Isaac Asimov on Security Theatre. | Hacker News Reader

Isaac Asimov on Security Theatre.

schneier.com

176 pointsbdhe46 comments

I thought the point of "terrorism" is to inflict change on behaviors and confidence of a population? Changing someone's way of life impacts their confidence which seems to be the end goal of terrorism. It stands to reason that in order to make it an ineffective tactic, change as little as possible within the population and do not react.

TBH I have been thinking about this since 9/11. I doubt it was that philosophical. They wanted to show that they could attack us. And they did. They had ZERO, no tech, no highly trained snipers and marines, very little funding (compare al-qaida's funding with the US Government's). It is us who did it all. We "refuse to be terrorized" but instead we give up liberties like they are tumors that we will gladly shed to increase our perceived chances of survival.

Agree. What's even stranger is how differently we treat different types of deaths. Anything terrorist related is something that needs to be prevented from happening again, regardless of the costs. Yet as many people die each and every month in auto accidents as died on 9/11 yet we all accept that as the cost of freedom the automobile offers us.

>We "refuse to be terrorized" but instead we give up liberties like they are tumors that we will gladly shed to increase our perceived chances of survival.

I don't know if it is appropriate here on HackerNews, but there's this one Philosoraptor (an image meme) which just perfectly sums this up in a single sentence:

  "If terrorists hate us for our freedom, does this mean
   they're starting to like us?"

http://i.imgur.com/XbmFg.jpg

To be honest, I'm not sure that surrendering my bottle of water at airports has impacted my confidence that much. It's not like the experience of passing through airports was an effortless pleasure before. A couple of days ago I spent an hour waiting in line whilst a couple of hundred passengers, some of them possessing five or more suitcases, put every item of their baggage through a single X-ray machine, whilst other security operatives hand-searched the entire contents of selected suitcases. I'm pretty sure the reason Quito doesn't have a green zone in customs has nothing to do with al-Qaeda setting up bases in the Andes though.

As for other measures like the Patriot Act, I'm not sure that security theatre was the prime motivation for their introduction.

Forget terrorism. This is EXACTLY the same as God and Elevators. Think about it. Lets start easy:

I see people every day come into an elevator and press the door close button like it is the only way to get air. Nobody realizes that the button does nothing. Furthermore many do, but they do it any ways on the off chance that it saves them an extra millisecond here or there of waiting. It never gives any benefit. However "may as well do it just in case it works". Trivial to disprove but still.

God: People worship. Why? Do we know god does exist? no we don't. In fact all signs point to got not existing. Why worship though? On the off chance that god does exist and we won't go to hell. It does not matter that there is no god, people will still worship.

Both examples are ways for people to feel better about something they can't control and makes them feel that they can.

Now the TSA is exactly the same. It makes no difference, or it does, all signs point to the TSA being complete horsecrap, but people want it just in case there is a possibility they can prevent an act of terrorism and save 10 people at the price of insane expenses, time expenses, people unalbe to travel, personal rights violated, etc.

After spending an entire semester in a course on the philosophy of religion and revieing things like the Scopes Monkey Trial during law school, I see arguments both for an against the existence of God.

I think there is no proof either way. I personally believe in God and am in fact Christian, but that is a personal choice based on faith and I have great respect for people who have chosen other faiths or who believe that there is no God.

This however is different. It can be shown that certain security measures actually are quite useful (sturdy, locked cockpit doors separating pilots and passengers for instance.) It can be shown that others are completely ineffective at their stated goals and seek only to avoid "donothingism" and fall into security theater

Do you think atheists will go to hell?

What evidence is there that supports the existence of a supernatural being?

No, I think the TSA and religion are quite similar.

>No, I think the TSA and religion are quite similar.

that's absolutely right. There is though a difference between a God and Organized Religion. For all we know Q is as God as any other and i do hope what he exists and enjoys the TNG on Netflix as much as i do :)

Remember that time that Q was forced to become human and was hunted down by that cloud entity for the horrors he inflicted on their culture? Yea... All hail Q.

For purposes of keeping the discussion on topic, can we just assume dlikhten's comment is specifically about people whose belief in God is based on Pascal's wager, and not about believers in general?

Its a shame people down-voted this. This is exactly what I meant. I care not about existence vs non-existence but the way people treat it.

To be fair, it could be said the analogy falls a little flat if Pascal's Wager is almost invariably considered only as an ad hoc rationalisation for things people genuinely believe to be true.

I am in no way claiming the existence or non existence of god. However I am claiming that security measures are exactly like the belief in god (probably a correction is exactly like religions). It makes no difference if it's true.

> arguments both for an against the existence of God.

Arguments are one thing, evidence is something else.

