Brussels Rocked by Terrorist Attacks
wsj.com
wsj.com
They had explosives, weapons, the resolve to sacrifice themselves and tried their best to do as much damage as possible. And they managed to to kill less than 30 people (provisional count).
Of course every death that brought on by this fanatic mob is too much, but we should keep our perspective.
A bus accident in Spain last week left 11 exchange students dead, in the US alone every day more than 50 people die in road accidents.
Of course we should root out the people that try to bomb our freedom away. But don't let us be terrorized by something that doesn't make a statistically recognizable dent in our probability for survival.
Compared with traffic regulation and enforcement, the response to terrorist events like this are vastly out of proportion, and well into the range of irrational response that the terrorists know is the only way to really damage a large powerful nation - by making it turn on its own people and put them in a security-state panopticon.
People should be much more afraid of dying in a car accident than dying at the hands of terrorists, yet few people are urgently pushing the government to enforce stronger safety standards in cars / on roads. Instead people demand better security to protect them against things they are unlikely to be involved in to begin with.
I appreciate your point, and it is somewhat reassuring, but terrorists can cause damage beyond the raw numbers because their damage can be focused.
I have no intention of belittling the incident, but I fail to see how shutting everything down is a proper response to any incident of less than catastrophic scale.
I take that back, I can see a reason: CYA. Nobody would want to be the one who makes the decision to keep the metro system running and have a second attack occur. I'm still not convinced that CYA is a sufficient reason, however.
If you don't shut down and an second and/or third incident then happens in a coordinated attack, it's very easy to say "Why didn't you shut down? Couldn't you see that we were under attack?"
That's "what's the point of using acronyms when you can just write out the full sentence?"
Well, you could ask the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Central Intelligence Agency, or even consult with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Perhaps you can send them JavaScript Object Notation using the Asynchronous Javscript and Extensible Markup Language standard over HyperText Transfer Protocol?
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I use acronyms to reduce the cognitive overhead of reading, and (relevant to this discussion) make otherwise offensive terms acceptable in a broad range of environments (snafu, CYA, OMFG, WTF, etc). I'm sorry you haven't run across CYA before (though that might be a good thing), but it's not a terribly uncommon acronym either.
Regular old inclement weather does this all the time and people don't cry panic that society is going to implode.
Shutting down transportation for a day is a silly thing to be terrorized about.
>As for us, we behave like a herd of deer. When they flee from the huntsman's feathers in affright, which way do they turn? What haven of safety do they make for? Why, they rush upon the nets! And thus they perish by confounding what they should fear with that wherein no danger lies. . . . Not death or pain is to be feared, but the fear of death or pain. Well said the poet therefore:—Death has no terror; only a Death of shame!
-Epictetus
Driving a car at least gives you the opportunity to reject taking on the risk.
The fabric of society is based around us not shooting each other/ blowing up trains. Every event like this (or, say, some countries bombing out neighborhoods in other countries) makes it harder to rely on the idea that this sort of thing doesn't happen.
Acknowledging that this happens because of conscious policy decisions by many people is also good.
There's absolutely nothing inevitable about these kinds of attacks. We could bring this sort of event down to a number real close to 0.
Not to mention that it's possible to worry about car crashes and terrorism at the same time
In my life time, I'm much more likely to be murdered by a driver than a terrorist.
Most bike deaths are single-vehicle accidents (they do not involve another party).
> We could bring this sort of event down to a number real close to 0.
Please, would you mind elaborating a bit on these two points?
The narrative after 9/11, and after both Paris attacks were "this is a war of civilization, of culture. They attack us because we are free". I think a lot of us realise on a conscious level that this narrative simply isn't true, but the narrative still stands.
Foreign intervention make us targets for "retaliation" (I'm trying hard to not apologise for monsters murdering a bunch of civilians pretty indiscriminately). There are many major countries and populations that are easier targets for Daesch that don't seem to get attacked. If this was about maximum carnage so many worse things could be happening right now.
The whole "having a population not super happy about the current government" thing doesn't seem to help (in terms of building a support network). Though even that requires a pound of salt: a journalist on twitter pointed out that in the case of the Paris attacks, there were support networks... but they were mainly for "normal" criminals (drug dealers and the like). We're not talking about a huge set of jihadists, but a bunch of opportunists [0].
I think most people would recognise that the IRA bombings and the Troubles was a result of policy, not culture. Daesch is, I think, pretty similar. It's not like a bunch of people got up and were like "We hate the West!". There's a lot of stuff involved. Not that it justifies their actions, but it's at least good to be lucid when thinking about the why.
[0]: https://twitter.com/joshuahersh/status/712280093343793153
I agree with you on that; it's unfortunate, though, that a lot of political bad actors have spot-welded "we need to understand why they're doing this" -- which is obviously true, it's much harder to defeat an enemy you don't understand -- to "it's racist to think that we have an enemy at all, never mind actually fight them effectively."
I don't think so.
Even if you exclude international politics completely the number still isn't zero. Take the 2011 Norway attacks where 77 people died. That was one guy, a Christian fundamentalist, likely paranoid schizophrenic who wanted to rid the world of Marxism/feminism/islam/something. Then you have the unabomber, most school shootings, and so on which you can point to.
My point is: This stuff is NEVER going away. All you can do is minimise it. Zero is certainly a laudable goal but likely an unachievable one.
Edit: However I agree with the part that this is never going to go away (completely). You cannot totally prevent terror, and living in a society that could would be terror itself.
They should look up north, Norway is the shining beacon in terms of how a country can handle terrorism responsibly.
With accidents, you can kinda hope they won't be happening too often because nobody benefits from them. Not so much with violent conflicts, though.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_i...
Saying that terrorist attacks barely impact P(death) trivializes them.
There you go. Killing 50+ people is absurdly easy. Hello, blacklists.
It is almost trivial to be an effective terrorist if body count is what you're optimizing for. In Baghdad they blew a fuel tanker sky high, the blast rattled my windows so hard across the city that I thought we were the ones under attack.
