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Comment by hobs | Hacker News Reader

Likely no impact, because no facility on earth has the capacity to filter and find information on this scale, especially when simple techniques are employed to hide the meaning of communication.

The methods needed to reduce attacks (geopolitical unrest resolved) is probably not within the capacity of the police forces we have, and even pretty good safety is so expensive no one is willing to pay for it (even if we did all agree to register every action we took with the government.)

There is no government action which can promise results when it comes to motivated attacks, so when you hear "oh if we allow this police action then terrorist attacks will stop." you are hearing purposeful naivete at the best, and power grabs at the worst.

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Agreed. It takes 10 minutes to find a hardware store shopping list and bomb recipe. Even then, a lot of ingredients can be purchased over time without raising any flags. Buy bleach at one store and ammonia at another, say you're cleaning if anybody asks, then find a public place to mix the two.

Once someone decides to kill a lot of people, it's already too late. There is no, repeat, no way to prevent every mass murder. A determined killer will always find a way.

Nobody wants to soberly admit that the only way to prevent terrorist attacks are to keep people from wanting to do so in the first place, which is a long and imperfect process with absolutely no guarantee of success.

A lot of America's mass shooters are simply deranged and hungry for national infamy.

> say you're cleaning if anybody asks

Why would anybody asks? But, your point stands: I've been absolutely amazed that nobody had blown up our (Parisian) metro at 8:30 in the morning already. If you want a maximum casualty count, just bring a bunch of stuff and shake it in a pressure cooker. Just synchronize payload over multiple lines, and boom, you got something around thousand of casualties, plus a massive panic mouvement, and a genuine fear of public transportation for a while.

Exactly about the fear of public transportation. Terrorism is meant to terrify people. Israelites have been dealing with terrorism for decades and it's usually met with a sober reaction reminiscent of the Japanese getting the trains back to running the day after Hiroshima. Terror attacks do happen, but there is hardly the kind of freak out one might find in, say, America.

It sounds like you're saying that because it can't be 100% effective, we shouldn't do it at all. You could say the same about having a lock for your front door, but I bet you've got one.

No, I think you're taking it too far. We only need to conclude that the minimal benefits from the proposal (i.e., few attackes would actually be averted) are vastly outweighed by the extreme cost to our civil liberties.

There do exist more reasonable compromises. For example, we as a society have already said that you can search someone's property if you get a court order. That's a smaller cost, because the authorities are forced to go through a supervised process before anyone's privacy is in jeopardy, and it's still sufficient to find the evidence in a huge proportion of cases.

But the proposal on the table is extreme. It affects everyone's privacy, before there's even a notion that a crime has been considered.

Other people - probably the majority of the UK population based on opinion polls and elections - weigh the balance differently. We (HN readers) are probably in the extreme minority, and we are not necessarily right.

The opinions of laymen only carries weight with those proposing idiotic solutions.

Burning down the house to kill a spider is stupid no matter how many people vote for it.

The lock on my door is basically a legal seal: the door itself is often so flimsy, you could probably kick it in, but because there is a lock, you can't then claim you entered by accident or that you assumed it was ok to enter. This is why effectiveness is relatively secondary.

This sort of surveillance, on the other hand, is supposed to be all about effectiveness... But it ain't.

I have a lock so that if I am burgled my insurance will pay out.

You don't even need to mix anything. Gasoline can be purchased freely in any country and is deadly when poured under doors, especially those doors are blocked.

Back in the 90s, I was doing telecommunications standards and one operator proposed storing all the performance information right on the optical switches. Given that a large amount of performance metrics were being generated every second, the vendors all had looks of horror on their face. Seeing that nobody else from a vendor was going to speak up, I calmly explained just what he was asking for. We could theoretically do it, but the cost would be massive. He promptly dropped the proposal.

So if it was technically possible to filter and find the information, and voters elected governments who said they were prepared to pay for it, would that make it a better idea?

No, but at least it would make it an honest proposal instead of a scam.

There is a difference between something like chemotherapy, which has drastic negative side effects but can save the body, and fake cancer drugs, which might have little to no side effects(or massive ones!) but you die either way, enriching the scam artist on your way out.

It sounds like you are trying to use the foot-in-the-door technique. But you are looking at just one concern being very hypothetically alleviated, when there are many many other reasons that have been repeatedly discussed for years. So in practice, the answer to your question is no, and there is no reasonably considered theory where the answer would be yes.

I agree with you wholeheartedly. The risk of saying "we shouldn't do this because it won't work" is that it only has to work a little bit for the argument against it to fail. And it will certainly work a little bit at reducing one type of terrorism, just not enough to outweigh all the other negative effects.

That said, I would also like to see more discussion of alternatives instead of just saying "it'll never work".

The alternatives I want to see discussed all involve cultural changes. Sometimes when I try to discuss these with people they get fixated on shifting 100% of blame onto the attackers and 0% onto culture/society/foreign policy/poverty/whatever, but assigning blame is a completely pointless activity and the question needs to be what will actually work, not what will feel good to our primitive instincts for vengeance.

Some hypothetical approaches for discussion:

- Convincing violent groups to be less violent; demonstrating that they can get more of what they want by participating in society than by attacking it (a multi-generational issue)

- Finding a place for the "lone wolf" types to feel like their needs and concerns are addressed, including mental health

- Getting first-world powers to stop purposely destabilizing other countries

- Accepting what remains of the problem as if it's a natural disaster (e.g. just as people accept or ignore the 1000x worse problem of traffic deaths)

- Convincing violent groups to be less violent; demonstrating that they can get more of what they want by participating in society than by attacking it (a multi-generational issue)

I do think that this is going to be the correct path for us as a society, long term. There are a lot of obstacles though; convincing people their theological beliefs have been manipulated, fixing the havoc created around the world from globalization, and the profits gained by some (powerful) people.

- Finding a place for the "lone wolf" types to feel like their needs and concerns are addressed, including mental health

Mental health availability in the US needs to improve immediately.

- Getting first-world powers to stop purposely destabilizing other countries

Ha ;)

Likely no impact, because no facility on earth has the capacity to filter and find information on this scale, especially when simple techniques are employed to hide the meaning of communication

This is a very naive argument.

Of course it is possible. I can search all my Facebook messages now. We know the NSA can search a large proportion of the world's internet traffic.

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