> believe there is no God

That isn't what atheism is, or at least that isn't what most English-speaking people who describe themselves as atheist mean by it. Western atheists think the existence of any deities is unproven; it is not supported by the evidence.

That's not atheism, that's agnosticism.

Agnosticism is a faith claim: It's claiming that we can never know anything about a deity.

I'm an atheist. I say the existence of a deity is both unproven and highly unlikely given the current evidence.

.. and until the time that it is otherwise proven, an atheist doesn't believe in a deity.

There is of course, a huge difference between not believing in something and believing that it must not be.

Ponder the following: I'm agnostic in the same way I'm 'agnostic' about the existence of unicorns.

Not so sure about the elevator part. Depends on the elevator. The elevator in my building in NY has functional open and close buttons.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/insidenova/2010/12/the-great-el...

Um there are working buttons in the elevators I describe, just on a timer. Most of the time its on a timer if active even.

For the most part, the open and close door buttons are there for use by firefighters.

If you're a fire fighter using an elevator you don't want the doors to automatically open or close when you get to a questionable floor.

When the fire key is turned the doors are manually controlled and only respond to those buttons.

Otherwise, the Open door button is for people wanting to feel good and the Close door button might as well be controlled by Schrodinger cat.

Not sure why you were downvoted, but this is false as others have pointed out here.

Adding another data point: The close button on the elevator in this building here works as expected. Press it, door closes _right away_. Don't press it, wait for the doors to close in a couple of seconds.

Many elevators have functional close buttons, just as many street crossing buttons work too.

I would say most,in both cases (at least in Australia). My experiences have never bought me across non-functional versions of either.

> I see people every day come into an elevator and press the door close button like it is the only way to get air. Nobody realizes that the button does nothing. Furthermore many do, but they do it any ways on the off chance that it saves them an extra millisecond here or there of waiting. It never gives any benefit. However "may as well do it just in case it works". Trivial to disprove but still

The close door button on the elevators in my work building work as follows:

1. After summoning the elevator, if I enter and press the door close button, the door immediately starts to close--even if I have not selected a destination. If I do not press the door close button, the door closes automatically after several seconds.

2. If I press the door open button to interrupt a door closing, as soon as the door finishes opening the door close button makes it close. If the door close is not pressed, the door closed on its own after approximately five seconds.

3. When the elevator arrives at a destination floor, if I press the door close as soon as the door finishes opening, it immediately starts closing. If I do not press the button, the door opens, waits several seconds, then closes.

Conclusion: your theories on elevator operation are inconsistent with experiment.

In my experience - admittedly, I haven't been keeping detailed notes - 99.9% of the elevator close buttons that I have pushed have done absolutely nothing: the doors just wait the default interval before closing. The open buttons always stop the doors closing, but the close buttons: no response. Perhaps it's country specific, or company specific. But most people know this, and don't press them. The button is irrelevant and ignored. Unfortunately, the same can't be said about airport security: irrelevant but unfortunately cannot be ignored.

It depends on where. In Switzerland they absolutely do something.

Small hack: in many elevators, pushing and holding the close button then hitting your destination prevents it from stopping at any intermediate level. IIRC it always works in Otis elevators, for the other YMMV. It's a sure way to annoy your fellow passengers when ascending, and a sure way to annoy people waiting for the elevator at descent :)

I've heard this a lot, and tried it a lot. It's never worked for me. Which elevators does it work with?

dlikhten quote: Nobody realizes that the button does nothing.

I wanted to point out that the door open/close buttons definitely have a function when the elevator is operating in emergency mode.

Allow me to expand further with an example scenario:

First off, an elevator's emergency operation mode is engaged by using a key. You may have noticed the keyhole before in an elevator car; it is typically located near the floor selection panel. It is primarily used by firefighter's or emergency personnel, in order to take control of the elevators.

Next, imagine a hypothetical elevator situation. The elevator is in normal operation mode. You step into an empty elevator car at floor 1, and you select floor 14 as your destination. Someone else enters the elevator car with you, and selects floor 3 as the destination. Now, floor 3 and floor 14 have been selected and are illuminated on the floor selection panel.

Assuming no other factors, the elevator car stops at floor 3, the doors automatically open, and the person that selected floor 3 steps out. But wait... you decide to step out too, because you need to hit the restroom. As it turns out, no one is entering the elevator car that you and the passenger just exited at floor 3. The elevator car is now empty.

What happens now?

The doors automatically close. No one is on board the elevator car that you just exited, and floor 14 is still selected. This is immutable; assuming no other factors, the elevator car will eventually make it to floor 14, or be stopped by other passengers that are waiting for that elevator car before it gets there. In either case, the elevator car is out of your control.

