[steckerbrett]

> People are scared of terrorists.

Are they? If they are it's irrational, you're far more likely to be killed by a falling fridge or alcohol induced liver damage. Attacking a bogyman in an attempt to take eyes off what your government is really doing is quite sickening.

Everyone would be significantly better off if we stopped parading around with 'defense' funding and put it to something with a perceivable impact like public healthcare. It's ridiculous that people are justifying this sort of enormous waste of time and resources as worthwhile.

[collyw]

Sadly the Guardian did a study on it recently, and the UK public's number one fear was of a terrorist attack. The propoganda is working.

[crdoconnor]

You ask people what they consider a geopolitical threat (a pretty abstract concept at the best of times) and they say terrorism because that's what's talked about in the news all the time.

You ask what they're actually afraid of and it's knife crime, snakes and dying alone. Dying in a terrorist attack is probably, like, #75 on that list.

[steckerbrett]

Yes, undoubtedly. I often wonder how much of commentary on social media sites is shills.

[JupiterMoon]

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/07/14/manipulating-o...

Unfortunately they will be on this site as well and although the mods work hard on detecting voting rings and shills I doubt that they'll be able to detect state level work.

[m_fayer]

This used to be my argument with my very much scared and FOXNews watching family. Then I realized that what us hn reading empirically-oriented types see as rational applies to a tiny sliver of humanity. In fact most of humanity sees what we call rationality as idealistic nonsense. I also wish that this wasn't the case but you can't squeeze blood from a stone so we might as well make peace with it.

[wfunction]

> you're far more likely to be killed by alcohol induced liver damage

Try telling that to someone who doesn't drink.

[madaxe_again]

That's probably still more likely than being in a terror attack.

[wfunction]

Maybe, but at that point does your brain think in terms of probabilities and expected values anymore (if it ever did)?

For example, when you're comparing prices at a store, you might be so rational that you perfectly compute the expected payoff for each product and choose the optimal one. But does your brain work the same way when deciding whether to steal the product too? If the expected payoff for that was higher, would you just go ahead and steal it?

Don't you think people might not think the same way about the more common cases and the less common cases?

[steckerbrett]

I often find myself doing it to the point of ridiculousness, there's a 0.01% chance you have one of your organs flipped horizontally. Statistically a lot of people in this forum have their heart on the wrong side of their body or a non-standard kidney.

[notahacker]

And the terror attack is probably still more likely than having one's laptop seized under anti-terror laws...

[vidarh]

Over the last five years, the UK has had more well publicized incidents of people having their laptops seized (2) or destroyed at the insistence of GCHQ (1) than terror attacks causing bodily harm (2).

Both of the terror attacks in question were stabbings of individual victims (Mohammed Saleem and Lee Rigby). Both were killed.

So in fact, assuming conditions remain as they've been for the last five years (and for several years before that), one appears to be at least as likely to have ones laptop seized than getting harmed in a terror attack. On the other hand, the harm of the latter is still clearly worse, given that both victims were murdered.

There were also 3 bombing attempts (all by the same far right extremist - Pavlo Lapshyn - trying to kill muslims, but spectacularly failing because nobody were present when his bombs went off).

A further two planned attacks never happend (one involved a plan to bomb an EDL rally, but the would-be terrorists arrived to late and left without doing anything; one involved plans that were never attempted set into life at the time the people in question were arrested). The calibre of would-be terrorists in the UK thankfully seem to be rather low.

[notahacker]

As of last year ten people in total had been subjected to the Terrorism Prevention and Investigation Measures that was used to confiscate Kermani's laptop[1]. I guess that's now up to at least eleven, but it's a number low enough to believe the majority of people subjected to them actually were very closely linked with planned acts of terrorism. British would-be terrorists are as you point out, not spectacularly effective, but did manage to kill fifty people in a single set of rather more indiscriminate attacks a decade ago plus some relatively minor attempts since then. So we have two extremely infrequent occurrences, but on the whole I'd consider the police - however unwise their actions were in this instance - to be somewhat less likely to target me than bombers, as well as my fate at the hands of the former more likely to be favourable even if I was operating at the cutting edge of journalism.

[1]https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/terrorism-prevent...

[celticninja]

no it isnt, not by a long shot.

If you look at the number of seizures under the terrorism act and compare that to number of terrorist attacks over the same period, i bet there have been more seizures than attacks.

[ionised]

Not at all.

[steckerbrett]

As a population, not you specifically.

[clort]

but it illustrates the problem beautifully.

The thinking goes, its ok for the government to snoop on the everybody in the name of catching terrorists.. because I am not a terrorist and they won't snoop on me.

[wfunction]

Yes but the first person people care about is themselves, not the rest of the population.