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Comment by throwaway892238 | Hacker News Reader

> “We don’t want another 9/11 in this country,” said Mr. Russo, who noted that the system frees up officers to focus on asking the “important questions that help us keep terrorists and drug smugglers out of the country.”

Fuck anyone who uses 9/11 as an excuse to reduce anyone's civil liberties. On the one hand, they are almost always defending some ass-backwards initiative that doesn't actually keep us secure. And on the other, we freaked out way too much over 9/11. 3,000 people died in 9/11, and we started two wars that lasted 20 years and killed 375,000 civilians. Yet the same number of people (~2500) die every month in traffic collisions - 600,000 dead over 20 years - and we have not yet implemented any draconian safety measures after decades of uninterrupted vehicular deaths.

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The shock factor wasn't the death count, it was that the American homeland came under direct attack from overseas.

For those unaware, the US has historically had very few attacks on the homeland from enemies who are not immediate neighbours. Off the top of my head, the second-most recent example before 9/11 was Japan attacking Pearl Harbor and the Aleutian Islands, and dropping some balloon bombs(?) on the West Coast during WW2. Before that we would go all the way back to the War of 1812 with Britain sacking Washington and all that.

When the country historically is not used to having the homeland threatened, that shock and revelation leads to kneejerk reactions of the "how fucking /dare/ you" sort.

The Japanese also attempted a naval bombardment of Santa Barbara, California. All they ended up hitting was an aviation fuel storage tank, but it did apparently influence the US's decision imprison people of Japanese ancestry without cause.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombardment_of_Ellwood#Bombard...

> *Japan...dropping some balloon bombs(?) on the West Coast during WW2

In fact six people were killed by one of those balloon bombs, five children and their Sunday school teacher on an outing in southern Oregon.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/1945-japanese-balloon...

Anybody who cites 9/11 or terrorism as a reason to reduce civil liberties is a direct threat to American values. If you destroy what it means to be American in the face of terrorism, you are letting terrorists win. People need to understand that but sadly fascists increasingly availed of the cloak of national security to enact their schemes to destroy all of the hard won victories for progress.

And so one might argue that to a substantial degree, OBL won.

There were days in prior peaks where we had 2-3k dead from covid.

Heck we had days in IL where we had 200+ dead in a day. (How much does a 737 hold and how much did those people's medical bills cost?)

As of today there are 391 deaths per day, 2,737 per week according to the official stats in the New York Times. It's not a thing of the past.

A death from an epidemic and a death from a terror attack are not equivalent in the threat they pose to a country. Terror attacks can destabilize political systems and damage economies to a far greater extent than the number of dead might suggest.

The US gov't clearly doesn't care about terrorist attacks any more. They happen all the time, and hardly even make the news:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mass_shootings_in_the_...

(3500 injured, 703 dead last year alone...)

For context, the CDC reports 24576 homicides in 2021, 19384 of which are firearm related. Don't know if redefining terrorism to include non-politically-motivated homicide is useful.

Those don’t fit the definition of terrorism.

I guess someone redefined terrorism then.

Right, and we didn't go bomb China when that happened.

Well your media definitely did.

> Fuck anyone who uses 9/11 as an excuse to reduce anyone's civil liberties

Whilst I agree that the reference to 9/11 was a cheap excuse - I think all of the terrorists had entered the US legally, and these changes would stop nothing. But what civil liberties are being taken away by these kiosks or lack of the kiosks?

They're being removed because they don't verify the person with them is the passport holder - apart from that they capture/process/store the same information as a 'manual' passport inspection. The passport holders photo, passport details and entry/exit details are all held on database - or am I missing something?

What would have been the correct 9/11 response?

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