Schneier on Times Square | Hacker News Reader

Schneier on Times Square

roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com

Here's my take on all this: You can't stop a determined group of people from disrupting society to some extent.

That's because it is way too simple to mess things up, all it takes is a hammer and you can probably get a 50:1 kill ratio. (the number of people one asshole can kill before being killed themselves).

Terrorists are the 'griefers' in real life. They need cooperation from the media to give their deeds the attention otherwise there would not be enough incentive for them to go through with it. Hence the trend towards the more spectacular but less efficient ways of killing people.

If wholesale murder really was their goal they could do a whole lot better than they're doing, let's hope they don't catch on to that.

As long as there are people willing to have their minds poisoned by 'authority figures' without thinking for themselves and taking responsibility for their own actions this problem is unlikely to go away.

A better approach would be to limit the media exposure to the dry facts and give proportional attention to the deaths of people that die in less spectacular but equally tragic ways.

CNN is just a big a factor in a terrorist attack as the victims are, and as long as that's the case this sort of attack will continue.

Imagine hearing 'a terrorist attack four months ago killed 12 people' versus live footage from the scene of a blocked off times square within minutes of it happening.

The first would result in a shrug, the second keeps nations glued to their tvs, gives the terrorists more recognition and therefore an incentive to continue.

We're way too fascinated with this terrorism thing taken the amount of people actually killed on average per year, it would be much better to direct the funds and effort going in to all this to more productive - but less politically sensitive - issues.

Poverty for example kills a lot more people per year than terrorism ever has, or ever will.

> A better approach would be to limit the media exposure to the dry facts and give proportional attention to the deaths of people that die in less spectacular but equally tragic ways.

Unfortunately this would require very heavy handed censorship. You can imagine how Orwellian it would sound for a government to 'censor' reporting of a terrorist attack. Media organisations are in the business of getting viewers and if CNN doesn't reporting it then sensationalist-conspiracy-blog.com will. The real problem is that a significant portion of the population really does get off on this sort of thing.

I don't think it would require censorship, but it would require some highly talented social re-engineering to alter the incentives enough that CNN doesn't benefit from low-brow, addictive, live coverage of tragedy.

> highly talented social re-engineering to alter the incentives

AKA censorship

No. I'm talking about transforming the expectations of society.

> If wholesale murder really was their goal they could do a whole lot better than they're doing, let's hope they don't catch on to that.

Oh, some of them certainly have. Why do you think Mr. Ahmadinejad has so many uranium centrifuges?

No way could you get a 50:1 kill ratio with a hammer.

Walk up to the bus driver of a greyhound and smack him in the head on the interstate.

His articles point seems to be buried beneath the fold (the read more button): "It’s much smarter to spend our limited counterterrorism resources on measures that don’t focus on the specific. It’s more efficient to spend money on investigating and stopping terrorist attacks before they happen, and responding effectively to any that occur."

Cameras make people feel safer, and make for great TV (a point he made). Just as airline searches make people feel safer.

Most people are perfectly happy living in their pretend world of security, rather than having to worry about whether anything is actually worthwhile or not.

Exactly what Schneier is trying to educate against.

Most people I know (midwest USA) think it is BS and are annoyed. It doesn't give them comfort when the visible signs of security are so flawed.

I respect Schneier but he kinda repeats the same stuff over and over.

He also posted it on his own blog.

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/05/preventing_ter...

"I know, nothing I haven't said many times before."

He knows he keeps repeating himself. And until things change, he needs to keep repeating himself.

Repeating himself is probably not enough, however.

What we really need, is for a terrorist to attempt to hijack a plane, only to be thwarted by the guy who snuck a knife onboard. With any luck, he would be a national hero and the news networks would be crying out for every passenger to be handed a stainless steal fork and knife upon boarding.

Because nobody is listening, which is very depressing.

True, but the current state of security theater involves repeating the same mistakes over and over. Perhaps through tiresome repetition some of these ideas will finally sink into the brains at DHS, police departments, etc.

He's just leveraging the high profile of terror stuff to increase his own visibility.

You can pretty much predict these posts and most of their contents.

Ten years ago, if you had told me that Bruce Schneier, the applied math geek who writes books about cryptography, was to become Bruce Schneier, national defense and counter-terrorism security expert extraordinaire, I would have been surprised indeed. Smart rebrand on his part.

I think he remains relevant because what he says makes sense and provides a proper balance to a nation so insistent on giving up their liberties to achieve false security.

Repetitive yes, but his voice is still gravely needed.

Does it stop being good advice?

Until "the powers that be" actually start listening to good advice I think a bit of repetition is ok.

Schneier for President.

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