I have wondered (ever since it was my job to think like a guerrilla fighter) why terrorists don't do similar things in the US or other countries. How many fuel tankers are there in the US? How hard would it be to GTA one of them and drive it into a dense gathering of people? How hard would it be to re-enact the CoD MW2 airport scene?
Perhaps it is symbolism not body counts they seek? After all the DC sniper effectively terrorized three states with a rifle.
In the infantry nothing is scarier than land mines and snipers.
All I know is surveillance can't stop every tanker or lone gunman. It's just too easy to do these kinds of things without the use of anything with a significant RF signature.
>No terrorist group has achieved a kill rate anywhere near a conventional military; and are vastly less than those death tolls for guerrilla organizations or dictators. Stalin or Mao could, in a bad day, exceed the deaths caused by all international terrorism over the last 2 centuries. 9/11, the crowning incident of terrorism in those centuries, was equaled by just 29 days of car accidents in the USA - and 9/11 was only accidentally that successful! 9/11 is also a sterling example of the availability bias: besides it, how many attacks could the best informed Western citizen name? Perhaps a score, on a good day, if they have a good memory; inasmuch as the MIPT database records >19,000 just 1968-2004, it’s clear that terrifyingly exceptional terrorist attacks are just that. Remarkably, it seems that it is unusual for terrorist attacks to injure even a single person; the MIPT database puts the number of such attacks at 35% of all attacks. Certainly the post-9/11 record would seem to indicate it was a fluke... Many terrorist organizations keep very detailed financial records (consider the troves of data seized from Al-Qaeda-in-Iraq, from Bin Laden’s safehouse, or Al Qaeda’s insistence on receipts), with little trust of underlings, suggesting far less ideological devotion than commonly believed & serious principal-agent problems. Stories about terrorist incompetence are legion and the topic is now played for laughs (eg. the 2010 movie Four Lions), prompting columnists to tell us to ignore all the incompetence and continue to be afraid.
- we need more surveillance rights and money for the secret services
- we need more police and higher spending
- and possibly bomb some country (Syria is en vogue)
What won't be said is:
- How come this happens again without anyone having seen it coming?
- What does it say about the success of the Western anti-terror foreign policy adopted ~2001?
But we're not completely anti-west, we enjoy the freedoms and religious autonomy we're granted and we enjoy the cultural mix that "the West" affords us.
It also doesn't mean we wish to maim and murder the innocent (on either side of the argument!) in order to make our point. I think 99% of us can agree that groups (like ISIS) who think it's acceptable and act to torture and kill the innocent to make their political point need to die in a hell-fire and be damned to all eternity. Or maybe that's just me.
Oh, completely agree with that.
The only problem is that this description fits not only ISIS, and its opposing government by Assad, it also fits the US friendly Iraq, and Saudi Arabia, and the US government itself, and anybody else that has the intention of doing anything there.
Ah, and don't forget the European border policies regarding (mostly Syrian) refugees...
Many believe that getting rid of Assad will end the Syrian refugee crisis. Others observe that when the Saddam and Gaddafi heads were cut off the snake grew ISIS.
And so it goes.
The only difference between Assad and the other remaining dictators in the region is that the US was heavily invested in getting rid of Assad -- and then Russia came and basically ruined their plans indefinitely.
If there's one Muslim country whose government is in dire need of being overthrown it's Turkey -- but sadly Erdogan has learned from his country's past and made sure the military won't turn against him anytime soon.
Fast forward a few years and she has completely turned around and regrets her former opinions.
This doesn't really prove what is the correct approach, but I think speaks about the fact that we often make decisions based on some vague ideals as opposed to practical and realistic outcomes - and we are sometimes wrong.
But I agree that this is a problem we can't bomb our way out of.
Alas, the spying is apparently targeting mainly the innocent civilians and is mostly ineffective against criminals.
There doesn't seem to be a "Goldilocks" amount of data. Or if there is, intelligence services seem to have no interest in finding it if it means restraining themselves.
For any city, I could give the advice: avoid the airport, trains stations, the metro, and famous tourist attractions.
On the other hand, these are typically the places that you need and want to go if you visit a city, so it's anyway better just not care. The risk is very, very, very small.
Metros and mass transit are generally the most lucrative target, as we see here, and as we saw in London 10 years ago.
This consisted of a small interview on what I've been doing in Israel, where I am going to, with whom and who packed my stuff. This all was before even entering the actual terminal building.
People interested in killing others will just go for the easiest place, so they will just bomb the line at the scanners entering the terminal.
I talk to a lot of frequent fliers, and almost every one of them has said that there is no point to a terrorist trying to bomb a plane any more. The easiest target for terrorism is simply the insecure portion of an airport. We saw this today in Brussels.
You have to stop the issues at their source: why did people who were born and raised in Europe radicalize in just one or two years? And why did the community they lived in not see or report that this was happening?
Besides, to defend against suicide bombings, the dogs would have to encounter everyone before they enter the airport checkin area, otherwise the bomber could just detonate once the dog start barking (or whatever they do to mark that they've found something).
Unfortunately, by the time there's a bomb at the airport, it is too late unless "James Bond" is on the scene.
The core issues here need to be addressed.
Yes, we should have security and even bomb detection tech in select public places... but that's secondary to what needs to be done to fix this mess.
Moreover, the bomb was set off outside the secure area. It is VERY likely that existing security measures got more people killed because there are dense crowds waiting to clear security. This exact type of attack, outside the secure area, was predicted long ago. And there you have it.
Any security lines are actually past passport control, and I've never seen them particularly packed.
https://twitter.com/mattocko/status/712227775805988864
TATP (acetone peroxide), the type of improvised explosive favored by terrorists because of the easy access to ingredients, is uniquely difficult to detect but there have been some recent advances in this area [0]
Most of these attackers use vests that carry 2-10kg of TATP, or backpacks with 10+ kilograms. They are required to load these devices up and travel to their designated target, the hope is that with explosive detection you could pick these guys up or minimize casualties in the same way you could identify a gunman on CCTV.
It wouldn't be a panacea - but it could form part of a broader set of new tech to assist with these cases
[0] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0925400511...
a) People would bitch more because it would take forever to get into an airport. And,
b) It isn't practical. What's next, stopping you at your car or bus before you park?
