Terrorist Hunt Sends America Over the Edge | Hacker News Reader

Terrorist Hunt Sends America Over the Edge

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33 pointsnjrc59 comments

As someone personally affected by the lockdown, I find this highly offensive.

We were not cowering, though it would not be illogical to do so... we're talking about people proven willing to not only kill and injure hundreds of innocent people, they were also willing to get into action-movie style shoot outs with heavily armed police, tossing homemade grenades and pipe bombs, and murdering a police officer in cold blood.

So, maybe keeping people inside for 12 hours isn't that much of a price to pay to make sure they stay safe. But it was really more than that.

It was about finding this S.O.B. before he could get away.

We knew he was in the area, but couldn't be sure exactly where. By shutting down public transportation and keeping people and vehicles off the road, we made it nearly impossible for him to escape. ANYONE walking around, driving a car, is then automatically suspect and can be stopped. There is no crowd you can mingle in, no trains or buses you can slip onto, no taxis you can hail. There are no cars you can carjack. You're trapped.

Suddenly, instead of being able to hide among all the people in the city, you're in an urban ghost town where anything that moves can be pounced on. It's a hell of a lot more effective than just hoping someone recognizes him among the other 2 million people running around.

If you mess with Boston we will shut the whole city down to find you. Yes, we will. And you know what, most people will be glad to do it, to get the guy who killed 4 people and injured almost 200 others. It's just one day. I'd do it again in a heartbeat. I think most other people here would too.

We weren't scared. We were pissed.

Where do you draw the line? Would you lock down all of New York City if some mother killed her four children by smothering them with a pillow? Why not? She's armed and dangerous and already has 4 dead to her name!

What happened in Boston was an amateurish overreaction to the task of hunting down and finding someone who had committed a handful of murders -- something that happens every day in the US.

There's really no logical comparison between your fictional scenario and what occurred in Boston.

The Boston Marathon is a world renowned event, and the apprehension of the perpetrators of the attacks was a necessary thing, because, as someone else has mentioned here, sending a message of "We'll catch you" to any would-be criminals is of the utmost importance.

Well done Boston. My condolences to those adversely affected by this tragedy.

> There's really no logical comparison between your fictional scenario and what occurred in Boston.

Care to elaborate? As he mentioned murders happen every day in the states, so would you prefer a non-fictional comparison?

> The Boston Marathon is a world renowned event, and the apprehension of the perpetrators of the attacks was a necessary thing, because, as someone else has mentioned here, sending a message of "We'll catch you" to any would-be criminals is of the utmost importance.

What does being "world renowned" have to do with anything? And what makes this case any different from any other criminal offence?

Don't we want to catch all criminals?

The Boston Marathon is a high profile event, and when explosives are involved, the security response is elevated. Explosives != pillows.

The "world renowned" aspect is just that. The world is watching how we respond to such incidents, and to attempt to marginalize this incident by comparing a mother smothering her children with pillows to bombs targeting a crowd is callous in the extreme.

Of course we'd prefer to catch all criminals, especially those who target high profile events with explosives.

"World renowned" is a bit much. I, for one, had never heard of it before the tragedy, whereas for instance I have heard of the New York marathon many times.

(I hope this doesn't offend anyone - I think Boston has enough going for it that the fame of its marathon around the world is of little importance.)

I don't know how old you are, but I've been aware of the Boston Marathon for decades. (I used to be an endurance athlete)

People come from all over the world to compete in the Boston Marathon, as they do the New York Marathon, the Honolulu Marathon, etc.

> (I used to be an endurance athlete)

That's why. A "world renowned event" is famous in the real world, not just in the world of athletics. I have never run a marathon and I never intend to (cardio kills gains, lol), yet I have hear of the New York marathon many times over the years. That is a world renowned event.

Deleted comment

Wimbledon and the World Cup are #1 in their sports - and, unsurprisingly, I knew of them. But there are simply too many things in the world for the average person to know about the #6 event in marathons.

someone who had committed a handful of murders -- something that happens every day in the US.

That's extremely disingenuous. Besides the fact that a 'handful of murders' carried out by the same perperator(s) is not actually a daily event, how many regular crimes also result in hundreds of injuries, many traumatic? I'm not very freaked out about bombings, given that I grew up in Ireland and lived in London during a particularly vicious phase of the Troubles, but enough with this BS meme that there's nothing distinctive about a bombing vs. everyday levels of crime. It's an insult to common sense and the experience of anyone who has ever been near to or affected by a bombing.

reducto ad absurdum isnt just something harry potter would say...

