point is that we over-respond to trauma, both in our daily lives and a macro society level. Clean living is more important and has broader effects on your life than crime, but it is less sexy on the evening news. Just like car safety and terrorism.
How do you end up with 430,000 lost jobs from direct damages due to the attack? No, I'm pretty sure those are damages due to the reactions to the attack, not damages due to the attack itself.
In New York City, there were approximately 430,000 jobs were lost and $2.8 billion in lost wages over the three months following the 9/11 attacks
That's just the number on wikipedia. 430,000 people lost their jobs in the 3 months after the attack. I supposed you could argue that it's not direct damages in the sense that 430K people were not all office workers in the WTC, but if they lost their job within 3 months of the attack it seems like the job loss is pretty directly related.
And, as a former NYC resident I would not at all be surprised if 430K people really did directly lose their job. The sheer number of people working in that area is immense. I remember an interview at the time with a guy whose bodega located down by Wall Street was destroyed, and he said he did $80K per week in business. And that's just one dude selling sodas, bottled water, cigarettes, etc.
Anybody who lost their job directly due to the attack would have lost it that day. Three months means job losses due to fear in the financial markets, economic pessimism, fear of subsequent attacks, etc. etc.
In other words, imagine a hypothetical world where the reaction to 9/11 was "damn, let's figure out who was behind this, go arrest them, and rebuild and carry on with our lives" rather than the "holy shit, let's declare a war on terrorism" reaction that actually happened. Do 430,000 jobs still get lost? No, I seriously doubt it. You lose some jobs because a bunch of office space got destroyed, but most of those jobs are still needed and will simply be relocated.
I've seen other figures that suggest that about 80K people lost their jobs immediately. I guess I'm not convinced that the rest of the job losses were due to economic pessimism and fear in the financial markets. I was assuming it included the bodega guy, the guy working for the bodega guy, couriers, tailors, every other small business owner in the area, people servicing those small business owners, the carpet cleaners, window washers, the outsourced IT guys, people servicing the physical infrastructure of the area, people who worked in the other buildings. etc. I could be totally off base, but blasting out part of the infrastructure of a city of 19M people seems like it could cause a relatively "direct" 2% job loss over 3 months.
The thing about job loss from the destruction of buildings is that most of it comes right back.. in a different building. It's only bad locally and temporarily.
I don't know if that's necessarily true. The downtown of the small city where I grew up was destroyed by a simultaneous flood and fire and most of the downtown businesses simply disappeared forever. Many small businesses are in economically tenuous positions and a catastrophic event will wipe them out. This causes all the employes to lose their jobs, and a chain reaction to other small businesses who relied upon the destroyed businesses. Applied to NYC scale, suggesting the job loss numbers mean "direct" unemployment in this sense seems reasonable to me, but I could be wrong.
The financial markets depend upon stability and law and order. They cannot function without it. The fear that markets and industries could be crippled with a simple bomb (not due to the reaction, but due to the event) did massive damage to the markets, which resonated and caused significant economic collateral damage. This is obvious given that the reaction to 9/11 was actually quite sedate for some time, and massive enterprises like the NSA's current adventure came about much later.
I confess to pondering: Is your reply sarcasm? Raw stupidity? An attempt at being clever? Sorry, but you fail miserably at all of those.
No, 300bps, 9/11 brought a sense among both the populace and business that big, bad things can happen by just a few people with ill will. The response was a realization that the basic security and law and order could be so easily overridden.
Exchanges, for one, in virtually any industry. Recall that one of the primary concerns after 9/11 were the NYSE, Nasdaq, Mercantile Exchange, etc. Banking centers. Oil refineries. Port. Etc.
I'm sure every major exchange has contingency plans to operate out of a backup location. I'm not aware of any single point of failure in banking, oil, or cargo, and if there were, mundane threats like weather would far outweigh terrorism anyway.
I think we disagree on what "crippled" means. You have taken it to mean "no longer functions or exists", which I think many handicapable people would disagree with. It simply means that it operates at a measurably diminished capacity in some regard, which with the economy can have profound implications.
If the NYSE building were bombed on an operating day, it would absolutely have dramatic financial repercussions, and that market would absolutely be crippled. Would some simile reappear? Of course it would, just as government would reappear if a full capital building were attacked. But the impact would be major and it would be felt.
If the traders could be rational enough to pick up and move to new temporary offices a few blocks over and carry on with their business the next day, the consequences of a NYSE bombing would not be so dire. The dramatic financial repercussions you mention would certainly happen, but only because people would panic.
How big part of the damage is caused by the terrorist attack and how big part is caused by (over?)reaction to it? If after each car crash the car traffic in the whole city had to be stopped and people were advised not to leave their homes until the 'hit and run' culprit was caught... how expensive would that be?
I don't know exact numbers but the numbers you provided do not seem to add up. The Boston Marathon bombing caused an estimated $333M in damage directly? I don't think you can do direct damage like that with primitive pressure cooker bomb. And if you count lost human lives (their insurance etc.) than it's comparable to a bus accident or a bit bigger storm. In my eyes the reaction to it still seems like hysterical overreaction. Calculate all deaths caused by car accidents and compare that to the damage caused by terrorism... and it still seems that the 'war on cars' would be more reasonable than war on terrorism.
Security people don't necessarily think about the past, because it isn't relevant. The death/injury ticker isn't really relevant. The assassination of Abraham Lincoln and post-WW1 anarchist bombings are not related and aren't relevant to today.
Security people do think about what motivated individuals can do. If some lunatic with a semiautomatic rifle can massacre dozens of people in a school or movie theater or shut down a major city for days, what could a trained group of fanatics do? There's a nearly limitless number of horrible things that can happen, and many of these things are real risks, just waiting for the right fanatic or lunatic to go for it.
The open-ended nature of this anti-terrorist campaign/effort/whatever reflects the open-ended nature of the risk.
That said, I think Snowden did a valuable thing. I think the approach the government has taken is too secretive and too much of an overreach. In an attempt to foil terrorists, we're undermining our democracy and the integrity of our institutions.
The open-ended nature of this anti-terrorist campaign/effort/whatever reflects the open-ended nature of the risk.
The risk is not "open ended" than any other risk. It can be estimated. Objectively, as many others have argued here, the response has been far more costly, destructive, and damaging to institutions and ideals we say we are trying to protect than the threat itself.
It's interesting that the response to a lunatic with a semiautomatic is to mount massive internet surveillance rather than, for example, outlaw semiautomatics or provide free mental healthcare.
Or issue more gun permits to lawful, trained gun owners so that citizens can intervene when help is needed, and don't have to wait for the police to arrive.
Notice that the bogeyman of "terrorism" is coming up just as the drug war is winding down (Cali legalized medical MJ in 1996, and this year Colo & Wash legalized it completely for recreational use).
The powers-that-be need an everpresent bogeyman to keep us in control.
> Terrorism is nothing but fear mongering to effect an increase in power.
This is absolutely true. The shadow of terrorism that our elected officials claim to be chasing is nothing more than a way to vastly increase government intrusions into our daily lives in a publicly palatable way. Everything that is used to "fight terrorism" also happens to be used against our own citizens to pursue increasingly questionable prosecutions - thousands of times more often than used against real life terrorists. Our tax dollars are in fact being used to fund a war - but the war is against us.
Then there is the question of reliability of the information collected through spying: if you know everything you say online is being read, and you are planning to commit a terrorist act, you will use your knowledge to spread false information.
One day we will consider spying just like torture, an immoral source of unreliable information.
And that's if you think this mass spying it's actually working. But so far we haven't seen any evidence that it does. In the vast majority of terrorist "events" they say they've stopped, the mass spying wasn't even essential in learning about them or stopping them. It may have no helped at all.
And for so little benefit, they spend hundreds of billions every year, and get the ability to blackmail or threaten anyone in the world.
So not only is not "not worth it". It's an extremely dangerous monster that should be slain as soon as possible, before it gets to do much more damage than any terrorist could ever do.
A large part of the response is irrational fear, true, a good example of salience bias. That said, there is a rational argument as well, and that is that terrorism has two special features:
- High variance : Even though deaths to date are low, there is a non-zero chance that someone will manage to pull off a very large attack (9/11 is an example, the next one might be a dirty bomb)
- Escalation : The point of terrorism is to create fear - if low level attacks don't promote fear the incentive is just to escalate until the attacks reach a point that does trigger a reaction. In other words - you're battling a human opponent and they will adjust their tactics to what you do.
I think this misunderstands the nature of statistics.
Those are individuals.
I want to do everything we can to prevent the death of anyone who doesn't deserve it (Justin Bieber is off the list).
Now, our debate turns to "everything we can."
What can we do without defeating ourselves, and defeating the nature of our society, and becoming paranoid shut-ins?
My hypothetical question is this:
If an AI were watching our emails/texts/phone calls instead of people, and the data never made it to people unless the AI found a strong hit, would that be more acceptable?
This is a really bad way to do statistical inference. I don't want to go into the n number of ways this is wrong. But, Let me point out another factor that gets ignored in these pointless and wrong bean counting exercises: People are up in arms against terrorism not due to the perceived probability being higher. It is because deaths due to terrorism are wrongful deaths while most others are not.
It is because deaths due to terrorism are wrongful deaths while most others are not.
In 2011, 9,878 people died in drunk driving crashes - one every 53 minutes. Is that not considered wrongful death in your mind? That's twice as many people in one year dying from wrongful death than terrorism has killed in 148 years. If we were treating this wrongful death as seriously as we did terrorism, we'd require breathalyzer starters on every single car. Hell, we'd probably bring back prohibition.
Let's not forget the roughly 15,000 people murdered each year in the US (which number does not, as far as I know, count drunk driving fatalities). If those don't count as "wrongful death" then nothing does. But nobody cares, because it's a continuous drip instead of a single big event, and because it mostly happens to poor people and minorities.
Proper inference should consider all available data not just historical data.
Just waving around numbers is not correct reasoning from first principles!
Correct and proper inference should include present threats, beliefs and intentions of relevant groups. Do you account for that?
Just because an axe-wielding madman has not committed any
murders in the past, you would not let him be on his own.
Just an instant before the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, nobody in that city had been killed by an atom bomb. You would probably stare at the bomb dropping on your head waving around stats saying the bomb is not a threat to your existence.
"The past never repeats itself precisely; otherwise, historians would be rolling in riches."
- James Gipson, Clipper Fund
Your comment is a one-way attack on sanity. It would take me a lot of effort to show where you went wrong. It takes you only a bit of effort to be wrong.
Instead of insulting me, care to rebut my arguments?
This is hilarious. I know you feel offended that I have shown that one drive a huge plane through the holes in your reasoning, but you don't respond with a barrage of "fallacies." Sigh.
While I agree with the sentiment and conclusion I don't think you can build a convincing argument by just looking at numbers of deaths.
Terrorism has no value but vehicles do.
Unchecked terrorism, ostensibly, begets more terrorism. This is unlikely to be true with vehicle deaths.
Terrorism also has effects beyond the deaths and injuries it causes and I'd argue those effects are much larger than the same number of deaths in a vehicle accident.
Am I the only one who find this flawed ? Why won't you take into account the deaths that would have occured both in short/long run if that money/time wasn't spent ? Note that this has kind of a butterfly effect. There is a possible argument for doing it more efficiently or differently, but this extreme comparison makes no sense.
As I understand it, the goal of Islamic terrorism (possibly internal anti-government terrorist?) is not to kill people. The objective is to bankrupt countries such as the US. Killing people is just a means to an end.
A threat should be evaluated on more than just historical performance. I don't agree with fear mongering based on unlikely events, but (much like unlikely financial downfalls) their probability is more than 0%, and possibly that % is significant. Unfortunately this is something that takes a long time to get good at, and resources have to be spent to get there over years of trial and error.
the damage done by 9/11 is colossal if you look at the economic and emotional cost. Do you really think it's equal to 2,977 drunk driver deaths?
furthermore, it is impossible to measure exactly what is prevented from catching a single terrorist. if 9/11 was thwarted who knows if we'd even hear about it. We don't know what we don't know. so unless you have some insight into what is actually accomplished by anit-terrorism programs it's silly to make such comparisons.
