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by Nasrudith
2778 days ago
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Sounds a bit like the Fermi Paradox and Drake Equations - while the math technically works out the missing terms make it useless on a practical level. The possibility space is limited by sanity checks of the actors - technically a terror group could start putting live rattlesnakes into snake in a can prank devices on people's doorsteps but it would be logistically difficult and incredibly stupid. Beyond that one interesting thing about attackers are how memetic they are over what is appealing to their personal image as opposed to effectiveness. Like the symbolism matters more. Terrorists in the US could cause lasting damage and disruption by infrastructure attacks like going around and emptying a few AR-15 clips into unguarded transformers and substations or train track sabotage around oil freight trains yet they don't at all.
Similarly looking at the historic trends between bombings vs mass shooting vs vehicular murder plots seems to be more cultural than availability related. |
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I agree that symbolism seemingly matters more. I was actually once on a podcast years ago arguing that terrorism was essentially a solved or non-existent problem because armed with nothing more than a rented truck terrorist could plow through crowds. And in the US it was even easier! They could buy weapons at gun shows! Why did they need to hijack planes?
Ultimately, though, my arguments didn't hold. The terrorists did exactly what I thought they would do if they really wanted to cause damage.
Just because X could Y (but doesn't) doesn't mean X won't ever Y.
I'm not worried about ISIL style attacks where a couple hundred people die. Frankly cutting out one can of cola a week would probably save more lives in the West.
I'm worried about mass attack. We can skate around it all we like, but we're one bad Windows / Dropbox / Tesla / Linux / Cisco / QNX update from hundreds of thousands or millions of people dying. The Windows worm that preceded the electrical grid blackout in the mid 2000s was the inadvertent cause. If an accidental worm can take out that much we should be much more worried about the scale of the threat.
We've also never been able to secure the boarder. With drones this gets even harder because capture is no longer a real deterrent.
Security is an arms race that favours the offense over time. A theatre that strongly favours the offense requires deterrence and intelligence for dominance, but the deranged can't be deterred and I don't think intelligence will work forever. Ultimately the arms race needs to end.
I don't know the solution, but my intuition points to GATACA and UBI. But even with an optimistic estimate I still consider that a stop-gap.