People demand security but don't want inconvenience. And if security fails, they point and say "it's ineffective." Even if it stops 80% of attacks, unless it's 100% people will bitch. AND if there aren't any attacks, can they really claim that they stopped one unless they publicly acknowledge every attempted attack?
As a result people have to bunch up outside the terminal, making them even more vulnerable than they otherwise would be.
Any true improvements would have to come from streamlined pre-screening, e.g. chemical detectors (or dogs?) in the concourse sniffing things out without making people stop or bunch up. Hard to do.
Looks like it's not working too well. Surveillance services have gained mass resources since 2015 in France and that did not stop the December attacks at all.
- Bringing more eyes and ears in the form of social workers and community policemen in problematic neighborhoods.
- Provide better education/work opportunities for immigrants.
- Better cooperation between municipalities and Muslim organisations/mosques.
- Deradicalization programs.
Of course, implementing such policies takes time and it's much more popular to present the 'easy solutions' (more surveillance, closing borders, etc.).
France has been doing pretty much the opposite, investing money in surveillance and special forces instead. Belgium has kind of ignored problems.
Edit: getting more downvotes, without any of the downvoters caring to justify them so far, so I can only speculate as for the reasons behind them.
I'm wondering if the downvoters (I'm guessing from the USA) are aware that my views are already a law in many of the liberal democracies of Europe? There are laws which put you in jail for saying certain things, and they are enforced (there are people who are doing time just for saying things).
That's part of the problem right there that people segregate into enclaves and have little contact with each other's communities.
Meanwhile, people are dying. That is exactly how some people see it, and exactly how I see it. I'm not emotional, I'm logical, and I expect government to protect us from evil individuals/groups. Arguably, it's not there to foster some sort of "long-term" sustainable co-existence between different cultures.
First, you establish security and root out potential problem groups. And once that's happened, and you have almost non-existent danger to the local populace, then you can start worrying about integration and grey-goals such as "peaceful coexistence" and "de-radicalization". And I don't say that as a means to single-out immigrants, or foreign groups. This reasoning should apply just as much to dangerous elements that are within, and part of society currently.
Just before Christmas last year:
French police have foiled an attack targeting police and army personnel in the central city of Orléans, Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said on Tuesday. Two men have been arrested.
...
Cazeneuve said 10 attacks had been prevented this year in France, which suffered its worst atrocity for decades last month when Islamist militants killed 130 people in Paris.
http://www.france24.com/en/20151222-france-terror-plot-foile...
Exhibit A: The Mossad is generally considered one of the best intelligence services world-wide.
Exhibit B: There are still frequent terrorist attacks in Israel.
I also feel governments today are under much more scrutiny than they have ever been. Are we at a place were a new Bin Laden is going to get a new Bush to launch a war. Who knows? But people are much more aware of the costs than in 2001.
Still security responses aren't mature/sophisticated enough to prevent such tragic incidents, and must be given some leeway to evolve.
Knowing how Belgium handles their minorities in Brussels, it's not a big surprise.
The fact that this happens now is neither a surprise. Salah Abdeslam has been caught, and there were messages that he wanted to cooperate with the Belgium police. Whether it's true or not, if they were planning something, and he knew about it, waiting was not a real option.
Could you elaborate? Is this a banlieu situation?
Belgium has big problems between the Flemish and French speaking parts, and particularly in Brussels it's politically very complicated. For some city wide measures, they need like 26 police commanders to agree. I don't know the numbers, but it's very complex to get all people in line. And I'm not talking about the people in the street, this is about city councils, police departments etc.
Brussels itself resembles the EU in this respect.
This article discusses the mess that is Belgian governmental organization: http://www.politico.eu/article/belgium-failed-state-security...
Why is this a bad thing? I feel safer with more police presence but maybe that's just me.
The security theater was specifically about TSA and other untrained (or minimally trained) symbolic gestures. Actual policing is not theater.
Does it work? The cost and human rights interferences are easier to take if more police works, but there's no evidence that it would.
Police have a bad habit of harassing populations (several riots in France were a result of policing practices such as asking everyone for an ID). It helps to contribute to send a message of unwelcomeness to people who are likely already disillusioned in the system.
It's unlikely that more police could stop attacks. Maybe deal with the aftermath/manhunts better. But it sounds like more precision operations (including human intelligence) will go a lot further.
A lot of people could see it coming, except for the naive PC people
Better than most people that didn't have the privilege of being there in the first place.
Also access to better education and social support, which most people in the world doesn't have
> they blame everyone but their own actions
Yes, that's the main excuse of people who don't make an effort and expect everything from society (including several 'natives')
Belgium certainly does. Its failures in counter terrorism have lead to the Paris attacks and now these attacks. At least that is the understanding I have gleaned from twitter conversations of CT experts
"One Belgian counterterrorism official told BuzzFeed News last week that due to the small size of the Belgian government and the huge numbers of open investigations — into Belgian citizens suspected of either joining ISIS, being part of radical groups in Belgium, and the ongoing investigations into last November’s attacks in Paris, which appeared to be at least partially planned in Brussels and saw the participation of several Belgian citizens and residents — virtually every police detective and military intelligence officer in the country was focused on international jihadi investigations.
“We just don’t have the people to watch anything else and, frankly, we don’t have the infrastructure to properly investigate or monitor hundreds of individuals suspected of terror links, as well as pursue the hundreds of open files and investigations we have,” the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media, said. “It’s literally an impossible situation and, honestly, it’s very grave.”"
See http://www.buzzfeed.com/mitchprothero/belgian-authorities-ov...
It's like the spy agencies and law enforcement are always highly competent and can never do any wrong.
They get fired if they break rules, fail to obey standard operating procedure, do not fill tick marks correctly on a paper.
They work in a system, and the system has responsibility, not individual people who work for it -- unless they neglect or break rules and procedures.
But they did see it coming. From what I gathered from the response of many Brussels residents and airport personnel, the question was "when", more than "if".
It's not like you can say "yeah, we saw that coming and let it happen." Because THAT, sure as hell, will not fly with the people. And "yeah, we saw it coming and stopped it" is questioned as just posturing. When people say "scanning individuals in airports makes us no safer," what are they comparing it to?