Lastly, nobody is saying we should ignore driver deaths. we have the resources to focus on multiple problems at once.
99% of the damage "done by 9/11" was actually done by the massive overreaction to 9/11. You cannot use the damage done by the overreaction to terrorism to justify the overreaction to terrorism.
It's like saying that your immune system's response to an allergen is justified, because just look at how terrible you feel when exposed to that allergen.
That's an interesting way to look at it, but it doesn't appear apt to me. These actions look to me like an ongoing reaction to attacks, not rational attempts to reduce the overall impact.
In any case, if you can reduce the immune reaction, that's far preferable. I don't see any reason why we can't reduce the overreaction to terrorism.
It's a very dangerous path to take when discussing statistics. Will it become moral to lie and extract taxation from people if there were 5000000 terrorists? At which amount of terrorists morality of gov lying and spying switches from "bad" to "good"? Or, if morality is not black and white, how can one lie and spy at the half the speed?
Seems like a fairly straight forward comparison at face value:
What negative value do you ascribe to 5000 people being killed by terrorists compared to 5 million people? Obviously, 5 million deaths would have a far greater effect on every day life and the ability of society to function.
On the other side, what value do you ascribe to freedom from government lies and spying? This is tougher, but it is generally assumed that the government performing such acts will lead to inefficient use of resources and services - resources that could have been used to prevent deaths in car accidents or raise the standard of society as a whole.
So at face level, the OPs comparison using statistics is fairly sound, and the changeover point is where the number of deaths or potential deaths switches over from one side of the argument to the other.
The OP is arguing that 5000 deaths is nowhere near the costs that the spying program has on society. This seems fair.
The arguments against the OP are that removing the spying program would increase the 5000 figure by orders of magnitude, or that the spying program has no negative effects. I disagree with both these arguments, so I think that the OP is probably right.
It's a very dangerous path to take when discussing statistics.
Statistics let you evaluate many things, including if the "cure" is worse than the "disease".
In this case, terrorism has killed 5,000 people in 148 years. The "war on terror" has killed 4,486 Americans in Iraq and 2,259 Americans in Afghanistan alone. Source: http://icasualties.org/
That's at least 6,745 Americans killed in a little over a decade to fight something that has killed 5,000 Americans in 148 years.
I'm purposely only mentioning American deaths to show how starkly idiotic what we're doing is.
So is it okay to take 5 good organs from a single man to save 5 lives? For me, morality comes first, then you use statistics to choose what's good for you, not me. I will decide on my own.
300bps pointed out that means justify ends. If there were more terrorists caught than people dying in car accidents, that would justify NSA activity in his eyes. (If it wouldn't, he would not defend his stats-based argument.)
I point out that with right statistics one can justify anything. E.g. giving up one man's life for 5 lives is measurable and sounds solid. Why don't we do that? Because we all have this gut feeling that some things are plain wrong.
I think what you meant to accuse me of is "ends justify means" but you're obviously a non-native English speaker so it's understandable. However, you are incorrect that I was saying "ends justify means". Instead I'm saying, "some ends justify some means". There's no legitimate point in attempting to ascribe a black and white philosophy to me.
If there were more terrorists caught than people dying in car accidents, that would justify NSA activity in his eyes.
Not even close. You have to admit that you completely made that up and ascribed it to me when I had never said it. However, I will say that if 310 million Americans per year were dying of terrorism I would think NSA activity might be justified.
You completely misread. Pretend you're looking at a theoretical 'wrong cure' for a problem. The first thing you should do is check if such a cure even works at all. Then you need to decide if it works well enough that you are willing to do something wrong.
300bps never said that you should automatically accept any wrong cure that works. Working is only one requirement.
HN has a nesting limit for comments (for probably good reasons), so replying here. Yes, I get your point.
> If there were more terrorists caught than people dying in car accidents, that would justify NSA activity in his eyes.
Ok, then our interpretations simply disagree, and that's OK. (edit here I mean that I do not believe that citing stats implies that were they reversed, NSA activity would be justified. I do not believe such a set of beliefs/etc. leads to inconsistency.)
I simply think that stats can be used to illustrate absurdity etc., but not necessarily to justify something. It is a slippery slope, but I believe it's a rather long slope ;) Indeed,
> E.g. giving up one man's life for 5 lives is measurable and sounds solid. Why don't we do that?
Here you are ignoring the slope entirely. What you're saying sounds like act utilitarianism. There are many types of utilitarianism and, more generally, "using the ends to [partly] justify the means" falls more broadly into consequentialism (utilitarianism being a subset of consequentialism.)
If we e.g. take rule utilitarianism, then your given example/situation computes differently. Indeed, this very example you cited is used to illustrate the difference [1].
All I'm saying is, there are many shades of gray. :) Just because you use stats to illustrate a point doesn't mean you're then bound by consistency to kill all lonely people to harvest their organs.
If terrorism killed millions it would be easier to accept the loss of liberty associated with the current war on terrorism.
But loosing ALL Internet and phone privacy, basic human rights such as the right not to be tortured and to some degree loosing the checks and balances of a normal democracy in the fight against a ghost is hard to swallow.
I don't see how it's "dangerous". If terrorism were a leading cause of death, I'd advocate for fighting it with many resources. However, it's an insignificant cause of death, so I advocate for dedicating very few resources to it.
My attitude toward the NSA leaks is, "they should not be doing this." If terrorism killed millions, it would be, "they should be doing a better job of this." Numbers matter.
So if terrorism was killing some people, you'd justify someone forcing me to pay taxes to fund NSA? Or you'd prefer some non-violent, voluntary way to organise protection against terrorism? Would you kick ass of your neighbour if he disagrees on your terrorist-fighting methods, or would you try to argue with him peacefully and let him live his life if he still disagrees with you? Would you like to be able to peacefully disagree with people, or are you okay if someone is forcing you to comply?
Yes, I would justify someone forcing you to pay taxes to fund the NSA in that case, just like I currently justify someone forcing you, and me, to pay taxes to build roads, pay teachers and policemen and firefighters, fund the military, etc. I strongly disapprove of some activities of government, but not of the concept overall.
So you should justify putting Snowden in prison because that's what government wants to do with him for failing his obligations. And since you justify violence when it comes from government, there is a contradiction if you disapprove of it. Are you okay with government coming to your datacenter and forcing you to give them your customers' data or you are not? If government-issued violence is justified, then you cannot be disappointed, no?
You appear to be saying that if I approve of government violence in some cases, I must approve of government violence in all cases. This makes no sense whatsoever.
Ok. So what's the source of your knowledge about morality? You cannot refer to laws because you may disagree with some of them. Which principle do you use to find out when government is doing right and when it is doing wrong?
Also: why would you turn in police some people, but not your friends and family? It sounds to me that your morality is not universal at all, but just a whim. E.g. "I'm okay to kick people I dislike and not okay kicking people I like".
The ultimate basis of my morality is the idea that maximizing overall human pleasure and minimizing discomfort is good, and the opposite is bad. I don't think this has an objective basis. It appears self-evident to me, and as best I can tell most people agree, but I won't pretend it's any sort of law of the universe.
Once you have that basis, game theory lets you extrapolate. Theft is bad it most cases, for example, because it lowers the overall human good, even if it improves my own particular good.
Governments are useful because they're a way to overcome collective action problems like free riders or tragedies of the commons. Because of this, they can be a force for good.
I have no idea where you got this "turn in police some people, but not your friends and family" from. Please try to limit your commentary to things I have actually said, not things you have imagined.
So lets say we have different ideas on how to maximize "overall human pleasure" (I also don't see how'd you measure it). Who should give up his idea? Should I force you to follow my recipe? Or should you force me to follow yours? Or could we just agree peacefully on some line in the sand and we try our ideas separately without insulting or threatening each other?
Example: if we develop a software and have different ideas on how to do it, should we fight till one of us gives up, or we can simply walk away to our computers and work with some other people, if we cannot work together?
I asked you explicitly in Twitter "@mikeash two questions: 1) will you give your friends/family to the police if they don't file taxes? 2) did I threaten you for your beliefs?"
https://twitter.com/oleganza/status/362954987661295616
You answered: "No, I wouldn't turn them in, but I believe such enforcement is necessary and overall good."
Before, in this thread I asked if you will turn me in, you answered:
"Yes, I would justify someone forcing you to pay taxes to fund the NSA in that case."
So my question was (quoting from above):
"why would you turn in police some people, but not your friends and family? It sounds to me that your morality is not universal at all, but just a whim."
How am I being dishonest here? Please answer what's the moral difference between turning me into police and not your family?
Did these people die by their choice also? Maybe they should have eaten more vegetables and exercised more? That's 116 times more deaths in one year than have died by terrorism in 148 years.
If we had 240,000 employees working on cancer prevention, screening, treatment and cures do you think we might be able to bring that cancer death number down by 1%? That would save 5,800 lives per year which is more than the last 148 years have killed by terrorism. (Department of Homeland Security has 240,000 employees, improving screening processes alone would likely reduce cancer deaths by 1% per year).
We invest billions to reduce driving accidents -- and have significantly reduced both accidents and fatalities as a result of accidents via investments in road engineering, vehicle engineering and rules.
The Department of Homeland Security has 240,000 employees and a budget of over $60 billion. There have been 5,000 terrorist deaths in the last 148 years.
We invest billions to reduce driving accidents
The National Transportation Safety Board has 400 employees and a budget of $100 million. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has an annual budget of $815 million. There are approximately 30,000 deaths per year from vehicle accidents alone.
We also invest billions in cancer research and prevention.
The National Institute of Health has an annual budget of $30 billion. This covers every type of infection and disease, but approximately 550,000 people per year die of cancer alone. Approximately 600,000 people die of heart disease per year.
Can you see how these things are totally out of whack?
DISCLAIMER: This is a comment on a message board. This is not a PhD thesis. There are plenty of additional nits to pick and I'm sure there are plenty of comments nit witty enough to be posted in response. The bottom line is that terrorism is given resources far beyond the scale of the problem and that is indisputable.
If the crux of your argument is the number of employees and funding are disproportionate to the number of deaths, you have to extract the number of employees and monies dedicated to terrorism specifically (If any).
Most of the DHS employees are part of pre-existing agencies that were combined to form DHS.
"187 federal agencies and departments, including the United States National Guard, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the United States Coast Guard, Customs and Border Protection, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, the United States Secret Service, the Transportation Security Administration, the 14 agencies that constitute the U.S. intelligence community and Civil Air Patrol"
Edit: removed FBI reference, posted subsumed agencies as per Wikipedia...
Read the disclaimer. I refuse to spend enough time on this to bring it to the level of PhD thesis. The numbers are so unbelievably heavy toward terrorism spending that it is not even necessary. You are nitpicking.
The TSA budget is $7.91 billion per year. Again, that's $7.91 billion toward stopping something that has killed 5,000 people in the last 148 years vs. Spending about $1.5 billion toward stopping something that kills 35,000 per year. Or does the TSA rescue puppies in addition to preventing terrorism?
I'm starting to think I'm on reddit with comments like yours.
My apologies, I didn't realize that a disclaimer meant that everything preceding it could be ignored.
If you truly believe that the proportionality is not debatable, then feel free to cease debating it.
I'm sorry to inform you, but I'll need to see something at least on the level of a 12th grade essay to concisely consider your argument. Simply yelling "It's Too Much!" is not helpful.
DISCLAIMER: I didn't realize that a disclaimer meant that everything preceding it could be ignored.
If you truly believe that the proportionality is not debatable, then feel free to cease debating it.
Simply yelling "It's Too Much!" is not helpful.
If you want to disclaim facts out of ignorance, go for it. If you spend 30 seconds researching highway death trends, you see that like cancer, there has been a significant reduction in highway deaths in the last twenty years, to the tune of 30% fatality reduction and 70% reduction per mile travelled. This was directly driven by federal investments.
The NTSB budget is a tiny piece of the pie. The US government has sent billions on vehicle safety, road engineering, road remediation, drunk driving remediation, etc.