Now, think of it from a firefighter's perspective. A firefighter does not want to be in a scenario where the elevator car is capable of leaving a floor, without his or her express command, regardless of whether the elevator car is being called by someone else, or if a floor has been selected and no one is in the elevator car.

This is what the door close button is for when an elevator is in emergency operation mode. In this mode, the desired floor is selected, then the door close button must be fully engaged and held until the elevator car begins to move. If the door close button is released before the elevator car begins to move, the doors will automatically open, and the elevator car will remain on the current floor.

In emergency operation mode, when an elevator car arrives at the selected floor, the doors will not automatically open. The open door button must be fully engaged and held in order for the doors to fully open. If the open door button is released before the doors are fully opened, the doors will automatically close. This functionality is designed to allow a firefighter to partially open the doors in order to assess a situation (e.g., fire, smoke, etc.), again, at his or her express command. Otherwise, the doors would automatically open fully, potentially exposing the firefighter to flames, or quickly filling the elevator car with smoke.

I love Asimov's stories, but it always pains me at how wrong his guesses were in regards to what would be easy and what would be difficult when it came to robotics.

Since no one has successfully made a robot worthy of an Asimov story, I would say that no one knows what is easy vs hard when it comes to robotics. We can make guesses but in the end until someone has a working copy, we won't know which parts of the development process were the most painful.

People who have been working seriously on robotics in recent years probably have a strong sense of what's hard and what's easier.

I second this. While current designs make Asimov's stories seem sci-fi, perhaps when we make the first, the second and third would become more and more trivial.

However one note is that Asimov's stories have one common theme that could not be known until now. Hardware is what drives everything. Today we know hardware is an enabler, software is everything.

We already have computers wildly more advanced than anything in Asimov's universe (until his very late writings), even as his robots firmly remain science fiction.

Yes, we know that he was wildly wrong about what would be easy and hard about robots and computers. It is bizarre to go back and read his stories in which robots are walking and talking, but it takes a massive robot brain installed in a permanent emplacement to get little more "raw" computational power than a 1970s mainframe. Unless you travel back in time and reveal the secrets of robotic brains to those in the 1950s, it's a done deal.

Asimov thought that it'd be easier to make general-purpose human-like robots than to automate our machines one at a time using specialized automation hardware/software.

In this, he has been proven wrong, as nearly all machines of industry are slowly becoming more and more automated, using hardware and software specialized to that particular machine.

As far as I can tell, AI is turning out like Philosophy. Back in the day, all science was philosophy. As a particular field of philosophy became advanced enough that we can actually do things with it, we broke it out into a science, like, say, physics.

The same is happening with AI. It used to be that natural language and image recognition were AI. Now that we actually have that technology working to the point where it can do useful things, it's no longer considered AI.

Both philosophy and AI, I think, are catchall buckets for "We want to study these things, but we don't understand these things well enough to properly define them."

I mean, it's a useful catchall, especially at first, but I think that breaking down a poorly defined field into many smaller but specifically defined fields is a natural part of scientific progress.

My guess is that we will reach the capability to build something that looks like asimov-style robots, but by that point we won't see any of the technologies involved as "AI"

Most of Asimov's stories are not hard SF and he frequently plays very loose with science when it suits his story (or occassionally a point he is trying to make through the story.)

This is clearer in the Foundation Series than it is in his Robot books, but it becomes blatantly obvious in The End of Eternity which only barely pays lip service to science, yet makes beautiful points about human nature in a painstakingly crafted and entertaining story.

My position on SF is close to how Philip K Dick put it: in SF the main characters aren't people, they're ideas. SF that purports to be scientifically rigorous in some way, or in some way predicting the future, seems to me to be missing the point. Science fiction is about today; it is about the world right now. SF is interesting in so far as it makes you consider the current condition in a different way. In so far as it is scientifically accurate, then it is speculative prediction, not science fiction.

I remember what some italian? guy wrote in the prologue of the Spanish edition of Lem's Star Diaries: that some kind of science fiction, like what Swift or Lem wrote, is about the present, not the future, a critic of our current society, disguised as a futuristic tale.

Considering how much he knew about science (he wrote tons of non fiction science books) if there are scientific inaccuracies in his stories it was by deliberate choice to further the story, and not out of ignorance.

What about when he describes wikipedia?

I always find myself thinking back to the Foundation series. In one of the novels he envisions a world where the populous can all instantly communicate by thinking, including with rocks and trees. He describes how the civilizations memories are stored in the rocks themselves.

I'm always struck by how that doesn't actually sound far fetched to me, but how crazy it must have sounded then.

Foundation's Edge - 1984. James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis was the basis for this (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_hypothesis), and at that time, such discussion was en vogue.

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