Is it that they doubt the effectiveness because people are still getting killed by terrorists in planes? No. It's because there are no attacks, so they have no data to say "yeah... it's been effective."
2) Finding real plots are too hard so they entrap people and even then, they don't find many.
3) They aren't spreading around their "successes" because they are absurdly few and borderline entrapment.
4) Homegrown threats are a greater danger and largely being ignored.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/25/us/tally-of-attacks-in-us-...
> But the breakdown of extremist ideologies behind those attacks may come as a surprise. Since Sept. 11, 2001, nearly twice as many people have been killed by white supremacists, antigovernment fanatics and other non-Muslim extremists than by radical Muslims: 48 have been killed by extremists who are not Muslim, including the recent mass killing in Charleston, S.C., compared with 26 by self-proclaimed jihadists, according to a count by New America, a Washington research center.
> Non-Muslim extremists have carried out 19 such attacks since Sept. 11, according to the latest count, compiled by David Sterman, a New America program associate, and overseen by Peter Bergen, a terrorism expert. By comparison, seven lethal attacks by Islamic militants have taken place in the same period.
> The contentious question of biased perceptions of terrorist threats dates back at least two decades, to the truck bombing that tore apart the federal building in Oklahoma City in April 1995. Some early news media speculation about the attack assumed that it had been carried out by Muslim militants. The arrest of Timothy J. McVeigh, an antigovernment extremist, quickly put an end to such theories.
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/other/nsa-program-stopped-no-ter...
> A member of the White House review panel on NSA surveillance said he was “absolutely” surprised when he discovered the agency’s lack of evidence that the bulk collection of telephone call records had thwarted any terrorist attacks.
https://theintercept.com/2015/11/17/u-s-mass-surveillance-ha...
> And even before Snowden, the NSA wasn’t able to provide a single substantiated example of its surveillance dragnet preventing any domestic attack at all.
https://news.vice.com/article/the-line-between-fbi-stings-an...
> A report released this week from Human Rights Watch highlights how, consistently, FBI sting operations are over aggressive and premised on the racist profiling of Muslim communities — that old building block of our contemporary national security state. Based on 215 interviews and focusing on 27 post-9/11 cases of alleged terror plot thwarting, HRW's findings call into question the very legitimacy of the FBI's counterterror work. The authors go as far as to call a number of stings "government-created" terror plots.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/nov/16/fbi-entrapment-...
> But the issue is one that stretches far beyond Newburgh. Critics say the FBI is running a sting operation across America, targeting – to a large extent – the Muslim community by luring people into fake terror plots. FBI bureaux send informants to trawl through Muslim communities, hang out in mosques and community centres, and talk of radical Islam in order to identify possible targets sympathetic to such ideals. Or they will respond to the most bizarre of tip-offs, including, in one case, a man who claimed to have seen terror chief Ayman al-Zawahiri living in northern California in the late 1990s.
http://www.wired.com/2013/02/american-muslim-terrorism/
> Since 9/11, Kurzman and his team tallies, 33 Americans have died as a result of terrorism launched by their Muslim neighbors. During that period, 180,000 Americans were murdered for reasons unrelated to terrorism. In just the past year, the mass shootings that have captivated America’s attention killed 66 Americans, “twice as many fatalities as from Muslim-American terrorism in all 11 years since 9/11,” notes Kurzman’s team.
> “Until public opinion starts to recognize the scale of the problem has been lower than we feared, my sense is that public officials are not going to change their policies,” Kurzman says. “Counterterrorism policies have involved surveillance — not just of Muslim-Americans, but of all Americans, and the fear of terrorism has justified intrusions on American privacy and civil liberties all over the internet and other aspects of our lives. I think the implications here are not just for how we treat a religious minority in the U.S., but also how we treat the rights & liberties of everyone.”
Some people probably also assume that higher perceived level of threat that justifies tighter security is not a result of natural development, but of direct action by governments when carrying out their foreign policies.
The vicious circle of "we go and do good in the faraway, they blow us up, we tighten local security and do more good in the faraway,…" begs to determine causation in this correlation.
The problem with this argument is that it can be used to justify any security measures, no matter how costly or stupid. Because maybe it's really very effective in practice but we can't tell you about it?
You're basically saying "trust us, we're the government." It's the recipe for total unaccountability.
So no, they have to justify that the costly and stupid security measures actually work. Or we'll have nothing but costly and stupid security measures that don't actually work.
How exactly do you want them to justify. Your demand is too vague to be even considered. How do you propose, they should advertise every thwarted terrorist attack, without alerting the other terrorists?
All security is plain unproductive overhead, which is compulsory in the presence of adversary.
>>You're basically saying "trust us, we're the government." It's the recipe for total unaccountability.
You're basically saying, "don't trust the govt" and that is the recipe for total anarchy, which is heaven for terrorists.
How about they stop doing it and if the level of terrorism remains in the "still kills fewer people than bathtubs" range, we realize we didn't need it.
> All security is plain unproductive overhead, which is compulsory in the presence of adversary.
All security is compulsory? Madness.
Security is risk management. All government activity is risk. You spend a dollar on surveillance technology instead of scientific research that would have led to safer products or life saving medicine and people die. You take a dollar from the taxpayer who now can't afford those products or medicine and people die. Government waste kills more people than terrorism. To say nothing of the people bad governments kill much more directly.
> You're basically saying, "don't trust the govt" and that is the recipe for total anarchy
Only if by anarchy you mean democracy.
Comparing terrorism to bathtub is foolish at its best and outright dangerously misleading at its worst. Tomorrow you can say `if the level of terrorism remains in the "still kills fewer people than old age" range, we realize we didn't need it.`
Statistics can be (mis)used to justify any claim.
One reason why people find terrorism more dangerous than heart disease, cancer, etc is this - bathtub and cars are NOT human beings and thus do NOT actively not tolerate difference of opinions amongst other groups of people and do NOT engage in acts of "killing other people for difference of opinions" while human terrorists do engage in such killings and do constantly search for opportunities to kill people with different opinions.
