[anigbrowl]

Again, it's fucking stupid to try to protect the airlines from Hollywood movie plots. First, they never seem to happen

I was in Europe on September 11, 2001. I turned on the TV after a busy day and at first thought it was showing a disaster movie, until I changed the channel and found the same thing.

More people died in bathtubs that year than on September 11th. If they wanted to save lives, we'd have a war on bathtubs, not a war on terrorism.

This is not correct. 1/10th as many people died in bathtubs, although a similar number died in all drowning accidents (some of which are the result of heart attacks or other incapacity suffered while in the water, making the exact cause of death hard to establish): http://danger.mongabay.com/injury_death.htm Of course, we don't have to look far to find things that are more deadly than terrorism in the aggregate - motor vehicle accidents, for example, do kill a lot more people than terrorism does.

But what your argument fails to address is that accidental deaths are highly distributed and largely uncorrelated while terrorist activity is concentrated and systematic. The qualitative differences are huge, just as there's a huge difference between being hit by a pound of sand (not painful unless some of it gets in your eyes or you inhale it) and being hit by a rock of the same weight (painful and with much greater potential to be fatal). As well as the immediate economic and personal losses, catastrophic events also tend to set big changes in motion. It's highly questionable, for example, whether we would have invaded Iraq absent 9-11 and it's equally unlikely that we would have invaded Afghanistan.

Of course that doesn't mean we should organize everything around the very low probability of terrorist attack or any other concentrated risk factor, but to ignore the multiplier effects of concentration is also facile.

[mikeash]

It annoys me to no end when people bring up the extreme overreaction to terrorism as justification for paying extra attention to terrorism.

You're mixing up cause and effect here. Invading Iraq/Afghanistan is not a reason to put a lot of effort into counterterrorism. It's a reason not to.

The US is like a country that's allergic to bee stings. The immune system is constantly finding new ways to fight bee stings harder and faster than before. And when we point out that the vast majority of the damage done by bee stings is actually done by the immune system's reaction, the counterargument is that we suffered a lot of damage in the last bee sting, so we need to react.

Imagine a "keep calm and carry on" reaction to 9/11 instead of the panic attack we actually had.

Yes, the differences are huge. And we should work to make them not be huge, instead of using the huge differences to justify making huge differences.

[anigbrowl]

Too bad. I am equally inclined to roll my eyes when people make false equivalences between terrorism and things like weather or dispersed accidents. I don't see terrorism as a massive existential threat, but the idea that it will go away if ignored is just as foolish as over-reaction.

Imagine a "keep calm and carry on" reaction to 9/11 instead of the panic attack we actually had.

There is no country on earth that would respond to an attack of that scale with equanimity. You seem to forget that 'keep calm and carry on' was thought up as part of morale-boosting publicity campaign to be deployed as a response to the outbreak of war in 1939, although the plan was not put into practice. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keep_Calm_and_Carry_On

Please try looking at actual historical examples instead of imaginary ones.

[mikeash]

I'm not saying it would go away if ignored. I'm just saying that trying to decrease our reaction to it would be for the best. It's going to happen whether or not we want it. All we can realistically do is try to limit the damage, 99.9% of which we inflict on ourselves.

I don't understand why you think I "forget" anything or that my example is "imaginary". I am proposing a response and using a well known phrase to illustrate it.

[anigbrowl]

Sorry I missed this yesterday.

I disagree that 'it's going to happen whether or not we want it.' In the abstract yes, but again you're back to saying counterterrorism is pointless. I also disagree that 99.9 of the damage is self-inflicted although a high percentage is. US reaction to terrorism is actually mild by comparison to most countries. The UK is festooned with video cameras and terrorist suspects are subject to different detention conditions from regular criminals. In Spain you can expect to undergo security checks when taking a train. Perhaps you could furnish some examples of countries that have a more laissez-faire approach to terrorism for comparison.

As for 'keep calm and carry on' I urge you to look into the historical provenance of the phrase. For one thing it was dreamt up as a campaign to reassure a population facing total war, and for another it was shelved at the time (despite some 2 million posters have been printed) because officials realized it was patronizing and unresponsive to public concerns.

[mikeash]

Counterterrorism in general is not pointless. Counterterrorism in the form of ultra-specific TSA directives is pointless.

