[ryusage]

You're basically correct about his principles, but I feel like your post makes it sound like Schneier's just trying to save money and doesn't care about the actual lives involved.

I think an important point is that it is literally impossible to prevent all crime. Not only is it impossible, but as you try harder and harder to prevent it, you get diminishing returns and an increase in false positives (which we also want to avoid). So yeah, there has to be a tradeoff. If you can't ever get the number of deaths down to zero, then you have to decide, how low is close enough and how much are you willing to sacrifice to get there?

Right now, we're sacrificing a crap ton, and it's really not clear that it's gaining us all that much.

[lifeisstillgood]

I beleive Schneier does care and was not intending to come across as belittling such things. Despite the Chuck Norris meme I am sure he is as human as the rest of us :-)

Its just we do live in a world where somehow we must efficiently allocate resources. In the UK we use a term QALY (Quality years of life) which is used to decide between which operations should go ahead (likelihood of success x expected number of qualifty years) - so a 80 year old looking for kidney dialysis is lower down the list than a youth looking for a common hip replacement. The US does it simply on income.

We should I feel have a debate on these things - why is it cars can kill thousands but a cancer drug cannot kill one or two. These trade offs get made in odd ways - and while I doubt we shall ever have politicians campaigning on the slogan "vote for me, only a tiny percentage of you will die because of it" its an important discussion.

I would suggest also a poll taken in the security / check-in lines at JFK:

  Would you support allowing one major terrorist outrage 
  a year if it would reduce queueing at airports by 

  a) 1 hour, 
  b) 2 hours 
  c) eliminate queues completely?

:-)