>How about they stop doing it and ...
Define "it".
Do you want to compare it to numbers instead of things? How about we not worry this much about it as long as the chance of the average person being killed by it is less than 0.1%. Or here's a good one: how about we limit the amount of money being spent on it in proportion to how many people it kills. Spend a trillion dollars fighting heart disease and a billion fighting terrorism instead of the other way around.
> One reason why people find terrorism more dangerous than heart disease, cancer, etc is this - bathtub and cars are NOT human beings and thus do NOT actively not tolerate difference of opinions amongst other groups of people and do NOT engage in acts of "killing other people for difference of opinions" while human terrorists do engage in such killings and do constantly search for opportunities to kill people with different opinions.
And what of it? A lion has a difference of opinion with you about whether you're its dinner. Do we need to spend a trillion dollars and have a war on lions? What about Streptococcus? It's alive, it adapts, it wants to kill you, another trillion dollars?
> Define "it".
Mass surveillance. And pretty much the entire TSA.
The point about lion is good and that's why our ancestors had spent a huge amount of resources (money, time, hunters etc) to "eradicate" lions. Due to our ancestors' efforts and the consequential huge spendings towards this eradication, today we don't have to worry too much about the opinions of lions. Today the lions are rendered as what we proverbially call "toothless tigers/snakes".
A similar argument can be made about Streptococcus or (any such bacteria/virus or even any other such animal) and humans want to be in charge of things so much so that their opinions and thence their consequential actions do not become a significant danger/hazard to the humans.
Many fanatical animal lovers do hate this idea (of humans wanting to be in charge/control of other animals) too. But that is a different story.
Now with terrorists, the things become different in a very important manner. Lions and other animals are different species and thus their eradication problem doesn't first pose a very difficult "identification" problem. To deal with human terrorists, first we have to "identify" them and their sympathizers who can/do provide safe harbour to them and thus help the terrorists in their intended terrorist actions. This "identification" problem is what requires mass surveillance. This brings "cancer" to my mind, as in case of "cancer" also we face a very "identification" problem: problem of identification of dangerous cells.
Hope this helps.
But the identification problem isn't unique. It's true of every crime there is. Criminals don't come with tags labeling them as a terrorist or a murderer or a pedophile. And there is nothing you can ever do to eliminate 100% of all crime. It's about the most cost effective way to provide enough deterrence to keep the crime rate low. And mass surveillance has a huge cost in privacy and in money and in security itself. It's a terrible trade off.
> This brings "cancer" to my mind, as in case of "cancer" also we face a very "identification" problem: problem of identification of dangerous cells.
You're kind of making my point. Cancer kills way, way more people than terrorism. Why are we spending more resources fighting terrorism than cancer?
Correct. But terrorism (inspired by hate ideology or religion) is significantly different in a very important respect from other crimes you mentioned; that is, the terrorist(s) generally find support and shelter amongst large number of otherwise normal citizens inspired/driven by the hate ideology or religion whereas a murderer or a pedophile generally doesn't find such shelter. That's why
>>You're kind of making my point. Cancer kills way, way more people than terrorism. Why are we spending more resources fighting terrorism than cancer?
No, I am NOT making your point. I gave the cancer example to point out the problem of identification. But I am not entirely against you here. You may say that we must spend some more resources to fight cancer but if you say we must curtail on mass surveillance and other anti-terrorism measures to do cancer fight then I don't agree.
>>And mass surveillance has a huge cost in privacy and in money and in security itself.
Privacy is important but NOT as important as survival itself.
That's why what?
> You may say that we must spend some more resources to fight cancer but if you say we must curtail on mass surveillance and other anti-terrorism measures to do cancer fight then I don't agree.
But why not? If spending a dollar fighting cancer saves more lives than spending the same dollar fighting terrorism and we don't have unlimited resources then why should we make the choice that causes more loss of life?
> Privacy is important but NOT as important as survival itself.
Privacy is security. The information they're collecting is inherently dangerous. It's much easier to use it to plan an attack than to defend from one. If you're looking for a needle in a haystack, more data is more hay. But if you're trying to burn everything down then it tells you who is vulnerable where and when. The only way to prevent terrorists from breaking in and accessing the data is to not collect it to begin with.
And terrorists aren't even the main threat. Surveillance of innocent people makes them vulnerable to anyone who has the data. Cartel hitmen, sexual predators, Richard Nixon, take your pick.
I will not agree with your dumping of Richard Nixon with crime cartels and sexual predators. In general, the US democratic government system has proven to be much more successful and benevolent than any other system in the world, including the much touted communism (USSR, China, N. Korea). What I mean to say is Richard Nixon is hardly a threat as compared to Mao or Stalin.
Granted, there is a small non-zero chance of an innocent getting hurt in some way due to privacy issues, but that doesn't and shouldn't mean we should abandon surveillance and deprive ourselves of important and timely information and put many more innocents to risk.
>That's why what?
(Oho sorry, but I guess, the rest of the words got deleted.) That's why surveillance of such hate groups (e.g. Wahabi mosques or extreme left/right groups) is also mandatory.
The nuance required to understand and attack the big picture is almost nowhere to be found.
I saw the French PM said something like "we're at war" - I'm not sure who they're at war with but onward with the endless war.
I've seen plenty of comments about ISIS. It's like a 99.999% chance it's not ISIS - maybe Al Qaeda, maybe a different extremist group. (For why it's probably not ISIS and one of the most fantastic explanations of the what's and whys of ISIS, see [0].) But it shows just how vastly uneducated most people are about the issues that lead to attacks like this.
This breeds calls for extremism in response, like expelling all Muslims (and can only help Trump's campaign) or comments like the one from the French PM above.
I can't imagine being in charge of trying to address all of the underlying issues that feed into attacks like this. And I don't know that those in charge are up to the task.
[0] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/what-isi...
Edit: ISIS inspired maybe, but not ISIS planned and backed. "During his visit to Mosul in December, Jürgen Todenhöfer interviewed a portly German jihadist and asked whether any of his comrades had returned to Europe to carry out attacks. The jihadist seemed to regard returnees not as soldiers but as dropouts. “The fact is that the returnees from the Islamic State should repent from their return,” he said. “I hope they review their religion.”"