Terrorists are in short supply, while methods of attack are essentially unlimited. Effective counterterrorism will attack what's in short supply. In other words, it needs to look for terrorists, not attempt to stop every single conceivable method of attack. The former can be useful, the latter is fruitless.

How many countries have carried out something as catastrophically stupid as the 2003 invasion of Iraq in response to a terrorist attack? If you want a country that took a milder approach to terrorism, given that, I'd say "all of them". Yeah, we didn't completely trample over everybody's civil liberties, we just killed a ton of people, put the government in deep debt, and wrecked the economy.

Also, did you really use "terrorist suspects are subject to different detention conditions from regular criminals" as an example of how the UK reacted worse than the US? Have you not heard of Guantanamo Bay? How many people did the UK hold indefinitely without trial because they were too dangerous to be released but could not be convicted of a crime? (To be clear, this isn't completely rhetorical. I wouldn't be surprised if the answer is not zero. But I also don't think it's in the hundreds.)

I don't know why you persist in thinking that I'm somehow unaware of the origins of "keep calm and carry on". Again, I'm merely using it to illustrate an approach, not saying we should replicate the conditions under which that phrase was conceived.

[anigbrowl]

Terrorists are in short supply, while methods of attack are essentially unlimited. Effective counterterrorism will attack what's in short supply. In other words, it needs to look for terrorists, not attempt to stop every single conceivable method of attack.

As you are surely aware, we don't have a reliable method for distinguishing terrorists from everyone else, notwithstanding the best efforts of intelligence agencies engaged in various sorts of spying. Targeting particular attack vectors is of course less than ideal, but if one receives a credible tip along the lines of 'agent X will attempt to transport a 'battery bomb' onto a US bound flight this month' then you can't blame security services for trying to leverage that information. There may even be a second-order purpose for announcing it publicly, eg to instill paranoia among potential terrorists about the leakiness of their OpSec or suchlike. So no, I don't think that such specific directives are necessarily pointless.

How many countries have carried out something as catastrophically stupid as the 2003 invasion of Iraq in response to a terrorist attack? If you want a country that took a milder approach to terrorism, given that, I'd say "all of them".

I might point out that the UK, and a lot of other countries joined in the invasion of Iraq. As for Guantanamo bay, I don't think that's an appropriate comparison. Most people held there were either captured in Afghanistan and a few kidnapped and subjected to 'extraordinary rendition', of them in the context of a hot war. I'm talking about people arrested on suspicion of terrorism, ie neither the Tsarnev guy in Boston nor any of the various would-be terrorists nabbed by the FBI over recent years have been sent to Guantanamo (despite calls for that some ultraconservatives). In terms of judicial process, they're subject to the same regime as any other person detained on suspicion of criminal activity.

In fact, the UK government did imprison a group of men indefinitely and without charge post 9-11 (although the law in question was overturned a few years later because it was in conflict with EU human rights law): http://www.liberty-human-rights.org.uk/human-rights/counteri... Britain is about make some legal history with its first secret trial (http://www.thestar.com/news/world/2014/06/12/core_of_uk_terr...). Looking farther back, for several decades Britain dealt with its terrorism problem in Northern Ireland by removing the right to a jury trial for many offenses (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diplock_courts) and for a number of years by internment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Demetrius - note that almost 2000 people were held prisoner without trial, quite a few more than Guantanamo Bay ever held).

Now, I wouldn't expect you to know all this - I grew up over there so it's easy for me to cite examples. But instead of rudely asking me if I've ever heard of Guantanamo Bay, perhaps you might acknowledge the possibility that I know what I'm talking about. I could dredge up a variety of examples from other countries in various stages of socioeconomic development, but since the UK shares a language and a common legal heritage with the US it seemed like the most obvious point of comparison. I stand by my argument that the US response to terrorism, while of questionable effectiveness, is not nearly as unusual as you seem to think. Indeed, in comparison with prior actions of the US it's fairly mild, sad to say; consider the Japanese internment of WW2, or historical punitive campaigns that would be regarded as genocidal war crimes today, such as the Phillipine-American war of 1899-1902, or for that matter the Vietnam war. Historical awfulness is no justification for bad governance today, but nor are today's problems as bad as you suggest.