You keep citing $60B (30% of which is the Coast Guard and Customs/Border Patrol) and 5,000 deaths since the civil war. You're out of touch. What is your threshold number where you care? Do we really need 30,000 people to die annually for you to care?
No, it's definitely a choice. If someone doesn't want to drive they can move to a city. Taking the job that led you to require a car is a choice. Having a kid that led you to require that job that requires that car is a choice, too.
There's no way to make yourself safe from car crashes unless you confine yourself to your house. Even if you never drive, you are exposed to vehicular death simply as a pedestrian. There's no way to avoid it without becoming a hermit.
Meanwhile, it's pretty much trivial to make yourself safe from terrorism, if you wanted to. Avoid airplanes, avoid skyscrapers, avoid major cities. Done. Tens, perhaps hundreds, of millions of Americans already happily live this way, although most of them don't do it specifically to avoid terrorism.
Using your logic, being a victim of terrorism is absolutely a choice. My girlfriend's parents live in Arkansas. In the middle of nowhere. 20 minutes drive to the nearest town that's larger than pop. 50, give or take. No terrorist in their right mind would even consider doing anything there.
So just move away from the city, easy peasy. Your choice.
I think this logic is flawed and the argument is a weak one.
The circumstances around a car crash are most certainly not voluntary or by choice. Negligence by other drivers (alcohol, distraction, and other factors) cause deaths to even pedestrians and bicyclists. One could argue that the victims of terrorist attacks are by choice - by choosing to work in a densely populated area or to send a child to school instead of alternative education. I think neither car crashes victims (in accidents caused by others) nor terrorism victims are "by choice". They are victims of circumstance.
If you only look at the US, maybe just the one spike on that well known date.
If you look at the entire Western world as a whole, my guess is that deadly terrorism on the whole has actually decreased pretty dramatically since the 80's.
The fallacy of the comparison to heart disease/cancer/traffic accidents is that tremendous resources are spent preventing and then resolving those issues as well. They are side effects of living productively, however, so we can't rationally just ban cars. But we can put hundreds of thousands of officers on the road, and endlessly add regulations and safety features to our vehicles, etc.
Snowden is a true hero in the sense of the word -- he is in actual, physical danger for what he has done for others -- however it is not a reasonable argument when people argue that terrorism is a non-issue because <body count> less than <some other body count>.
Do you think those who wish to do you harm don't want to exponentially increase that count? If various groups could get a nuclear warhead or dirty bomb, do you really believe they wouldn't use it? If they could sabotage a major city's water supply or a nuclear power plant, do you think that would be below them?
This doesn't seek to justify the NSA's all-encompassing surveillance at all (human intelligence is where it is at), however there is an actual possibility that they have actually preventing significant events. But the problem with proactive actions is that no one gives you credit for what didn't happen.
As an aside, to add to what others mentioned about the enormous costs and economic damage that resulted from 9/11, for instance, another reason terrorism of even the smallest kind sees a dramatic response is that it is terrorism -- it terrorizes a whole populace. If someone randomly shoots people in parks, there will be a massive response because the impact is on everyone.
There are several issues here. First, the comparisons are often brought up in response to those claiming - directly or indirectly - that terrorism is an existential threat to America. The fact that we live with things that kill vastly more people puts the lie to that.
Second, the issue is the marginal expenditure to marginal deaths. We spend tremendous effort and some freedom reducing auto accidents, and we reduce them substantially. We don't spend trillions more at this point, because we don't consider it worthwhile. Before 9/11, we had some level of expenditure (of effort, money, freedom) on preventing terrorism, and doubtless saw some reduction in terrorism over what it would have otherwise been, and had it down to some particular level. Since 9/11, we've been spending that plus trillions of dollars and more of our freedoms, and the most we can possibly do is reduce terrorism to zero - and even if the alternative were a significant increase in terrorism (something like 9/11 every other day, instead of - generously - once every several years) there would still be more room to save lives in these other ways.
Finally, 9/11 had an enormous cost, but a lot of the psychological cost is due to fear mongering from people who lack the perspective the numbers bring. Another large portion of that cost is due to lack of resiliency in the companies with offices in the WTC, and companies doing business with those companies, &c. The former is addressed through education and leadership, the latter by encouraging behaviors that will also help in the case of (say) a massive hurricane. None of this is served by a panicked focus on terrorism.
So am I, as a citizen, supposed to be content with a 9/11 scale terrorist attack happening "every few years?" If the idea of that frightens me, am I just falling victim to fear mongering? Do I "lack perspective?"
If the state can't prevent every murder, why would you expect that it could prevent every terrorist attack? Why does it make any actual difference whether deaths are simultaneous or distributed? Horrible things, intentional and accidental, happen every day, and they can't all be prevented, but you don't waste your time worrying about drunk drivers or lightning strikes, because they're spread out and you don't notice.
You make a reasonable and proportionate effort to protect yourself to the extent that you can, and roll the dice and pray to the extent that you can't. What makes terrorism any different than plain old murder?
To all but the first, "yes." If that idea frightens you more than the greater number of murders or accidents or disasters, that kill more people and do more damage, then you have lost perspective - probably because you have fallen victim to fear mongering.
To the first, it depends on what we have to trade away and on what we get in return. There will always be risks, because our resources are finite and the world is occasionally hostile. A 9/11 scale terrorist attack happening every few years is bad, but unless the resources we shift there make a bigger difference in reducing those threats they can make elsewhere, you should be "content" in the sense that that is the result of the policy that you should prefer. In this context, freedom/power can be viewed as an important resource: power in the hands of the security apparatus makes them more effective, but freedom in the hands of the people helps to protect against government abuses (in the extreme, tyranny - but things don't have to get there for it to be important).
It's an iterated game. And the only way to win is not to play at all.
Once you get into the business of having your government spend trillions of dollars and destroying other countries in response to a couple idiots, you paradoxically make terrorism more likely, because shifts in policy accompany it.
When no one gives a shit, there's no incentive for ideological terrorists to attempt any interesting attacks, leaving only the occasional madman.
"We spend $0 a year on defense against meteor strike. Should I, as a citizen, be content with meteor strike happening every few years?"
"We spend $0 a year on defense against flesh-eating bacteria. Should I, as a citizen, be content with flesh-eating bacteria happening every few years?"
"We spend $0 a year on defense against maniacs going postal. Should I, as a citizen, be content with maniacs going postal happening every few years?"
Compared to the US defense budgets and what the US spends on counter-terrorism, I think all of these are effectively zero. Yes, there might be programs in the million USD range, but certainly not in the hundreds of billions.
Hmm, depends how you count it. Arguably, hospitals are significant defense against flesh eating bacteria, just not terribly targeted. Likewise, police forces, firearm restrictions, and mental health services all serve to reduce somewhat the risks from "maniacs going postal". I wouldn't be surprised if either of these were in the hundreds of billions, though certainly not all of that is federal money. I don't know enough about meteor defense, but expect you're closer to unequivocally right there.
So, police forces do great job to prevent terrorism too. Hospitals have knowledge how to mitigate the casualties of a bioterror attack. By your reasoning, we might say that we already have the infrastructure to prevent the immediate dangers of terrorism too (without the defense budget monster). Oh yes, they are "not terribly targeted" :)
I don't know what you're arguing, here. Yes, by my reasoning it's fair to count some of that spending toward fighting terrorism - in fact, I believe that should be a significant portion of our response: investing in resiliency that will help in the event of terrorism but also in the event of the myriad other disasters we are occasionally faced with, and hopefully even when there's no disaster at all.
It's still wrong to say we spend $0 on X, Y, and Z.
> Finally, 9/11 had an enormous cost, but a lot of the psychological cost is due to fear mongering from people who lack the perspective the numbers bring
What about the psychological cost of fearmongering about the possibility of 1984-style dystopias vs. the reality of violent attacks whether broken up beforehand or not?
I'm not saying the government should have the powers that it has now, but if you can "live with" terrorism then you can just as easily "live with" surveillance.
History has shown that given power people abuse it, the set up of mass, warrantless, surveillance is itself evidence of this, a feared consequence of the Patriot Act. It is a completely rational fear that given increasing powers government will increasingly abuse them. Also there has been nothing in recent policy that at all demonstrates that the federal government will ever relinquish power once given it. The more power that the government takes without challenge or checks and balances, the more it can easily take in the future. It's a positive feedback system.
"Terrorism" on the other hand does not scale, especially with an adversary so technologically limited oceans away from US borders. Terrorism isn't even meant to scale, it's entire purpose to create a maximal psychological impact because the adversary does not have the resources to achieve any significant damage through force. Even if you look at Isreal's total deaths and injuries from terrorist attacks you'll see that the numbers are small [0,1]. Also, unlike increasing government powers, there is no evidence that terrorists acts on US soil are increasing.
> It is a completely rational fear that given increasing powers government will increasingly abuse them. Also there has been nothing in recent policy that at all demonstrates that the federal government will ever relinquish power once given it
If you really think that then you haven't been paying attention. For example, the Church committee, and later when the U.S. belatedly relaxed controls on computer cryptography, and then even put the NSA and NIST in charge of ensuring the public had great cryptography available to them to protect the public's and government's communications and data.
> "Terrorism" on the other hand does not scale
It doesn't have to scale. You could sit and prepare for years for a single massive attack and get maximal value out of it. As technology improves, so does the ability to for a single malicious agent to kill or maim more and more and more people at a single time, which only gets worse when you combine multiple such agents into a group.
And as you mention, the psychological impact is completely out of proportion to the resources expended. The government is following the public's lead on this. No one wants to be blown up, but even more importantly, no one wants those who try to attack the nation to be simply let off the hook or allowed to attack unopposed.
> Also, unlike increasing government powers, there is no evidence that terrorists acts on US soil are increasing.
Wow, it's almost like there's some unseen force interfering with Al Qaeda's previously-stated wishes to bring violence to American soil...
> It doesn't have to scale. You could sit and prepare for years for a single massive attack and get maximal value out of it. As technology improves, so does the ability to for a single malicious agent to kill or maim more and more and more people at a single time, which only gets worse when you combine multiple such agents into a group.
So, if we extrapolate towards the future, what you're saying is that the only way to prevent terrorist attacks that kill millions in a single blow is to abandon any and all privacy on a global scale? Because that's what i conclude taking your argument to its logical extreme.
Also, al qaeda didn't have any success attacking on US soil prior to 9/11, so it seems the NSA did some time travelling there. I might also point out that all the information needed to stop the 9/11 plot was known to the government at the time, they just didn't know they knew it. The NSA's warantless wiretapping wouldn't have been necessary to stop 9/11.
> So, if we extrapolate towards the future, what you're saying is that the only way to prevent terrorist attacks that kill millions in a single blow is to abandon any and all privacy on a global scale?
No, but what I am saying is that there is very little some suitable middle ground between letting extremists do whatever the hell they want and a total police state.
Notice I've not really been arguing with people who say that more controls are needed on government surveillance, as I agree completely.
I am arguing with people who say things implying that terrorists are dumb or that there is no amount of fatalities that would make even a little bit of law enforcement capability reasonable.
There's a lot of different arguments going on around this, but you'll note that there was not much public outcry about the idea of the police being able to wiretap cell phones, subpoena emails, etc. pursuant to an investigation.
So the issue IMHO is not with government surveillance per se, it with the type of surveillance now available to the NSA, and the oversight that is not currently going along with it.
Back to the point though, the increasingly deadly probability of a single event makes it correspondingly more of a good resource and policy allocation for government to take pains to avoid these events. That doesn't mean unlimited police powers by any stretch; but it does mean we expect people to be detecting and breaking up terror cells before they become deadly.
> Also, al qaeda didn't have any success attacking on US soil prior to 9/11
Don't be silly, the 9/11 attacks were at least the second attack by Al Qaeda on the WTC site.
And either way, what's that matter for this? The U.S. Navy sucked at combat in 1941 and 1942 but by 1944 outclassed the Japanese Navy and aviators even on a 1:1 basis.
The reason AQ sucked at terrorism was because they were crap in general, but they learned over time, gained operational experience, developed training methods and command & control, and built what we in the military call 'corporate knowledge'. All of which leads to a much more effective terrorism 'machine'.
People's beliefs are simply not prima facie evidence of what is actually happening though.