I always stand to be corrected.
You should see the wind go out of politicans sails when they learn an event like this is a random nutcase. They look like their dog died.
What's most sad about it, is that the current situation is the result of doing nothing, despite having crystal clear data on the situation, and in which (wrong) direction things has been changing.
It's been clear that something needs to be done for years, even decades, but actually doing something about the situation would mean publicly acknowledging these facts. And nobody has been willing to do just that.
In fact actually using these known indisputable facts has been systematically avoided for fear of being seen as "racist" or whatever.
Putting the specific issue of immigration aside, I think that it's a very bad sign for the future of enlightened democracy when actually running a fact-based policy is deemed as "risky" and even unacceptable from a public relations point of view.
If we let this attitude persist, we can do lots of wrongs in other areas as well: Think about environmental changes, etc etc.
We need to heighten the status of cold data, of facts as a matter of indisputability. But that's not a left/right issue and I don't think you will find any party fronting such a position.
I think the current situation is the result of doing way too much the the past decade (or two). If the US and EU stayed out of the Middle East (Iraq, Libya, Syria), the EU+ME part of the world would be a much more peaceful place.
Allow me to amend my comment slightly, and emphasise that I'm speaking of domestic policies.
Across Europe we've seen increased ghettofication, social segregation and religious extremism.
But because this has mostly been within demographic segments considered "weak" or "minorities", the explicit policy has consistently been sweeping things under the rug and proceeding as if nothing has been wrong.
And that has landed Europe where it is today.
Anyway. This is HN and I don't want to get more political than I need to. What bothers me the most is honestly the low status facts have in the politics of nations today, something I think should be a fairly incontroversial position.
perhaps the fact that they are "weak" or "minorities" is the cause and not the consequence of the attacks... I mean, in a complex society causality goes in any direction.
100% agree....when you can sit and watch a debate or discussion on TV, and one side or the other, or both, are using arguments that are known to be factually incorrect, it's bound to not turn out well.
I think if we are going to accept immigration from anywhere, we should first figure out how to assimilate all cultures to prevent as you correctly note ghettofication, social segregation and religious extremism. The things we're seeing today might be small potatoes compared to what could happen if there's a mass uprising.
I very much doubt that. Of course, there is no alternative reality where you could observe how things went when things were done differently, but there's no lack of violence in parts of the world where US and EU have not been doing things.
And of course you are neglecting that especially after WWII, Soviet Union did not exactly stay out of places, either. For instance, Afghanistan and Somalia, the two most notorious failed states in the world, were actually run under Soviet influence for a considerable time. Syria is still very much in the Russian sphere of influence. Etc.
A "fact-based policy" is utopia. What for you is a fact, for me it's not. You can not have policy without politics.
And what? That "something" needs to be done was clear since the 80s, but so far constructive solutions have been rather sparse. Integration is too expensive to the austerity and privatization loving right wing, and expulsion doesn't work because our economies depend on cheap immigrant labour. So far I've not seen anyone seen pushing for a different solution.
Say what you will about America's institutional racism, but I have rarely heard an American whine about people not acting American enough (maybe I'm hanging in the wrong circles)
Meanwhile I would hear a lot of complaining about riff raff accumulating around ethnic grocers and the like messing up the "culture " of downtown Nantes.
The integration fallacy is one that is doomed to fail from the outset. The people define an area, not the other way around. Let people do what they want, the free flow of ideas will do the rest.
Belgium does not have this problem.
Why?
https://twitter.com/caitlinmoran/status/712254657662418944
> Always good, on days like this, to remind everyone that the guys blowing up Brussels are THE PEOPLE THE REFUGEES ARE RUNNING AWAY FROM
I think it would be fair to call them French/Belgian ISIS members. There is no requirement that you must be Syrian to be a member of ISIS.
Pretending that it was a foreign aggression is a lie.
You're drawing a foreign/domestic distinction when none exists. There is no reason someone cannot be Belgian, and also a member of ISIS. What is your criteria for inclusion in "ISIS" if it's not someone saying "I'm with ISIS"?
I think it's far more likely that these attacks were triggered by the recent arrest of Salah Abdeslam and the killing of Mohamed Belkaid (in two different raids). There were multiple other suspects who were not captured/killed, and it seem plausible that they carried out these attacks now as they felt the police were closing in.
I'm not claiming that all terror attacks are always ISIS, and I'm not saying I'm sure this was ISIS, but given recent events in Belgium, the likelihood of ISIS involvement is a _lot_ higher than 0.001%.
That said, I agree this is likely retaliation, I'm just not sure how big the "enemy" we're fighting in Belgium is. Today's attack took a minimum of what, 3 people?
At least twice that. Some sort of cell leader, a bombmaker, logistics, bombers, etc...
They have been saying that since the terrorists attacks of 2015 in France. Nothing new. And France is actually at war against ISIS, that's not a secret for anyone.
The problem is very simple: cultural incompatibility.
It is better to stay humble, as the parent comment was.
The article you're linking to was written before the November attacks which certainly was by ISIS.
They created the mess in the first place with regressive colonial era imperialist policies. Just take a look at this photo from Afghanistan [0] before the US decided to arm the Taliban in a proxy war against the Russians.
Everyone loves the material wealth neoliberalism gives them, but acts completely oblivious when confronted with the pure violence of its operation outside of the western bubble.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-belgium-blast-idUSKCN0WO0L...
"Bombs at Brussels airport. I'm alive but I think there are casualties." - https://twitter.com/lrz/status/712173286281650176
Laurent Sansonetti MacRuby & RubyMotion's creator and lead developer was near the blast.
I don't think there is any solution which makes everyone perfectly safe. Politicians always want to guarantee perfect safety but it's not possible. Some things you can prevent, some things you can stop, but some horrible thing will inevitably happen.
I don't buy it.
On the other hand, religion is probably the most important, yet arbitrary and completely illogical, divisive influence in the world. So, religion most definitely is to blame.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sectarian_violence#Northern_Ir...
