[bittired]

Well, doubting that leaks of information won't have a negative impact on our security is pretty obtuse also. I'm not afraid, but I also wouldn't be surprised if we have a greater number of terrorist attacks in the coming years. It's in their interest to complain for multiple reasons.

[downandout]

Snowden merely confirmed a widely held suspicion that the feds are recording and analyzing most modern communications. The notion that terrorists didn't already assume this and use encryption online and burner cell phones is dubious to me. If anything, Snowden may have stopped some would-be terrorists by showing them just how many ways there are for them to get caught.

[BWStearns]

There's also another layer to this: The terrorists that actually exist are not 10 feet tall and not all geniuses. If I told some of my non-technologically oriented friends how to encrypt and anonymize their communications, they couldn't do it. If I went one step further and configured their computers and explained to them how to use it, they would probably still leak information by misusing it.

Are the terrorists changing their tactics? Probably. Is it going to do them any good? Unlikely.

[rbanffy]

It's not like the collection of vast amounts of information on everyone everywhere had a positive impact on the US citizens security either...

The shining example that pops up is the Boston marathon bombing. If the NSA, with its vast dragnet couldn't catch two amateurs, does anyone really think it would catch someone who actually knows how to pull of a bombing?

[onebaddude]

>I also wouldn't be surprised if we have a greater number of terrorist attacks in the coming years

Greater than what? The last 1 year? 2 years? 5 years? 100 years?

[moocowduckquack]

Most terrorist attacks in the US are by US citizens, such as bombing of abortion clinics and the like. I doubt that the Snowden leaks are likely to change their frequency that much, especially when compared to other factors.

[dhimes]

I hate to state the obvious rebuttal, but: maybe the programs were working? Maybe that's why Obama didn't cut them. Maybe he decided he couldn't be the guy to pull the plug and have $avg_fatalities people die every year. Maybe.

On the other hand, you would think he would say so if that were the case.

[lukifer]

It's a no-win perception issue for Obama. If even a few Americans die in a terror attack, his administration looks weak (look at how badly Fox has gone after him on Benghazi). If he does "whatever is necessary", he looks like a warmonger with no respect for the Constitution.

But people die in all sorts of preventable ways. Dropping the national speed limit would save hundreds or thousands of lives. So would nutritional subsidies for kids, or all other sorts of things we could spend our political capital on. But those things do not have the same broad support as anti-terrorism measures, because the public is not willing to pay the cost, even though more lives are at stake.

You could say our fear of The Other comes from Bush's fear-mongering, or the shock of 9/11, or a genuine clash of civilizations, or just human nature. But whatever the origin, that irrational fear is the real root of our disproportionate reaction to the theatrical murder called "terrorism".

Our culture has been conditioned to be afraid by reflex, and it has to end. The fear of death is the beginning of slavery.

[mcritz]

It’s a no-win situation for Americans who are forced to pay $10,000,000,000 annually to fund an agency to spy on us and find “terrorists” or $160,000,000,000 annually for wars if they don’t find actual terrorists.

Neither of those expenses has its desired outcomes, nor are they mutually exclusive.

[dhimes]

This is probably completely naïve of me, but I would think that if he just came out and honestly said, "I couldn't be the guy to pull the plug once I saw how effective the programs are," then that would be a brilliant way to start the national conversation. Not only about spying, but Gitmo- which he has been very slow about closing.

[lukifer]

He basically said as much, though less directly, and without specifics: http://youtu.be/m8F99BT8QAA?t=6m0s

It's also telling how clumsily he's stumbling over his words. Whether Obama fears speaking freely for political reasons, security reasons, or just plain deception is something I can't answer.

(And obviously, much of what he's saying is demonstrably false, or at least misleading. But it also wouldn't surprise me for the NSA to be misinforming the President.)

[warmwaffles]

> Dropping the national speed limit would save hundreds or thousands of lives.

Fine I'll bite. Where is this evidence?

[VLM]

A realistic fact based estimate is around one hundred, around 1 or 2 orders of magnitude lower.

http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/811753.pdf

Around page 6, a little under 10K fatalities in 2011 somehow involved speeding. (about 1/3)

Around page 7, 87% of fatalities involving speeding were not on interstate highways. So about 10% of about 10K is about 1K people died from driving "too fast" on the highway.

Around page 7, around half of drivers who killed someone while speeding were drunk. so about 500 people were killed by sober drivers who were going over the current speed limit. Drunks are going to kill someone anyway, no matter what the law is. You can consider this a fixed constant death rate regardless of speed laws.

In other words, if you raised the speed limit such that no one ever got cited for speeding during a fatal crash, aka we go total full motion autobahn, about 500 people would die legally instead of illegally.