Many people believe the Earth is 6000 years old.
Many people believe it's impossible for humans to have evolved from apes.
Many people believe gay people simply chose to be gay.
Many people believed that Sunil was the Boston bomber, right up until it was proved it wasn't him at all.
Many people believe that God will heal their child of disease modern medicine eradicated 100 years ago.
Many people believe that vaccines cause autism.
In short, many people believe the dumbest things.
To the extent that these things are inaccurate they must be opposed; otherwise you can incite public panic by fearmongering and worse, the people who perceive accurate problems get lost in the noise of the crazies.
To the extent that these accusions are accurate, reason and logic are certainly the way to make that clear. You may get more followers with FUD and rhetoric but those tactics are still just as distasteful when used by us as it is when used against us.
> They are side effects of living productively, however, so we can't rationally just ban cars
Terrorism and crime are side effects of living freely.
> "Do you think those who wish to do you harm don't want to exponentially increase that count?"
Not sure how that is relevant. In fact I take it more as an argument for how normal, non-expanded powers have been surprisingly effective at stopping worst-case scenarios.
Terrorism and crime are a side effects of living freely.
And I didn't say otherwise. However that there are efforts to combat terrorism always gets compared to the traffic deaths/heart disease/cancer canard. It is a non-starter argument.
non-expanded powers have been surprisingly effective at stopping worst-case scenarios
Expanded relates to expanded avenues of communications and organization. The NSA moves into collecting data in avenues that "the other side" didn't have not too many years ago. The world evolves on all sides.
Further, as the critically important old saying goes: chance favors the prepared. There will come a day that a nuclear weapon gets in the hands of the "wrong" people (e.g. during a breakdown of the government in Pakistan, etc.). That chance event, which thankfully hasn't happened thus far, can have many possible outcomes.
If someone randomly shoots people in parks, there will be a massive response because the impact is on everyone
This is precisely why terrorism is not a big deal. The people are not the ones demanding rendition, illegal wiretapping, drones, nude body scanners, etc.
These things are being created the the corrupt public/private partnerships that the US Government has created b/c of poor oversight and little transparency.
Suppose you want to strike terror into the American population. There are so many simple attacks that are impossible to prevent -- you could bring a few gallons of gasoline into a subway car and light it, you could open fire at a mall on black Friday, etc. Event the crudest, least effective permutation of these kinds of attacks would cause significant terror, yet nobody does them.
I'd argue that there are simply too few people in the US who want to, and most who want to are incapable of the minimal functioning required to do so.
9/11 was a larger scale attack, but as we can see from other countries' situations, low tech, less lethal attacks are very effective too.
Nothing that the US Government is doing can prevent against terror plots from succeeding. That ought to be obvious to everyone. The idea that the government has somehow spared us from attacks on the water supply or nukes is absurd, since there aren't even any terrorists willing to try the simplest, lowest-risk kinds of attacks.
The counter-argument would appear to be that terrorists have an insane delight in over the top attacks that will be even more symbolic. But worldwide very little terrorism is like this, and so I view it as propaganda. When you think about it, most of the "terror" caused by 9/11 nationwide has been due to all the fear-mongering elected officials engage in.
As we should have learned back on 9/11/2001 when the last plane was thwarted by its own passengers, people are resilient and will adapt to protect each other.
There are so many simple attacks that are impossible to prevent
To add to your own excellent examples, you could blow up the people standing in the security line at an airport. Which I guess they could solve by having a security line before you get to the security line. Which you could then blow up.
We're going to need a lot of additional security lines.
True, even conspicuous failed attacks would instill terror, such as a mysterious abandoned car with lots of fertilizer in the trunk... the media would play up the terror angle and terror would be achieved even w/o any intent to create an explosion.
Nothing that the US Government is doing can prevent against terror plots from succeeding.
Nothing? How utterly defeatist. People in all manner of ventures seldom act alone, and it is in those communications and networks that is precisely what the NSA (and the CIA, and the FBI, and the...) is targeting. Their wholesale capture is open to question, but it absolutely can thwart terrorism attacks.
Here in Canada we've had several potential terrorism events that were prevented by exactly that sort of action. Not by NSA type methods, but by someone in that network of associates coming under suspicion for some reason and it percolates out.
The idea that the government has somehow spared us from attacks on the water supply or nukes is absurd, since there aren't even any terrorists willing to try the simplest, lowest-risk kinds of attacks.
This is so profoundly broken of a thought process -- the "I have made my decision and I am sticking with it, logic be damned" -- that it isn't worth further consideration. It is a very good thing people like you have no part in safety and security -- by your failed thought process, things that haven't happened thus won't happen.
I would not classify my comment as defeatist. By definition, Terrorism is action that exploits a society's freedoms to create terror. Thus any free society will be vulnerable to terrorism.
No matter what areas our government cracks down on, as long as we have any freedoms left, someone can exploit them to create terror.
You dismiss my point about low tech, low sophistication attacks. But think about how everyone reacted when mysterious (but eventually harmless) white powder was found in a few envelopes. Terrorism exploits freedom for great psychological effect.
> Do you think those who wish to do you harm don't want to exponentially increase that count? If various groups could get a nuclear warhead or dirty bomb, do you really believe they wouldn't use it? If they could sabotage a major city's water supply or a nuclear power plant, do you think that would be below them?
Of course no one thinks those things. That's a straw man. There are a number of people who would be quite delighted to do each of those things. Everyone knows that.
But you're acting as if we're standing at that precipice--as if requiring narrow warrants to tap search histories will all of the sudden enable these people to obtain and deploy a nuclear bomb.
And the fact of that matter is: such events are unprecedented. There have not been hundred-thousand-death terrorist acts. You raise the possibility of them, but evidence suggests that it's actually very hard to pull off, and has been for a very, very long time, independent of various changes in surveillance technology and law.
IF (and it's a big if) terrorist attacks were to increase sharply in response to a strict interpretation of wiretapping laws, why couldn't we just deal with it at that time? Why do you want to deal with it now? The terrorism rates could increase 100x before even registering as a public health issue.
You're like someone who won't go on a date because they're worried about getting a divorce. Yes, sure, it's a possibility, but it's a long ways down the line, and we will have ample opportunities to try and solve each specific challenge along the way.
There are two ways to prevent terrorism. You can a) focus on preventing the actual act and b) focus on preventing people from becoming motivated enough to commit the act. If we truly want to prevent terrorism, we need to focus on both. Currently, we only focus on the first. My point is, there are other ways of preventing terrorism than by eroding our freedoms and tracking everything everyone does.
I am bold enough to say that even 'doing nothing' would be much more effective than what the US is doing right now. At least it won't increase the number of fanatics around the world who hate the US just because of the (from-their-perspective) unjust wars.
Unfortunately, 'doing nothing' is not in the dictionary of 'serious' managers, politicians or generals.
If you want something more easy comparable, lets compare terrorism kills vs murder rates. How much police resource is spent per murder citizen vs killed by terrorism.
Do anyone really think that the US would spend the same amount of money catching a shotgun wielding mass murderer who robs liqueur stores, or the same shotgun wielding guy that has a terrorism manifesto posted on youtube but with no prior kills on his hands. Who of the two is more likely to have biggest kill count in the end?
That is average number spread out over all the terrorists and not median. Trying to merge those two concept is a common way to use statistic to mislead.
The question was if a shotgun wielding guy posting a video on Youtube is more likely to kill more people than a shotgun wielding mass murderer who robs liqueur stores. To clarify, he doesn't have a time machine to suddenly transfer himself to 2001.
Not fair; the public was not prepared to deal with that situation; now they are. Pilots carry; attendants and passengers are knowledgeable to fight back. And that's including revoking most of what the TSA has become.
One simply has to extrapolate that all reasonable efforts to avoid terrorism aside, terrorism is simply the same result of liberated living as driving a car
What a strange world we live in, when you have to run from the US government after revealing its illegal and unconstitutional activity and hope for safe haven in Putin's Russia.
I am not a US citizen, nor do I live there. However I did live there for about 12 years.
I don't think there is a lot of support in favor of Snowden in USA, don't be confused by internet activism. The reality is most people is US doesn't care about snowden or the implications of his revelations.
In the current US, anti-government activism is a foreign concept. You won't find a lack of people complaining about the government, but you won't find them on the street and make some noise untill there is some real change.
Even the occupy movement was largely a farce and it wasn't really against the government.
>I don't think there is a lot of support in favor of Snowden in USA, don't be confused by internet activism.
This is spot on. Most people here don't even know his name. To the ones that do, he is "that guy that leaked all those secrets." It pains me to say it, but it's true.
The odd thing is that with the recent House vote that almost successfully de-funded the NSA with regards to the meta-data collection program, it seems that a lot of our representatives were ahead of the population (or responding to the more activist elements of the population) on the issue.
>Even the occupy movement was largely a farce and it wasn't really against the government.
I was there that first day that it started. To be fair, the movement was largely about the relationship between the government and the private sector, not just the private sector.
Do you have evidence for that? I've not personally seen any polling, so maybe you're right, but my impression is that a lot of people of all ages strongly approve of government anti-terror efforts in general.
Well, beware sampling bias. As best I can tell, the tech crowd has very different opinions on these issues than the population at large, and it can be easy to fall into the trap of "most young people think this way" when it's actually "most young people with six-figure salaries at technology companies think this way".
I think we are both saying the same thing. I originally meant to say that there is very little support for snowden outside the online tech crowd eco-chamber. I think you are also sayin the same thing.
I think what brought us to this point is our persistent belief into the Cold War era roles in the world. US the good guys. Ruskies - a menace to humanity. When the US invaded Iraq, everyone was upset, but in the end people shrugged it off. After all, the US is the good guys. They can't do no harm.
Now after a decade of American led wars, invasions, drones... and now the mass surveillance program, we slowly start to realize that maybe things are not as good as they seem.
Perhaps, it's time to reassess the past established roles and look at the world afresh.
Has it ever occurred to anyone, that Putin's Russia today is a conservative's "paradise"? I mean, if you do not agree with everything that the 'progressive left' stand for, you may feel quite good in Russia.
Putin's government is supporting the church, and promoting traditional family values. They have instituted significant money benefits for families with children, and as a result the much talked about decline in Russia's population has been stopped in 2013. For the first time in modern Russian history there are more babies born in Russia than people die of old age. http://www.amren.com/news/2013/06/russias-population-decline...
The laws prohibiting "gay propaganda" should be viewed in the context of these policies. Obviously, being gay as such is not illegal in Russia. There are gay bars in any large Russian city, and quite a few of celebrities have admitted to be gay. However, they have made it illegal to promote homosexuality publicly.
Then, there are economic policies of Putin that would make Reagan jealous. Russian government has adopted a flat 13% tax rate on all incomes in 2001. Not only this has made Russia one of the lowest tax jurisdictions in the world. Most importantly, the flat rate has removed thousands of 'tax exceptions' that is the source of economic inefficiencies and outright corruption in most of 'developed' countries. Here is a noted US conservative lamenting that Putin has achieved something he had worked on most of his life. "We won the Cold War, but Russia gets a flat tax while America is stuck with a Byzantine tax system based on class-warfare ideology."
http://www.heritage.org/research/commentary/2003/03/russias-....
Finally, the 'freedom of press opression' and 'political persecution of opponents' thesis is in many ways overblown. Most popular Russian internet media outlets are openly anti-Putin (lenta.ru, slon.ru etc. etc.). The most listened to news/talk-show radio station (Echo Moskvy) is strongly anti-Putin, and a very popular cable TV channel (Dozhd) is also anti-Putin and anti-establishment.
And the trial of the poster-child of anti-Putin opposition Mr Khodorkovsky (who was imprisoned years ago on fraud and tax-evasion charges) has just been recognised as a 'non-political' by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) (read: Khodorkovsky was indeed a crook, and his sentencing was not influenced by his anti-Putin stance). http://www.rferl.org/content/russia-european-court-khodorkov...
Putin's government is also following Western conservative script with regard to intellectual property. Actually, today the have effected a broad-reaching anti-piracy law that would outlaw any internet site that publishes links to illegal movie download or torrent-trackers. To Putin's credit, the downloaders of illegal content themselves will not be prosecuted. So, parents of teenagers need not worry about gigantic fines etc.