If the mother killed her children by using home-made explosives in crowded places frequented by innocents, of course. A (perhaps more tempered) version of this response would still have been necessary if not a single person had died.

don't discount the dozens of people who were injured or maimed by the original bombing.

Not to be pedantic, but it's over 150 people injured in addition to the dead.

I did say dozens of people. 150 people is just over 12 dozen.

It's a bad way of dealing with terrorism. It's in the name - it's all about terrorising, and the Boston bombers have certainly succeded in that. With this whole spectacle you've let two guys with very little resources put the whole nation into a state of emergency. You're playing their game. This is exactly what they want. They don't deserve that honour.

I wrote about it here a few day sago: http://www.maximise.dk/how-a-great-statesman-would-deal-with...

A true statesman will not put fuel on the bonfire of fear. He will extuingish it by telling us that there is nothing to be afraid of. That these acts are done by moronic twisted people that don’t deserve the attention. He will tell the people that they have nothing to fear but fear itself.

And despite this deathless rhetoric in the face of economic collapse, FDR interned 110,000 Japanese people because they had distinctive ethnic features shared by one group of people engaged in a war against the US, although there was never any attempt to intern German-Americans.

What happened in the Boston is that the authorities requested the cooperation of the public in exceptional circumstances, and got it. If they had tried to impose some sort of lockdown on Monday after the bombing, you might have a point. But they didn't. The city kept operating normally until the suspects resurfaced, got into a shootout with police, and one of them managed to evade his pursuers. Given how many people were affected by the original terrorist incident, I don't find it odd at all that most people chose to facilitate the manhunt by leaving the streets empty.

Being "pissed" doesn't really make people any more rational than being scared, though.

This may have also been done to prevent whatever interference or vigilantism may have occurred from a city who was pissed and not scared.

The shutdown of Boston was an incredible event without precedent. It is absolutely correct for people to discuss whether the right choices were made, and it is a little bit frightening to have people declaring such a conversation "offensive".

In the end it was pretty clear that these two perpetrators were not the brightest of terrorists. They operated in plain sight, during a massively photographed event, and then went about their life as if nothing had changed. Their bombs, while sadly effective to a degree, were much less devastating than they could have been (and that they were throwing pressure cookers at police borders on...the word comedic doesn't quite fit given the carnage they have wrought, but it certainly is ridiculous).

Did the lockdown help catch them? We'll never actually know, as the suspect could have been caught using traditional means in a fully operating city. On the flip side, if the suspect wasn't seriously injured, as they purportedly were, they could have been murdering people in house after house during the lockdown.

"We weren't scared. We were pissed."

Please. The people of Boston were scared shitless. And you know what? There is nothing wrong with admitting that. When you have a couple of insane killers who could have hidden god knows how many bombs out there, being scared is the appropriate response.

What is not appropriate is shutting down the entire city to find those guys. I'm very glad they were caught. But by shutting down public transportation and getting all cars and humans off the streets, Bostonian authorities greatly magnified the scare-factor for Bostonians. It was an overreaction.

Now that I think about it, we are really good at overreacting to terrorism. A bunch of guys rammed planes into the Twin Towers and our response was to invade two countries. Some guy hid a bomb in his shoes and our response was to make tens of millions of people take off their shoes every time they are at the airport. A couple of guys set off bombs at a marathon and our response was to shut down an entire city.

When does it end? When do we learn to respond to terror attacks rationally rather than emotionally?

Thousands of people lined up in the streets Wednesday night for a chance at a seat inside the city's Cathedral for Thursday's memorial service. That doesn't sound like the behavior of a population living in fear, since they were making themselves a target by gathering together in that fashion.

Thousands showed up in Dorchester on Monday night to mourn the death of one of their residents.

These actions went far far beyond martial law powers, and yet martial law was not declared. I don't know what legal authority there was to do this, I assume it exists and comes from some recent Patriot Act like bill. Whatever it is, we see that its power is greater than that of martial law and it is something that doesn't have to be activated in an emergency, the power exists at all times.

That in itself is terrifying and that undeclared power is not what I want for a country that I live in.

The detail that the police ordered everyone to shut down even train service, but with the sole exception being that they requested Dunkin Donuts shops stay open and continue providing free donuts for police is straight out of feudalism.