Of course a lot of this involves police high speed chases, driving too fast for conditions, suicide by car, road rage, mental illness, stuff like that. I feel confident that out of a total sample of about 500, a realistic change in speed limit up to perhaps 75 would probably kill at most 100 people. I think this is a overestimate, but feel confident it would not actually turn out to be 10x higher.

This analysis pays no attention to the death toll from increased car exhaust fumes due to reduced mileage, or increased soldier death rates in the middle east due to needing to burn more oil, or any of the other secondary effects, which may very well be greater than the primary death toll, I really can't estimate those very well. For example, if you raised the death toll in Iraq by 20% on both sides to get 20% more oil, that would swamp the relatively minor increase in death toll on the interstates back home.

This helps you identify political axes to grind... someone claiming "10" or "zero" is obviously distorting reality in one direction, and "100s" is obviously equally distorted in the other.

Frankly I wouldn't be concerned. The odds of death by lightning are about 1 or 2 orders of magnitude higher. The odds of death by poor diet are around 5 orders higher. Death by poor exercise habits, probably the same around 5 orders higher. Higher highway speeds are not a very serious threat in the big picture of risks. I'd worry a lot more about "not talking a walk after dinner" or "drinking too much corn syrup"

[lukifer]

To be clear, I'm not in favor of altering speed limits. Just pointing out how little sense it makes to turn our whole society upside down for terrorism deaths, when we clearly don't do that for non-terrorism deaths.

Thanks for the details though. :)

[VLM]

Not entirely disagreeing, but an Occams Razor approach would imply the profit motive is more at work.

Which results in more election campaign funds for a politician, funding a new constituency of child fondlers at airports, or administrative fooling with speed limits?

One interesting analysis of speed limits is do people drive to live or live to drive? If, conservatively, one billion person hours per year are wasted sitting in a drivers seat, and increasing speed limits 10% caused a reduction in wasted human potential of 10% aka 100 million person hours per year, and an average remaining lifetime of a typical driver is far less than a million hours, then if less than a couple hundred extra people die per year due to the higher speed, total loss of human potential would be lower at higher speed, despite the somewhat higher death rate, which is somewhat counter intuitive.

"conditioned to be afraid by reflex"

Cowardly. No sense tiptoeing around it. America is a nation of cowards. Very heavily armed, dangerous, and violent, but none the less fundamentally a nation of cowards. A strong man with a gun is an asset to everyone around him; including himself. A shivering coward with a gun is a danger to everyone around him including himself. We (as in the whole world) are not in a good situation.

I never fail to be impressed at how brave the .uk people were during WWII and during the IRA troubles, at least contrasted with the Americans. Despite the supposed special relationship between the .uk and .us. Maybe the .uk men could send us whatever makes them so comparatively brave, tea or soccer or monarchy or whatever it is.

[lukifer]

> Cowardly. No sense tiptoeing around it.

Couldn't agree more. Far too many chickenhawks.

Paradoxically, I think it's because we are so comparitively safe. The slightest threat to that safety (real or otherwise) bursts the bubble, and is a shock to our veil of normalcy, as opposed to the "shit happens" outlook in parts of the world where danger is more frequent. (I wonder if those who live in the worst inner cities, surrounded by gang warfare, waste any time worrying about terrorism?)

But in fairness, those flames have been pro-actively fanned for decades by government and business alike. It's near-impossible to realize how pervasive the propaganda machine is here unless you go out of your way to detach yourself from it.

[jonknee]

I'm sure he was told that if he ended the programs it would cost lives, but it's not like we had lot of terrorist deaths before the government threw out the 4th amendment without telling anyone. There were attacks before and after, there will be more in the future as well. Most terrorist attacks get stopped because they actually aren't very sophisticated (see the shoe or underwear bombers), not because the NSA has everyone's email.

[dhimes]

Most terrorist attacks get stopped because they actually aren't very sophisticated

Perhaps you are right, but some are stopped because of intelligence. It could be that the bad guys are getting more sophisticated, even though there are still lower-probability lone-wolf types out there.

[KMag]

Just a side note: the Boston bombers and the Times Square bombers are much better examples. The shoe bomb plot was actually very sophisticated, planned and built by something like terrorism's version of Q. Luckily, they sent more of a Johnny English than a James Bond.

[ajays]

It's not the programs that prevented attacks; it's this magic stone that I have and pray to. It keeps "terrorists and other groups" at bay. But now, since I've divulged its existence, it may not be as effective.

[ThomPete]

That is not the question. The question is a what price.

[WayneDB]

Nothing new was even revealed though! There were articles in major publications over 5 years ago about the NSA putting boxes on mirror ports at Internet backbone sites. That's when we started hearing about the CEO of Qwest.