Obviously, Putin is no friend to US conservatives, primarily because Putin is a nationalist and conducts an independent foreign policy. What is good for Russia need not be good for the US. And vice versa. But Putin may be good for those Russians that hold traditional conservative values. Hell, such people may feel Russia is the last bastion of true conservatism left in the world, while not being exactly a Pinochet-like fascist place.
>Has it ever occurred to anyone, that Putin's Russia today is a conservative's "paradise"? I mean, if you do not agree with everything that 'progressive left' stand for, you may feel quite good in Russia.
Minus the extra judicial killing and prosecution of any serious political opponent.
Just to be clear, I don't try to judge Putin's russia through the "prism" of western media bias, I am sure he has done a lot of good for his country, but he has also done boatload of fucked up shit.
Not to mention the constant, evidence-based accusations of widespread electoral fraud, and the UN veto being used to continue selling arms to Syria as long as possible...
constant, evidence-based accusations of widespread electoral fraud
There are conflicting views on that.
Accusations of fraud are mostly aboutRussian parliament elections of 2011. Pro-Putin party was accused of fraud in many districts, which I personally think is correct. (But, strangely enough, Israeli foreign minister, has found those elections fair and democratic... http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/lieberman-russ...)
On the other hand, most definetely Putin did not need any fraud to help him win presidential elections in 2012. He had an overwhelming support among common Russians. Forecasts by anti-Putin polling organisation Levada Centre promised him 63% of the vote (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_presidential_election,_...), and he indeed got 63.5%. His closest competitor (a communist) got 17%.
To win elections fraudulently, Putin had to doctor close to half of the bulletins, which seems unlikely, given worldwide scrutiny of the election, and his own efforts to dispel doubts such as installing live webcams at every polling station etc.
Tl;dr Putin won because he is popular, not because of the fraud.
What "boatload of fucked up shit" are you referring to? Why do so many negative comments pop up about him all the time? Either I'm missing something or it's just ultra-liberals complaining about the conservatism in the country.
Its strange because a whistleblower has to run from US government as he is 100% sure (rightfully) that there is no chance of having fair trial or policy change despite the revelations and its implications.
And he has to run to Russia, a country that has much much worse human rights records (at least publicly, it is possibly that US government privately is much worse in human rights).
I think the people of the USA should ask their government what is the legal way to expose government wrongdoing, _to the extend Snowden did_, without being prosecuted and having to run for his life? I am afraid, currently no such law exist.
It's a fairly typical case of shooting the messenger and this is the generalized fate of whistleblowers the world over, be it in corporations, governments or other institutions. The first response is to squelch the source by any means available. If there is change it usually is much later.
Not fair in the sense that the current law exists to not protect whistleblowers like snowden. The law is by default against him and there is no legal way to expose the government to the extend snowden did.
As to Federal judge's my understanding is that (might be wrong) most of these appointments are political in nature. And at least in case of supreme court the judges tends to align with their ideological bias and their interpretation of laws often wildly differs. Don't quote me on it though, just my understanding.
There were well-defined legal channels available to Snowden to communicate any concerns he had about the existing programs. By all accounts, he did not take advantage of any of them.
Did you see the interview that USA Today conducted with NSA whistleblowers Thomas Drake and William Binney when Snowden's leaks were first published? They specifically addressed the myth that there are effective mechanisms in place to report and rectify misconduct. There are none, and these very intelligent, very principled men agreed that Snowden took the correct course of action in exposing all of this.
As dissenters within the agency, they have a more accurate idea about how all of this works in practice than nearly anyone else.
Feel free to show examples of said "well-define legal channels" which Snowden could have used to show the depth of NSA's activity as he did, where the discussion is open for public debate.
Also this has been going on for so long, why didn't anyone else from NSA use said well-defined legal channel to expose NSA activity or at-least put them up for scrutiny.
I can think of 3 reasons:
1) There is no well-defined legal channels to expose NSA illegal activity, to the extend Snowden did.
2) NSA only hires people who are morally corrupt.
3) NSA employees are genuinely concerned about their safety and well-being if they want to expose NSA.
The comparison was not between putin's Russia and Russia 50 years ago. It was between Russia and USA. Despite everything that is fucked up and wrong with US Government, I would hope (perhaps naively), its still better than Russia in terms of human rights at least?
> I would hope (perhaps naively), its still better than Russia in terms of human rights at least?
That depends on a lot of factors:
- are you homosexual
- ethnically caucasian
- A subscriber to Islam
- have a name that matches the name of someone on a no-fly list
- an 'enemy combatant' (ages 13 and up)
- an activist of sorts
Or anyone of a hundred other arbitrary criteria. Those could make the difference between a safe & secure life 'just' being harassed periodically by people in uniform or spending time in Gitmo or Siberia.
Actually, that matters in Russia a lot, too. Although, their meaning of the word is different (Russian Caucasians are people originated from around the Caucasian Mountains; that's where all the guerilla fighting is currently going on).
I am a recently naturalized US Citizen, from Russia. In magic scenario USSR would be restored, I would go back and work in an institute, like my father happily did.
Before you happily go to (hypothetically restored) USSR, please read about the fate of Italian aircraft designer Robert Bartini, who moved to USSR in 1923. In 1938 he was imprisoned and spent 14 years working in sharashkas:
Hell, you didn't need to be an Italian to get "conscripted" into a sharashka. Some of the best Russian aircraft designers (e.g. Tupolev) were contributing to the Russian war (WWII) effort from prison.
Thanks, but I'm pretty sure I am aware of the actual ratio of the horror stories to reality.
The reality is not as bleak as what the western propaganda made USSR out to be while it was out to destroy the only alternative political system on the same planet.
> I am aware of the actual ratio of the horror stories to reality
And what is the ratio? For example, try calculating this ratio for aircraft designers of the period: imprisoned_designers / free_designers. I don't think the result would be pretty.
I was interested enough to make (completely unscientific) assessment of what happened to some of the emigrants to USSR.
I've looked through all 8 Finnish emigrants listed in Wikipedia category [1]. The result isn't pretty: 3 executed during Great Purge, 1 commited suicide, 1 killed during civil war, 1 "lucky" to die just before Great Purge. The rest 2 were politicians (one of which was very high ranking). No scientists or engineers or technicians.
And here is the same assessment of all 7 American emigrants listed in Wikipedia category [2]: 3 spies; 1 scientist (Arnold Lokshin); 1 composer (Karl Rautio); 1 short-term technician, not allowed to go back to US, Gulag prisoner (Alexander Dolgun); 1 car toolmaker, not allowed to go back to US for 44 years (Robert Robinson).
Ignoring spies, we've got 2 miserable fates, and 2 good fates. So your ratio for US emigrants is 2/2. And those two are good mostly because of political reasons: the composer of Anthem of the Karelo-Finnish Soviet Socialist Republic; and asylum seeking scientist.
Do you still want to move to (hypothetically restored) USSR?
I didn't realize until much later, but linking to a 60 year old events as a detriment to an action NOW is absolutely ridiculous. It's like, yeah, thank god I'm not Japanese, so I don't have to be imprisoned in a concentration camp right now!
Initially you wrote: "In magic scenario USSR would be restored, I would go back and work in an institute".
You didn't mention what kind of USSR would you like to be restored. Of course, there were different periods in Soviet history, with various rate and cruelty of persecutions. To stress my point I chose one of the most hideous periods. But unfair persecutions were always there.
If USSR was restored, it would obviously be the period of 2013. The pre-Gorbochev era was what my 'father' should obviously reference. The 'cruelties' of the Soviet period are directly related to the cruelties of the world at large, such as preparations for WW2.
> The 'cruelties' of the Soviet period are directly related to the cruelties of the world at large, such as preparations for WW2.
This statement is so generic, that it's very hard to argue about it. "World at large", "directly related" - what do mean by those exactly?
Pre-Gorbachev era was certainly safer to live in than Stalin era. But I would argue that "cruelty" was actually one the pillars of the Soviet system. Totalitarian system couldn't survive without the excessive use of force. That's why it's called "totalitarian". Less cruelty leads to less control, and finally leads to collapse of the system. Foreign intervention had very little to do with the collapse of USSR.
The problem is that most people wouldn't call it "Soviet misery". You were given a lot of things for free, so who cares you couldn't say bad things about the government? If you had a guaranteed job(at which you could just slack off and do nothing for the entire day with pretty much no consequences, since you knew you were getting paid at the end of the month regardless), free house/apartment paid for by the state, free medical care, free education, including higher education and state-sponsored holidays twice a year - why would you complain?
In fact I come from a country which used to be communist(Poland) and a lot of people(older people) say that it was fantastic. Obviously they don't realize that these policies pretty much ruined our economy and were unsustainable in the long run, but they don't care - they want their nice jobs, free stuff from the government and paid holidays twice the year.
It's a sad day because a citizen of our nation decided he needed to go to a foreign journalist instead of one of our own to break this story.
It's a sad day because that same citizen felt like he wouldn't get a fair trial in our justice system and might be treated the same way Bradley Manning was until he did get a trial.
It's a sad day because lots of decent, honest people who work in our intelligence services that are trying desperately to uncover the next possible attack are going to have to work much harder.
It's a sad day because those people are going to work harder because the leaders do not feel like they can trust the American people to understand and decide for themselves how much of their privacy they are willing to trade for the work that the government's intelligence services do.
It's a sad day because we demonstrated that we care more about the embarrassment of our duplicity being revealed than in the ideals of our commitment to civil liberties.
And I'm sad because I'm an American and I love my country and I want it to do better.
Living in Brazil, working with the Guardian, a UK Newspaper. Not saying that OP was right, just saying that there isn't much reason to split hairs here.
True but one has to assume he finds it easier to publish his reporting through a British newspaper otherwise why wouldn't he simply be on the NYT payroll?
1. Foreign means not from a country, Greenwald was born in Queens, NY - just because he lives abroad, that doesn't make him foreign.
2. He works for Guardian US, a US company based in New York.
3. According to the editor, it's actually easier for the Guardian to publish stories on this topic through their US subsidiary, rather than the UK, because free speech protections are stronger in the US, so the US connection is very important to them and they view themselves as a global media operation now (just moved to a .com domain for example).
The point I am trying to make is that Snowden took this story to a few local, bona-fide, 100% US-owned/operated/associated well-known media outlets and they passed.
He went to a UK-associated news outlet and got published.
When you're done focusing on the most irrelevant part of my post, please look closer and see if you can discern a forest amongst the trees.
Americans making "informed tradeoffs" about privacy defeats the purpose, from a SIGINT perspective. If everyone knows Skype is bugged, the bad guys who aren't idiots don't use Skype. The only way for a crime prevention dragnet to work is if nobody knows about it, and even then the nastiest bad guys will still probably take heavy precautions just in case.
Surveillance is about control; more nines of safety may or may not be a beneficial side product. There is no reason why mass surveillance would not expand to encompass other crimes: first murders and rapes, then tax evasion, then drugs and torrents, then joining "subversive" protest groups, etc.
I'm not sure there is any person or group trustworthy enough to own a unilateral monopoly on all knowledge.
It's kind of amazing that I visited and traversed the entire country by train (St Petersburg to Vladivostok) all while he was in the airport.
So when everyone is talking about big political issues, all I can think of is all the mundane stuff he must be putting up with. Like: how much clothing does he have, and how is he doing laundry? And: Who's paying for his expenses? I assume his ATM card and Visa aren't good anymore.
Get a blini and some квас at Теремок, Edward. It's pretty tasty.
In common speech, teremok is a small wooden or stone house[1], like the one from a fairy-tale of the same name [2]. Also a name of a fast food chain. Blini = pancakes. Kvas = Russian national non-alcoholic (<1%) beverage.
Initially it was a term for an upper living floor in a rather big medieval russian house. Like a penthouse. After some time it became a synonym for a such house with "terem".
Reminder: the real reason Snowden could not walk out of the airport is not because of some virtual "passport" that US "revoked". It is because there are real armed obedient guys on the border who would not let Snowden go his way.
