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Comment by mindslight | Hacker News Reader

I agree it's a much bigger problem than just the boots on the ground watching too much 24. But the "September 11" focus in the latter half of your comment is itself part of that problem. If you're talking about historical effects, at least refer to the date with the year attached.

FWIW "copycat attack" is just yet another minimally-plausible scenario that propagates fear.

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> If you're talking about historical effects, at least refer to the date with the year attached.

That seems unnecessary, I don't think there's a person alive unaware of the year he's referring to.

No one in the comments here is "worshipping" 9/11 but the GP is correct in saying Coalfire should have thought twice about a redteam pentest on a date that puts law enforcement on high alert.

The point is to avoid magnifying the one-time tragedy onto a calendar day that happens every year. Your comment suffers from this, implying that it's the public's job to be sensitive to when law enforcement comes up with a reason to have a paranoia party. I would imagine it's possible to come up with a similar justification for "high alert" for at least a quarter of the year - and none of it should be accepted by Free society.

> That seems unnecessary, I don't think there's a person alive unaware of the year he's referring to.

Yes but explicitly stating the year emphasizes that you're talking about an event the better part of two decades ago. A "copycat" of something that happened when one of these guys was about 11 years old. It's farcical and stating the year emphasizes that. If they'd done it on December 7th, "the date that will live in infamy", would a copycat attack on Pearl Harbor be suspected? Give me a break.

We did not get the Patriot Act from Pearl Harbor.

But we did murder millions of innocent people because of it. Whether that’s on par with the Patriot Act is up to you.

I'm curious where you're getting that figure. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 550,000 - 800,000 Japanese civilians died during WWII (those figures includes both atomic bombings.) More than two million Japanese military personnel were killed, but those obviously don't count as "innocent people murdered".

That's an inane and irrelevant point to make. More than 100,000 Japanese Americans were interned in the aftermath so in either case there was an extreme reaction from the US government, but that's not relevant because it's no more plausible that two guys creeping around a courthouse at night were trying to torpedo battleships than they were trying to fly airplanes into skyscrapers.

I respectfully disagree.

It took almost 50 years for the US government to acknowledge the extreme reaction to Pearl Harbor and provide reparations.

If that is any indication, 9/11, will remain in the zeitgeist for at least another 30 years.

Clearly he's referring to the 1973 coup d'etat in Chile, the start of 2 decades of torture and disappearances in that country.

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