Christianity fractured in 1517 over the question of the extent of Papal authority and corruption. This led to centuries of power struggle as to who was superior: papal authority or civil authority? The UK eventually decided for civil authority in 1688 by installing a Parliament-respecting Protestant monarch rather than a Pope-respecting absolutist Catholic monarch. The ensuing fighting was ended at the Boyne in 1690. But it's still a battle the commemoration of which leads to fighting in the street in NI.
This led to a position of Catholic oppression by Protestants for centuries. Is this really a religious issue, or a self-perpetuating cycle of violence?
How about reading the exact sources in order to avoid even being in position of having to "buy" anything? For example the core texts? Just get one and read it. Don't let anybody tell you anything, especially don't trust any claimed "interpretations," read it yourself, in your language, undiluted, not just one sentence, but at least the whole chapter where it appears, take notes, then discuss.
And then if you question the translation you read, there are enough online sources which display the different translations which can be then compared. You can even search where any word is used through all the texts. Just don't believe anybody who says that you can't do that.
Just like I don't have to know ancient Greek to understand what's written in the Odyssey.
Then investigate if there are any known interpretations by the influential scholars that are equivalent to western approach to other religions "that it shouldn't be taken literally." Investigate the practices and how the ideas are actually applied in real life. Study history to know how they were historically applied and which effect they had. Know the context.
(I'm not going to discuss this further here, this is my only post, but I stand to my claim that everybody can read and understand the sources and research how they are viewed by the influential scholars, and that these facts can be calmly discussed, and that the discussion should not depend on the groupthink or faith but the actual knowledge of the topic discussed. Don't write "I don't buy" this or that, discuss the facts you actually know, then somebody can contribute to your knowledge by stating the facts he knows etc).
Moreover I haven't seen anybody else who wrote what I see only you write: "You and many others seem to post that there is a mental cancer infecting 1.5 billion people on this planet, and at any time it could transform its host into a bloodthirsty murderer seemingly at random."
Careful readers are advised to read what others really wrote (e.g the post to which you respond wrote just "I would argue that religion is the variable that plays the dominant role in this war of ideas"), not what you claim (or somebody else claims) it is supposed to mean.
Analyzing your post in this light, it appears to be strikingly manipulative and dishonest, distorting what others actually wrote and promoting non-thinking and blindly believing (your attempt to discredit somebody with something he hasn't even written).
[1] Jihadi John: http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2015/02/27/the-horror-...
It is an ingredient. Eric Hoffer's _The True Believer_ is a good sketch of the phenomenon. Among the disaffected, some will latch onto any available dogmatic belief system. As long as radical Islam is in the news, and is accessible, some among the disaffected will choose that path.
Not all dogmas result in blowing yourself up in crowds, or setting off bombs or gunning down people in theaters. Doesn't it make sense to preferentially attack those dogmas that bring out, at present, the worst characteristics in their adherents?
It would be great if our foreign policy in the past 1.5 (or 3, or 5, or 7) decades hadn't been a disaster and promoted unrest in the region, because that undoubtedly increased the seriousness of our current situation. We (by that I mean our leaders who make foreign policy and military decisions) should try to learn from history and not repeat the same mistakes, although they all (no matter their politics) seem to do a very poor job of that. But the question of why radical Islam is such a problem now is irrelevant to the question of whether we should fight radical Islam. It's not a very reasonable thing to conclude that because we're partly responsible for the rise of radical Islam, we should do nothing and let it conquer the world if it wants.
What I think would be an awful mistake is to replicate the Roosevelt style policy with regard to Muslims.
Also, The True Believer is already on my to-read list, I'll bump it up after I get done with Piketty. Thanks for the recommendation!
But it's important to understand that these feelings are what such attacks are intended to invoke. They're intended to harden the gap between "us" and "them", to make Westerners despise anyone who looks conveniently foreign enough to be suspicious of belonging to "them" and to use them as scapegoats for the perpetrators who have often already escaped justice through death.
These atrocities weren't committed by "Muslims" just like the atrocities in the UK during the Troubles were not committed by "Christians". The perpetrators were individuals -- even if they belonged to a group that group wasn't "Muslims", it most likely wasn't even "ISIS"; just a small group of like-minded dangerous individuals who were convinced they would aid mankind by committing atrocities like these.
In so far as certain ideologies led to these convictions it is important to understand that you can't kill ideas with weapons. Yes, where there are armies fighting for dangerous ideologies they need to be stopped, but where you can't even clearly distinguish the soldiers from the civilians you need to destroy the ideology, not the people.
But unlike people, ideologies are very difficult to destroy and take a long time to fully extinguish. And in times like these it's far too easy to fall prey to politicians promising fast satisfaction rather than a long-term strategy towards a shift in ideologies.
We need to embrace our humanity and liberties. We have already had our period of enlightenment and we have overcome totalitarianism and theocracy. We must not allow ourselves to regress to the dark age, no matter how appealing it may seem in times like these -- neither here in Europe, nor oversees in the US.
I like that you used "extinguish" here.
I'm not sure if you intended it, but I think the behavioural psychology definition of "extinguish" is especially relevant.
In other words, to get rid of the ideology, we'd have to not reinforce it: i.e. to neither reward it or punish it.
And yes extinction[1] takes a long time.
Also see "extinction burst".
I guess it’s official. Facebook Safety Check is for terrorist attacks in white, western countries only. Good to know.
Edit: I was wrong and I take back what I said: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Safety_Check#Other_de...
A civil war is when two or more parties are actively fighting each other within one country. Current examples in the Middle East: Yemen, Libya, and Syria.
My country Tunisia is quite peaceful and is a young and successful democracy. Turkey is a stable country but is unfortunately sharing its border with Syria and has some trouble with extremist Kurd separatists.
I don't see what you're getting at mate.
If that for example is just "has some trouble with extremist Kurd separatists" then ok.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Safety_Check#Other_de...
Perhaps some sort of real time image recognition of video streams from major public areas (like airports), which can detect things like guns and unattended packages and alert authorities automatically? Of course, that doesn't help detect the suicide bomber scenario.
Automatic facial recognition of known criminals? That would be hugely open to abuse.