This whole story is not about privacy, spying or politics. It is about your personal inability to choose your phone company, internet provider, or a bank without confronting armed "state" which dictates what is allowed to you. Don't like NSA spying through Verizon? Build your own phone company. Oops, there are feds with an order to "cooperate".
Guns and violence are the problem, not all these abstract inventions like "rights" or "privacy".
Kind of a useless reminder. Not a single source given for 'real armed obedient guys on the border'. On what border? Where? Besides, his revoked passport is not virtual. It is quite real.
What do you think was stopping Snowden from sitting on a bus and going to Moscow? Armed soldiers.
What do you think is stopping Google from non-complying with an order to install a fedbox in their datacenter? Armed guys who would go in and confiscate equipment, or even put some managers in jail for "aiding the enemy". "Court order" is just a paperwork to justify concrete violence.
What stops you from not paying your taxes (when you dislike war, spying or whatever gov is doing)? It is armed people who would come in and extract your property from you. And they will always be slightly more violent than amount of self-defense you'd try to apply.
Armed soldiers are also stopping me from going to any country I want, without a visa. Should I start protesting about my right to travel any-fucking-where?
Your argument is silly. "Armed people" are just a tool to enforce policies enforced by governments. It is them, not the soldiers, we should be worried about.
Now, don’t get me wrong, it is typical braindead libertarian rhetoric, but there sort of is a valid point in there.
I think one of the big injustices of our time we will look back to with disgust (like slavery 200 years ago) is not allowing people to go wherever they want to go. What gives us any right to deny people to live anywhere on the planet they want to?
It’s just that I absolutely do not believe that abolishing (all or large parts of) government is any kind of solution to this.
(And, yes, this would have often dire economic consequences for some. Just as abolishing slavery had dire economic consequences for some. Doing the right thing isn’t free.)
Lets have slavery as an example. You feel uncomfortable abolishing government completely. That's fine. How'd it work with slavery? Imagine we decide that slavery is not good. Should we just let every slave run away (at the expense of cotton plantation owners who'd immediately incur losses)? Or should we release every 10th slave this month, then every 9th next month etc.? Is it then moral to shoot down a slave who'll be freed two months from now, if he runs away today?
Armed people are those who make the choice. Gun does not kill, Putin does not kill. Armed dude who can follow or not follow the orders kills.
The whole point of my comments is that what is generally considered immoral (threatening and killing) becomes 180 degrees different when some man in a nice costume says so. Don't you think someone was bullshitting us?
In my view, murder is never justified. Even in self-defense. However, in case of self-defense, you don't have much choice (and people around might understand you), while guys in the airport don't have any kind of attack and everyone can be peaceful and nice to each other and walk their way.
So what? That's sad, but in the end we rely on existence of these armed guys to do whatever we need to do. In post-apocalyptical fantasies where government armed guys cease to exist, who would usually thrive? Organized armed guys.
At least we have some mechanisms to influence the armed guys we have now.
In places with lack of central government, (ruthless) armed group tends to become the de facto ruling regional organisations, like Somalia, Libya, etc. This is debatable that the lack of government is the only issue with these areas. However, I don't have examples who come to mind where the lack of central authority transitioned in a peaceful coexistence of different factions/regions/tribes.
Let's conduct a thought experiment: tomorrow everyone in the US wakes up and realizes there's no government, no cops, no army etc. And for the purity of the experiment, let's say there is no way to create a new government. Do you think it'll be like Syria or Somalia? Do you think the demand for security and peace will suddenly evaporate?
It is really too far-fetched to provide a meaningful answer or discussion. Does it includes prison guards ? Are the inmates left to starve, or running freely ? Does it includes fire-fighters ? FDA, can I sell you my cure for cancer ? ...
It is probably due to my education, and the time I was born, but I can't imagine a society working without "safeguards". Maybe it is because of lack of imagination, but I would like to see a working example, before making the jump. Which is a kind of chicken egg problem, because if no one tries, you can't know it works. Maybe it will seem obvious retrospectively in 500 or 1000 years, but currently it is not.
I would recommend a non-fiction book "The Machinery Of Freedom" by David D. Friedman, it depicts and discusses how a society could function without a government.
1. Government doesn't provide food
2. Government only provides SOME jobs
Even if we assume that ALL people who can no longer be employed because government disappeared cannot find jobs, it would only demonstrate that they can't work on jobs no one wants to pay for voluntarily. That is, if people wouldn't need cops anymore, because (let's imagine) there was no crime - no one would pay to private protection agencies and they would have to find something else to do. "Jobs" are not the desirable result, it's "doing something valuable" that's important.
I think you'll find that the presence of effective, competent governance is pretty strongly correlated with the availability of both food and jobs.
You missed my point, anyway, which is that your comfortable notions of a safe, orderly society will go right out the window once the economy breaks down, which it would if you removed the framework in which it operates, which is basically indistinguishable from government.
"Any society is only three square meals away from revolution"
The proposition is not to remove the framework, but to de-monopolize it. We currently have a government framework of law, but nothing (except people not realizing it's even possible) prevents us from having multiple frameworks, each operating on its own client base (even when those clients physically live on the same territory) and negotiating with each other when disputes between clients of two different agencies arise.
The major difference in this situation would be that clients of such firms would voluntarily pay money to be protected by them. If they don't want protection or don't like specific laws, they stop paying or switch. The monopoly we have now extracts money from taxpayers at gunpoint and provides a rather crappy service.
> The proposition is not to remove the framework, but to de-monopolize it.
To demonopolize it is to remove it. The monopoly is the essence of the framework.
> We currently have a government framework of law, but nothing (except people not realizing it's even possible) prevents us from having multiple frameworks, each operating on its own client base (even when those clients physically live on the same territory) and negotiating with each other when disputes between clients of two different agencies arise.
This kind of patron/client system is not novel, and most people do, in fact, recognize that it is possible.
> The major difference in this situation would be that clients of such firms would voluntarily pay money to be protected by them.
Unless there is some supervisory entity that does have a monopoly enforcing it (in which case, this remains a monopoly system with low-level enforcement farmed out, not a demonopolized system), voluntariness seems, well, dubious. You've just invented a system competing warlords (well, invented is too strong a term, its the basic model of primitive feudalism.)
Yes. I don't know (and frankly, hardly imagine) of any societies without any hierarchies though. I could imagine communities with democratic collegial decision-making, but it still implies there is a way to enforce decisions, which means armed men.
"A general reminder whenever budget issues are discussed: the U.S. government is — this isn’t original — best thought of as a giant insurance company with an army. When you talk about federal spending, you’re overwhelmingly talking about Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and defense. And the bulk of the insurance — all of Social Security and Medicare, about 2/3 of Medicaid — is for the elderly and disabled."
So... it's real. It's a piece of paper required to travel internationally. It's not virtual. A driver license isn't a virtual document stating you can legally drive a car, it's just a document stating you can legally drive a car.
Lets start with "Reality 101". The documents do not talk and do not act. It's just a piece of paper (real) with some text on it (real). But it becomes a legal thing only when some particular armed dude is looking at it and makes decisions.
So: the decisions of the armed dude are real, but "legal statement" is just a virtual abstraction invented to hide the fact that some violence will be applied.
You should attend "Reality 102", where they explain how abstractions and inventions like "rights" or "patriotism" or "duty" can affect the mind of the guys with the guns and influence whether they shoot or not.
Millions of people believe in one god or another and visit churches where they are being taught about what's good and what's right. Does that kind of "education" make something right or wrong? Does it make it right for me to comply with soldier's orders if he was properly educated about patriotism by some people I don't even know about?
So lets simply pray that gunned men are educated well and let them do their thing. E.g. killing innocent people overseas.
I thought you wanted to talk about what happens in reality. If you start discussing what's right or wrong, then you are no longer talking of what things are. You've switched courses to Ethical Philosophy 101; Reality was taught in the hard sciences faculty, Ethics is at liberal arts.
In that case you'll have to consider all kind of perspectives, because what's considered right or wrong varies greatly by who is doing the consideration.
I am talking about what's happening in reality. "Morality" and "ethics" are creations of our minds, not something we find lying around. When these abstractions are used to justify violence, then I come and expose it.
I'm not the one who teaches you what's good and what's bad. I'm just pointing out grave contradictions in other people's justifications that lead to all sorts of things that many consider "evil".
In other words: I'm not the one who will violently oppose your lifestyle, nor will I support those who will violently intervene in your life. Believe in what you want, live with people you like. I'd only like the same respect from you towards me. And in case we have some conflict, I'm all for peaceful non-violent solution. E.g. dialog, public debate, "defamation", boycott, economic ostracism etc. But no guns and ass-kicking (unless someone pulls out knifes and forks, in which case I'd have to run away and/or fight back, but I still don't justify violence).
It's not just the passport: you need a visa to enter Russia, and there's normally no way to acquire one except through an embassy in your home country.
So even with a valid passport, Russia would have had to make an exception to their normal rules.
If your point is that the nature of the state as an institution with a monopoly on violence is the core issue here, then you've overgeneralized the problem. That is the source of many ills in the world. This situation is unique because states nominally protect certain rights for their citizens, and denying them those rights subjects the state to a risk that some subset of the populace will do violence to it (whether by voting out officials or rioting in the streets). The US has calculated that the negative consequences from its populace in this situtation are likely to be minimal, and the worrying part is that it may be correct.
Please come visit Russia without a passport or maybe ask people to come visit US without one. You'll see how fast those guns can become real. They won't even let you out of the country if you don't have a passport, which, of course, only a government can issue.
Guns are necessary only because there exist violent sociopaths who will use force to avoid obeying the rules human society has set down. That you fear them implies you are exactly the kind of person the rules are intended to protect us from.
Why do you want protection from me? I have not given a slightest hint I want to harm anyone in any way and I don't like violence. Why would I fear rules? I fear people who want to randomly enforce those rules, justifying by them anything they want to justify, while themselves avoiding the rules they created for us. Besides, it is exactly high ranking government jobs that attract sociopaths, because it becomes really easy to do anything with very little accountability.
The guns are not to be used against you unless you are violent. You imply you obey laws only because there are men with guns. This indicates you will use violence to avoid obeying laws. That is why I need protection from you.
If you believe it's wrong, work to get it changed through non-violent means.
> This indicates that you don't believe in opposing unjust laws
Using violence to oppose laws perceived by you as unjust is wrong so long as there is a democracy at work. And no, I will not accept the argument that because the majority happens to disagree with you, the democracy must not be working.
> and shooting any one who disagrees.
As far as I can tell, it is you who wants to shoot anyone who tries to enforce a law you don't like. I call that reprehensible and have no sympathy for you.
Resisting a law is non-violent, but often gets a violent response from authorities, with guns. Most existing approved methods to change law simply dont work for most normal people.
Its not as black and white as you think. If a minority is oppressed by a majority, then yes, the democracy is broken. The point of democracy is not legalized mob rule, it MUST protect minorities.
> Resisting a law is non-violent, but often gets a violent response from authorities, with guns.
People don't always do the right thing, film at 11. That's not a reason to eradicate law enforcement nor government as a whole.
> Most existing approved methods to change law simply dont work for most normal people.
Failure to change a law to suit your own whims is not a failure of the mechanisms. It is your failure to persuade.
> The point of democracy is not legalized mob rule, it MUST protect minorities.
In the end, minorities are only ever protected by consent of the majority. A society whose people do not believe in rule of law cannot and will not effectively protect minorities, no matter the governance structure or what any piece of paper says.
All we can do is try to instill the rule of law, and set up rules and institutions to protect everyone's rights in anticipation that, at any given moment, the majority may wish to treat a minority unjustly. We must then hope that either the majority is persuaded that their hatred does not justify damaging those rules and institutions, or that the majority view changes before it succeeds in punching a hole in them.
> The last bit you just made up.
You made up my alleged desire to shoot people who "resist" laws.
No, I obey some laws because there are men with guns and I obey others because I think it's a good idea to. For instance, I pay taxes or obtain visas to other countries because otherwise officials are going to make my life difficult if I don't do that. On the other hand, I don't steal from or hurt people because I don't like it and consider it immoral.
You're continuing to indicate you would be violent toward those attempting to enforce laws if not for the fact that they could be more violent toward you.
If you're just using guns as a proxy for "someone is telling me what to do and I don't like it", then how about being a little more honest and just saying "I don't want to obey rules I don't like"?
No, I have not indicated it at all. You misread me. No one likes obeying rules they don't like. You're trying to present it as if I'm some kind of an outcast, which I'm not.
If you leave via commercial airliner the TSA will check to see if the name on your identification (be it a passport, driver's license, or other) matches that on your boarding pass. They don't, however, check to see if you're allowed to leave the country like most other countries do. They've never scanned my passport into a computer like every other country (besides Canada) does.
It's a deep denial of the reality when you say that.
Both my and your lives are 95% peaceful anarchy - we voluntarily interact with who we want and ignore people we dislike or disapprove of. The remaining 5% - is when some dudes in costumes brainwash us to comply with a well-hidden gun. Try to "disagree" by not paying your taxes and see what happens.
If you never intend to pay your taxes the government can garnish your wages. The individual state governments are far more vigilant about this than the federal government, however. California will dip into your Wells Fargo account almost immediately but one can not pay federal taxes for quite some time. You occasionally hear about some celebrity or fiancier getting busted for not paying their taxes for the past 20 years. Your passport is never revoked, though. Congress has tried to get a bill to do that but it has never passed. Certainly "men with guns" do not show up at your house if you miss the April 15 deadline as seems to be suggested in these ridiculous discussions. This is a country where at least half of the government officials themselves also hate taxes and dodge them as much as possible.
That you might pay your taxes voluntarily is charming, but do you really think that if all enforcement behind tax collection is lost that most of the population will pay their taxes?
Enforcement of laws does not require threat of violence except against those who threaten violence in response to enforcement. Wage garnishment, liens, and asset forfeiture are effective means of collecting sums owed without anybody pointing a gun. Even if you are arrested for tax evasion, violence will not be used unless you appear to pose a threat.
All I hear when someone talks about how laws are enforced with guns is "I am civilized only so long as someone has the capacity to be more violent than I.". To me, this is madness.
If you fail to pay taxes that you owe (and I have not heard you dispute owing them), then you are in violation of the law that you agree to when you remain in your country of residence.
If you ignore liens, you have forfeited the right to live in that home by not paying your financial obligations.
Your arguments imply that the men with guns are the cause of the use of force. In reality, the men with guns are the consequence for disobeying the rules of a civil society.
You continue to equate the person possessing a gun with the gun being used against you.
The gun isn't there to be used against you unless you're going to be violent. The gun is there because they can never be sure when someone might become violent.
A robber comes to you on the street with a gun in his pocket. He kindly suggests you hand him your wallet and that'd be the end of it, no violence is going to happen, he promises. He also points out that if you decide to fight back, he's probably gonna shoot you. So what we have here is a threat of violence. It may be not as awful as violence itself, but it's still immoral, don't you agree? And a robber is still a criminal because he takes away things you don't want to give him voluntarily.
Let's look at this carefully. According to the scenario you've outlined, the "robber" has asked for my wallet, and indicated that if I am violent towards him, he will respond with violence.
It is not a crime for anyone to ask me for my wallet. Nor is it a crime for anyone to tell me they will shoot me if I attack them.
It appears I can simply walk away. Neither crime nor violence will have occurred.
A crime occurs when the robber threatens to shoot me unless I comply with demands he has no right to make.
On the other hand, an IRS agent telling you to pay your taxes has every right to demand that you pay your taxes, and will never threaten to shoot you if you do not. He will threaten to shoot you if it looks like you're about to physically threaten him.
You can put your theory into practice by walking into a bank with a gun (in states where it's legal) and kindly asking them to hand you a million dollars. It'd be interesting to see what happens next.
But, more importantly, it seems to be that your point is that crime is not a crime as long as it appears to not be one. As long as a robber asks and I cooperate, it's not a crime. As long as IRS doesn't use force first, it's okay to steal things from me. I don't agree with that. What right on earth does anyone have to take away from me the money I honestly made? Who gave anyone this right? Why should I comply except for the reason that if I don't, they will make my life difficult and will still manage to take things away from me? I haven't stripped anyone off their money, I created value and sold it to people who were willing to buy. Explain to me: why does anyone have the right to take money from me?
The IRS is not stealing from you. The money does not belong to you, it belongs to society, which has authorized its agents to collect its property.
This is the reality of human society. We are herd animals, and the herd has spoken. Your extreme anti-social views have not and will not prevail, for the logical (and observed) results are intensely undesirable to those of us who wish to live in relative peace.
Who makes up this society? Just the people in your political borders? What about the people in other countries? Or would they count only after their military successfully invades your country? And when their military does this, everyone in that country is responsible, right? Cause it's their "agents", right? So if it is an illegitimate invasion, they are all guilty? Or would the guilty just consist of the immature and irresponsible anarchists who didn't support any of the warmongers up for election? How would we know if it is an illegitimate invasion? Society decides, I guess?
It's amazing how the blatant conflation of state and society that you make is allowed to pass in debates about anarchism with such frequency. And how often the people who make that conflation pat themselves on the back for being all "nuanced" and mature when in fact, through sloppy thinking, they managed to avoid dealing with all the problems that the anarchist has had to work through in order to arrive at his position.
So if tomorrow the herd decided it is acceptable to send you to uranium mines to work for free for the rest of your life because it is better for the society, you'd have no objections to it? And, mind you, it is exactly what the herd had been doing for thousands of years, staying willfully ignorant of the horrors of slavery, religious wars and inquisition.
You are confusing acceptance of the need for laws and their enforcement with belief that law is infallible. This intense inability to deal with nuance is both a cause of Randroid philosophy, and one of its most aggravating characteristics.
> This intense inability to deal with nuance is both a cause of Randroid philosophy, and one of its most aggravating characteristics.
And this is, I believe, why it's so comparatively common with computeristas; it is a worldview which is much more logical and binary than the current one, with the implication that such a worldview is obviously better. No nuance is necessary but there are no nuances to perceive in this system.
This is, of course, why the system is not suitable for general implementation. It will be quickly and immediately co-opted by those who can perceive nuance where others see only black/white, who will eventually bring the whole edifice crashing back down again.
> And a robber is still a criminal because he takes away things you don't want to give him voluntarily.
He takes away things that aren't rightfully his.
The robber has not performed services for you. He hasn't maintained your street, educated your children, or ensured the safety of your food. He's not saving for your retirement or using your money to create a social safety net for those in need. You don't owe him anything.
All US citizens benefit from government services in some form. If you'd like to opt out, you are free to move to Somalia and renounce your citizenship. But as long as you're living in a civilization, you have to help maintain it.
While a completely pacifist person would likely not face the gun, force is still applied, and the threat is still present. A person in their own home who fails to pay their taxes will be removed with as much force as the government needs to achieve compliance, whether that only needs a polite asking, handcuffs, handguns, machine guns, or rocket launchers.
If you won't stop committing an illegal act, yes, they will eventually use some form of force to stop you. Guns will not be necessary unless you are actually threatening them with violence.
That is my point. By indicating you expect guns to be used, you indicate that you expect to be violent. At that point, you have surrendered your right to not be subjected to violence.
So if you keep peacefully not paying your taxes, you will be subjected to violence, yes? A person grabbing you and throwing you out of your house is violence, is it not?
Violence and force are not the same thing, no. Violence is force or the threat of force intended or likely to cause injury. They will not "throw" you. They will carry you.
If you feel that you don't get enough of gov "care" when someone doesn't pay taxes, it means you are personally entitled to that amount that he didn't pay, right?
If you feel you are personally entitled, will you consider it moral to come and get what's yours? Will you allow other citizens to do so towards you?
About income tax: imagine I work an hour and sell some artwork to a friend. How did this affect anyone on the planet so that government is entitled for an income tax from what my friend gave me? If I tell you about that transaction, will you consider it moral and good to report it to IRS? Will you do that to any of your friends, or only people you don't like much?
Blindly equating the actions of society and the actions of individuals is at the heart of the problem with your worldview, and one of the many reasons I disagree with it.
Because passport is just a piece of paper (or a record in a database) that armed dudes called "border control policemen" are asking for to let you go. And if you don't have one, they'll point a gun on you.
Make a thought experiment what would happen if you try to peacefully move to another country without a passport.
Ask yourself, why does the state require you to have a passport to travel? Why can't you just go wherever you want without it? Passports don't seem to stop bad guys from doing bad things.
"Sovereignity" is just a word. I can also use it to proclaim me and my friends individually "sovereign" so no aggression against them is justified. May you tell me how violence is justified in your eyes when person voluntarily pays for a flight, then pays for a taxi and goes outside the airport without a passport?
Sovereignity is a concept. Whether you want to use this word or another is irrelevant.
As I said in my post the first and mandatory requirement for one to be sovereign is to have a monopoly upon violance within particular geographic region.
What you declare is absolutely irrelevant. You are sovereign if and only if you are firstly capable of defending yoursef from harm and second unleashing harm upon others within this teritory.
There need not be any justification for violence beyond whim of the sovereign. So if you walk outside the airport against sovereigns will, local sovereign may do harm unto you.
And it has absolutely nothing to do with morality.
This is good news. I'm glad his airport captivity is finally over. Russia is possibly the safest place for him at this point. And I'm glad there's at least one country that can openly stand up against the growing US offense.
Since the NSA says that there are such strict controls on who can access what sorts of data, how did Snowden gain possession of that data?
If some private contractor can walk out with "thousands of classified documents" how are we supposed to believe that the NSA isn't lying about their allegedly strict controls?
> how are we supposed to believe that the NSA isn't lying about their allegedly strict controls?
I think you're getting close to a key issue here: I think one reason the public (and, I'll admit, myself) isn't so outraged yet, is that there isn't (much? any?) evidence that shows widespread abuse of these programs. Yes, I'd like these NSA programs to be dissolved, but if you want me to show up at a protest, I need a better reason than that the government has access to my email. Because while unwarranted access my email is unjust, it would be a different story if there was evidence that this information was routinely used to actively suppress innocent people.
And I guess the reason I feel compelled to point this out, is because I think it explains why I haven't "lost faith in the system" when it comes to the U.S. government. As bad as these programs might be, I think it is important to recognize that there is a lack of tangibly bad consequences to these programs (so far!), and that we still have a chance to end them through the democratic process. And if that's the case, then all is not lost.... hopefully...
> "it explains why I haven't "lost faith in the system" when it comes to the U.S. government. As bad as these programs might be, I think it is important to recognize that there is a lack of tangibly bad consequences to these programs (so far!)"
s/so far/that we know of/
And that's only if you don't consider the rape of the Fourth Amendment a "tangibly bad consequence".
If the US Congress passed a law suspending one's Miranda rights would you have the same attitude if the police didn't report any "tangibly bad consequences" they had observed? How you see these issues is a matter of perspective, and if you adopt the government's perspective you aren't doing your fellow citizens any good. Skepticism should always be the default response to any statements made by those in power concerning the proper limits of their power.
As I've read it - the NSA are using the weasel-word "strict controls on analysts accessing data" – Snowden was a SysAdmin. I bet there's lots of other "non-specifically-analyst" roles at the NSA too. Like "Senior Analyst", or "Manager - Analyst Division".
2. He stated he had full access to the system as a contractor and could lookup details on anyone he wanted. I fully believe him. In his documents he has examples of the systems being used.
Bonus point. He has yet to release all the documents and has timed his releases very well. Expect more documents showing better examples to be released in the future when the US government has stated more lies that he can disprove.
I've been trying to find the source, but I can't, so scratch off my #1.
My understanding of it was the "theft of government property" charge was based on physical laptops, or their drives, being taken home... But I can no longer find that source. And all the media reports are alleging/assuming (though without any references or proof) that that charge is in relation to copying the data.
Last night on CNN they tried to say Snowden stole passwords from his manager. They had on the ex-head of the NSA and he was like (paraphrasing), "We don't have any direct confirmation but we must entertain the idea that Showden had outside help. Why else would he go to China?!?" They also implied several times that Snowden isn't smart enough to do something like this on his own.