This is not the way I want to feel. If you would've told me around 8:30 a.m. on September 10th the way things would be changed, I couldn't have fathomed it. I was sitting in my high school Spanish class, trying to get the attention of a girl who probably doesn't even remember my name now. But things changed and I kind of came into my own with those changes, growing up, going to college, getting one job, then another. It became normal.
Data is the buzzword now. I eat it and breathe it every single day. I work with collections of numbers and information. These are the same things that keep us safe from attacks - collections numbers and information. The NSA and others rely on it. For every attack we hear about, I cannot even venture a guess on how many are thwarted.
Given that numbers and information are critical tools in trying to prevent future tragedies, I struggle with the same question we all do: how much is too much? What do I want to let the government know about me? About my family? About where I travel and when? Is there an inevitable trade-off between safety and privacy?
I think abut these things at work, at home, while driving. It seems now that we are facing a new breed of terror that has evolved, even since 2001. It is calculated yet seemingly random, completely lawless yet in their eyes the only lawful way to live, more violent, vile and sadistic any other terrorist cell I have heard about.
So you would think, given the way I feel about this new iteration of terror, and the struggle I have with personal privacy questions, I would've been paralyzed with anxiety this morning, seeking meaning, trying to configure a strategy in my head for how the governments involved will deal with it and prevent future attacks.
But I did not feel or do those things. I poured my coffee and walked out the door. Of course I feel horrible for the poor innocent lives lost, but as far as worrying and obsessing about it, I just cannot. This is not how I want to feel. I fear that my not panicking signals attacks like this as a new normal for me, something my 17 year-old self never could've or would've wanted to imagine. Thanks everyone for sharing thoughts and insights on this, I think it is helping me process yet another attack in my own way.
Edit: I don't claim to have a rich understanding of the issue, but I appreciated the nuanced analysis in this article:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/what-isi...
Many people seem to view doing this kind of reading and learning as some kind of gesture that is sympathetic to those who commit such acts. I will never understand how wanting to be educated on the history of a group automatically means you are siding with them ideologically...but I am from the midwest and left quite a few beliefs I will never understand.
What we need is to think this through, which also means challenging conventional wisdom, not just be "be united in following whatever said government wants to do".
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11334908 (67 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11335167 (79 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11335518 (115 comments)
Is it getting flagged for being off-topic?
Yes, users have been heavily flagging all these posts.
EDIT: it was a controlled explosion made by the mine-clearing experts.
If you want a link without a paywall.
2nd generation immigrants
I'm not against immigration per se, but there's a lot of problems coming from people who fail (because it's mostly their responsibility) to integrate
Truth is, you can be so enclosed in a foreign culture that you will actually stay a foreigner trough all your life.
P.S.: I'm not saying that was the case here, I'm just answering your broader remark.
And that they're not first generation immigrants doesn't prove it isn't a problem with immigration either. We are still left with this recurring coincidence aren't we.
I don't claim to know the absolute truth here, I'm just suggesting we honestly acknowledge reality during discussions.
I didn't say it was recent immigration that caused this incident, we both know that (if they are 2nd generation, it couldn't be recent).
> other than that they're Muslim
You think that their religion has absolutely nothing to do with this? I mean, even unjust prejudice within their host country because of their religion could easily cause social isolation and economic disadvantage leading to anger - that seems like a perfectly reasonable explanation to me and largely places the ultimate blame on the host country.
A few of the others were French and were known to be in Syria, but how they came back to EU is apparently not known (could be with help from people smugglers, avoiding any registration at borders, because some of them were on wanted lists).
Schengen area doesn't actually even try to verify who comes in, and that enables also movement of jihadists - even if they are only a few among thousands and thousands, but the few can avoid border controls.
That has nothing to do with 'recent migration policies'.
Also, Belgium political system is also not helping given its fractured nature thus limiting its options to effectively tackle those challenges and if we take into account the weak economic reality of Brussels add to that its ineffective fight of organized crime (Funding terrorist attacks and armaments) creating a perfect storm for this type of events to flourish whether in Belgium or spilling into other parts of Europe like what happened in Paris last November.
Two of the nine were not - they were actual, recent immigrants through asylum-seeking process.
"Ahmad al-Mohammad" who came as a refugee through Turkey to Leroa in Greece, and together with him were registered the fingerprints of another immigrant known as "M. al-Mahmodin".
The rest were second-generation immigrants:
Bilal Hadfi was French but he spent time in Syria and came back, not through controlled border crossings, so he might have come with the asylees/immigrants. Others included French citizens Samy Amimour, who fought in Yemen, and Omar Ismail Mostefai and Foued Mohamed-Aggad who fought in Syria, and they were on wanted lists but were not spotted on border, so they appear to have come through people smugglers as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/November_2015_Paris_attacks#Id...
If it turns out that they were in fact refugees, that still doesn't make it a migration problem when most of the attackers were French or Belgian.
If he'd jumped on Easyjet from Istanbul, he'd have had to provide a passport and visa and risk being arrested at border check in case the authorities were too interested in his involvement with extremists.
I don't get your point about blue channel; flights from Istanbul are not EU/Schengen internal.
Again, that's not something that totally prevents acts of terror, but would work as a bit of deterrent. I believe I should have a voice about this, because I live in the same Schengen area.
So perhaps that "bald-faced lie" needs to be toned down a bit.
> Always good, on days like this, to remind everyone that the guys blowing up Brussels are THE PEOPLE THE REFUGEES ARE RUNNING AWAY FROM
Will wonders never cease. But let’s stick to what HN does best, discuss the wonders of technology. In this case, I’d liek to administer a Turing Test:
The hypothesis is that ”odinduty" is a reasonably sophisticated bot, trained to emulate the kind of comments you find on /r/Europeans. Can we find it making a statement inconsistent with this hypothesis?
Anything even remotely rational.
There are many other strains of terrorism like the last terrorist attack in Ankara last week where a female Kurdish ultra-nationalist militant blew herself in a bus killing about 40 civilians in the process. This was just an instance of a political/nationalist violence/terrorism that has nothing to do with religion or Islam for that matter.