So the NSA hires someone who's supposed to be not smart enough yet was able to steal passwords as well as laptops from them...
I'd say that their security measures are a joke and I am concerned about how many other people can utilize NSA capabilities for personal reasons. Say, some geek who was picked on in school who decides to settle the score now that he's got the chance to dig up dirt on his tormentors. Or a jilted lover who decides to use NSA databases to stalk their ex.
We're supposed to just blindly buy the story from the Puzzle Palace after they've been caught out in more than one blatant fabrication or omission?
Sorry, not me, I can't trust people who deceive me.
If it wasn't for Snowden the general population of the US would never be even having a discussion about widespread national spying on everyone.
They could bury previous whistleblowers and Manning but Snowden has finally made people sit up and realize while the TSA is groping your genitals at the airport, the NSA is groping everything else about your life at that same intimacy.
The sad part is, in 100 years nothing will have changed, it will just be hidden better and whistleblowers seized before they can get to the press.
That's super news, I was concerned that yesterdays release by Greenwald might imperil Snowdens chances in Russia but it appears that was unfounded.
It's funny how this whistleblower thing might turn into a mirror image of the torture scheme the CIA employed: the CIA would use other countries to ship prisoners to to have them tortured/interrogated in ways that the country where the capture took place or the USA would not condone on their own soil (but for some magical reason doing it somewhere else or even hiring people to do it makes it ok).
Now we get whistleblowers that move outside of the jurisdiction of the country the revelations are about. Cue a Russian whistleblower to flee to the USA for some symmetry.
I'll bet Snowden is a Hacker News and Reddit user. I expect that he might read this thread when he gets to a computer, perhaps even taking the time to do a Reddit AMA.
They have a very low fertility currently, and there are plenty of correlation between places that accept homosexuality as normal (instead of only tolerating it) and low fertility.
Of course, correlation is not causation, but what you think the majority of russians will think about the subject?
There's also plenty of (negative) correlation between the number of pirates at sea and worldwide temperatures, which is why the Pastafarians are preaching their gospel in full pirate regalia to try and stop global warming.
It means showing people not living in a monogamous stable relationship dedicated to upbringing of their kids, that it is "normal". I'm not a homophobe, so I guess I won't fuck off, asshole. I have nothing against gayness, I am actually a bit bi, also unmarried. However, I know that if everyone lived the way I do, this society would be MUCH, MUCH, worse off. Therefore I would not advertise my lifestyle and tell people it is okey, and they should live it.
Your lifestyle is ok, dude or dudette. Seriously. It is systemic problems of societies such as horrbile education system, emotional politics and various instances of "prisoners dillemma" games that are much more major factors that are detrimental to society well-being.
Being gay is not the issue, the issue is people not marrying or having kids and dedicating their lives to it because they see other people not doing the same. Thinking that's normal is good for the individual, but not good for a society. US is doing fine in that regard, but Russia is not, population is declining, people are not marrying or having kids as much as they did before, and lifestyle propaganda is one of the few things the state can do.
http://visualbooster.com/share/20130801230340534.png Here is graph which represents fertility rate in Russia (orange) comparative to Japan (red) and Germany (blue). It's obviously climbing up since economy stabilized. Now, would you expect huge increase after anti gay-propaganda law is established?
No I wouldn't, not just because of this single law. There also needs to be actual pro-marriage, pro-kids, anti-drug, anti-promiscuity propaganda at the same time. There need to be more proactive actions and measures taken, but of course that's much harder than some blocking measure.
The most reasonable conclusion is IMO that there is a strong correlation with developed countries, low fertility rate, and socially liberal values. The more likely connection is the developed economy and the low fertility rate, in general. Socially liberal people tend to accept homosexuality more.
...because apparently, Russians have never heard of artificial insemination and families with gay parents. You've got sperms, eggs, and loving parents. What's the problem?
Also, traditional families are much more stable, divorce rates with gay people are very high, you cannot rely on them to have millions of stable families.
There is research (that I won't find now, I am busy) that families with natural born sons (not girls, for some unknown reason) have much lower divorce rates too, and across several cultures, suggesting it is something biological.
This of course, is not possible in a homosexual couple... But I think that beside that, there are several other biological systems to ensure a heterosexual couple reproduces and take care of their child until it can reproduce too.
But you should also context that the studies are based on Norway and Sweden, and the latest reference in it is from 2003 whereas public acceptance has changed quite a bit in ten years, especially in the U.S. where it seems every three months gay marriage is legal in another state.
I don't think this was ever posted on HN and happened just 2 months ago. This is how Russia deals with extradition when the shoe is on the other foot and they want someone:
Remember that we’re wired to respond to personal news. That’s the secret to Facebook’s and tabloid magazine’s success. So as happy as I am about this, let it also be a reminder that Snowden's not the story. The fate of the internet is.
I don't live in DC but it would be nice if someone could stop by the Russian embassy and put some flowers in front. It would show that American people don't necessarily agree with our government and are grateful for the Russian's support.
I'm flying into Sheremetyevo this Sunday. I was secretly hoping they would be holding one of those press conferences while I was there, a long shot I know.
ES: if you're reading this- Anything you want from the homeland? I can drop it off in a secure location, I'll be staying about 100km south of Moscow. /u/@gmx
This of course happening the day after what was perhaps the biggest revelation so far, even though Putin said that asylum would be conditional on Snowden promising "to stop harming the United States." I do not think this highly symbolic timing was coincidental.
I agree. Russia's perhaps the only country the USA would have serious reservations about going into. Maybe if it was some unknown defector or something .. but Snowden? My god, I can't even imagine what would happen.
China would probably be the only credible alternative, but the govt there doesn't really have the right attitude to give someone like Snowden asylum.
Maybe he's worse than the NSA for Russians, but he ain't doing anything to me. As a non-USAsian, the NSA and what they're doing Hoovering up everything they can about me sucks way more.
I stand by what I said even after the downvote :)
I don't like what NSA is doing and I applaud Snowden for exposing their activities. However, people like Putin is why we have to have the NSA in the first place
I am not defending the NSA or claiming that we should not curtail or better monitor what they are doing. What I am saying is, being a freedom fighter and then seeking asylum in Russia which is the place that heavily curtails personal freedoms of all kinds is kind of ironic don't you think? especially in light of the fact that Snowden allegedly has these 4 laptops with him
Do you honestly believe a trained KGB agent like Putin would give Snowden asylum in Russia without getting something in return ( I mean other than publicity )? Possible, it is also possible he got something in return from Snowden
this hypothetical if seems irrelevant to our discussion. US and the rest of the western world have a much better track record on supporting individual freedoms than Putin's government, which violates them whenever it sees fit or whenever it's politically expedient. That fact is hard to argue with
When there are no "good" governments left (and the extent of your own country's graciousness is "not seek death penalty" for you), your options are limited. Put yourself in his position. What else could he do? Stay in the US and be subject to the same fate as Manning (possibly even worse)?
Yeah you're right, he's an irreconcilable traitor. Though I mean, it's a bit of an assumptive jump from whistleblower to turncloak spy, but I'm totally with you. Although.. he did give the data to journalists, and not to Putin. And he did plan to go further but got his passport cancelled.. But yeah, I'm sure the jump you made there is sound.. there is after all an exhaustive list of alternative places that would have sheltered him. Right?
Snowden actually wanted to go to Ecuador - Russia was simply a layover on the flight. It's only because the US demonstrated it wouldn't allow him to leave (by virtue of pressuring European countries to deny airspace permission) that he's still here.
It's silly to blame Snowden to any degree. He got enough troubles from his employer already. The problem is the reason why he got "4 laptops of NSA secrets". Hint: it is because there are certain people who lie, spy and threaten people.
I disagree with your logic. If the goal is to further the goals of open society and freedom, the worst way to do it is to deliver US Govt secrets to Putin's KGB ( or FSB as they call it now ). What is the net effect of this action? depending on what's on those laptops, he could have made things worse
It's silly to focus on Snowden's actions at all when uncontrolled violent organization forces various groups of people to give up information on millions of people and lie to them about the fact.
Imagine, Snowden does not go to Russia, but goes to Finland instead. Did it make your life any better considering what we know?
"uncontrolled violent organization". That's a bit of an overstatement, don't you think? And the same or worse could be said of the Russian FSB ( former KGB )
Government is not controlled by people. This is easy to prove by trying to peacefully disagree with government's procedures. E.g. not paying taxes or not following regulations when establishing a company or a bank.
"Voting" is a suggestion. You are not allowed to "vote" for "leave me alone, I don't hurt anyone".
"Government is not controlled by people. This is easy to prove by trying to peacefully disagree with government's procedures. E.g. not paying taxes"
I am not sure why you would assert that paying taxes is not in the interest of the people. Functioning government is definitely in the interest of the people and taxes pay for it
There is no reason to believe Snowden gave anything to Russian interests. In fact Snowden has stated that he took precautions so that he couldn't hand over any secrets even under torture. Presumably he can still give up whatever is in his head but there is no evidence to suggest he has done that either.
I agree with you to a degree, however, it is not entirely fair to view NSA activities in isolation as if they are happening in an idealized world where Putin and the KGB do not exist
Does anyone else find it odd that he immediately went to the US's biggest rivals. I mean right away he ran to Hong Kong (China) and now he has accepted asylum in Russia.
I mean these countries have huge interest in this guy. He knows intimate details about how the USA gathers intelligence. I mean I wonder what kind of info he has given (if any) to these countries. I am sure Putin would love to get a hold of those laptops he took with him.
Not odd at all. If he'd gone to a country with good US relations he would have been extradited. Russia and China don't want to be seen giving into requests from the US so along with Latin America were two of the safest places for him.
Yes but Latin American countries wouldn't have as much interest in his Intel as the other Russia and China. If he was just seeking asylum Ecuador would have been a much better choice for him. They have already given Assange asylum so I would think that would have been a better first option than HK.
Latin American countries also wouldn't have the power to tell the US to piss off (as we've seen in July). He asked for asylum there but there was no way he could fly to these countries.
What I find odd are people finding odd he went to US's rivals in such a situation. I wonder, where do you suppose he should have gone? US-controlled Europe?
The enemy of my enemy is my friend should be pretty obvious once you're running from a government that does not think twice about murdering their own citizens.
What sort of cold war spy movie scenario are you imagining? If he wanted to give the data to the Russians or Chinese, he could just have uploaded it somewhere for them to grab. On the other hand, I would assume that he knows how to encrypt things well enough that nicking his laptops while he's not looking would be pretty much useless.
We should care that we can't be sure about something as important as Snowden's dealings with Putin government, if only to slow down rush to judgement, when situation is uncertain.
Read the interviews with him. He took Hong Kong because that's where he could travel without raising suspicion. Russia was supposed to be a layover.
In the end, it worked out very well for him, because he ended up in powerful countries who weren't in a hurry to do the US Government any favors, but the implication that he's "aiding the enemy" by running to the US's biggest rivals is ludicrous.
> I mean I wonder what kind of info he has given (if any) to these countries.
I assume those countries already had their hands on that information (and more). If it was easy for Snowden to get his hands on it, it would have been just as easy for them.
This information falling in foreign hands isn't much of a problem I would guess. The real fear is more information leaking to the biggest enemy: the public. I would not be surprised if part of the dealing of granting him asylum was that he stop leaking to the public.
Not odd at all. His options were either US-averse Latin American countries (Ecuador, Venezuela, Cuba) or China-Russia. And between those, he took maybe the safest, as said latin american countries may not be able to protect him if the US gov is truly determined to get him.
Since 1865, there have been 5,031 deaths and 22,125 injuries caused by terrorism in the United States. Source: http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/terrorism/wrjp255a.html
5,000 deaths in 148 years.
In 2011, 32,367 people died in vehicle accidents. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_in...
There are all kinds of cancers that "only" kill 1,000 or so people per year that are deemed not worthy of research because they are so rare. But for terrorism, we sacrifice nearly inexhaustible supplies of money and time. We sacrifice our liberty, our privacy. None of it makes any sense.
Terrorism is nothing but fear mongering to effect an increase in power.