It's hardly martial law, it's more like a tornado warning. It's been used many times in the past, also.

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/national/2013/04/small-scale-...

I'd like to see evidence that the police shut down the city with martial power. I'm inclined to think the Governor said, "Everybody should stay home today", and the author of this article embellished a little.

This. Exactly.

As a resident of a neighboring town not technically on "lockdown", residents nevertheless acted that way. Streets were empty. Businesses closed. It was very very quiet. This was obviously done by choice, not mandate. Yes, there was some fear driving this, as a police officer a few miles away was killed for being in the wrong place at the wrong time (cop killings do not occur often in the Boston-area suburbs). However, a large motivator was solidarity with other towns on lockdown. We really wanted to give the police every chance they could to catch this guy. The value judgement was made by private business owners and employers to support that effort.

An entire city cowering in fear of an incompetent 19 year old isn't what I would call sound judgement and solidarity. Giving up because they have no courage or sense of what it is to live in a free state, yeah that's what I'd call it.

http://georgedonnelly.com/libertarian/boston-police-state-fa...

"If you allow an angsty teenager with a pressure cooker to frighten you into abandoning your daily routine and cowering in your home as if it were a prison, then you desperately need to re-evaluate your posture towards life. Reclaim your self-respect, Boston."

"When a dozen paramilitary cops with fully automatic battle rifles backed by a guy on a humvee turret and snipers come to my house, the words ‘voluntary’ and ‘cooperation’ have no place. I would be a fool to resist. They have guns to my head and the heads of anyone with me. It’s now too late to resist. I don’t blame anyone for cooperating. I blame them for cheering their oppressors."

"Boston was turned into a police state for a day. It was an experiment. It failed miserably. The governments in operation there rallied all of the military might at their disposal with a near-complete suspension of liberty and they failed to find the man they were looking for – until they lifted their siege."

"The bottom line is that the man on the street, the civilian, the regular joe, is a more effective agent for public safety than any hopped-up government employee with body armor, night vision, full-auto rifles and flash-bangs. Just like with Flight 93, the shoe bomber and the underwear bomber, it was the regular folks who played the key role in neutralizing a suspected terrorist – not the cops or the TSA. That should be a sobering fact for any law enforcement cheerleader."

Is this house search voluntary? What about the people pulled out by heavily armed soldiers at gun point? What was their crime? Can you tell me? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LrbsUVSVl8

Did this guy have a right to film soldiers on the street outside his own home? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0A5vfyFyptQ

Is that what you think living in a free country looks like? Or is it what living in a totalitarian police state looks like?

Something to consider: it worked. It would still be presumptuous, but at least a little less misdirected, to Monday-morning-quarterback a team that lost the game.

It didn't work, as the suspect was discovered after the curfew was over, by a man who had been inside his house all day. Had the man been outside his house earlier in the day, and seen the cover of his boat, its all but likely the suspect could have been apprehended 8-12 hours earlier.

Worked === Intended outcome achieved

At the point when the lockdown started, the intended outcome was likely to catch the suspect without any more death, injury or destruction. It worked. You can speculate as to whether it would have also worked with a different approach, but you can't say the selected approach didn't work.

And all this time I thought that post hoc ergo propter hoc was a fallacy!

I'm talking black box QA. Input is suspect identified. Output is that inside 24 hours they had him alive.

Every particular possible outcome has some set of strategy changes that, in retrospect, would have made apprehension quicker. But this success was reached without the benefit of clairvoyance.

> Something to consider: it worked.

Damn right it worked.

INPUT: pressure cookers and gunpowder

OUTPUT: front page headlines around the world; whole city gets shut down

That's pretty damn effective. And it's all thanks to the multiplying effect of hysterical overreaction.

---

EDIT: Updated my description of the bomb, in response to comments below.

INPUT: pressure cooker and household chemicals

Actually, I don't keep any gunpowder under my sink. Why are you deliberately mischaracterizing the inciting incident, and omitting the rather significant context that it involved multiple detonations at a public event?

OUTPUT: front page headlines around the world; whole city gets shut down

Front page headlines - so what, we should censor the news now? As for a city shutdown, that could just as easily be interpreted as 'whole city cooperates to catch bombing suspect.'

> Actually, I don't keep any gunpowder under my sink....

Thanks for pointing that out. I've updated my description of the bombs.

> ... omitting the rather significant context ...

That's kind of my point. The terrorists chose to plant the bomb at a marathon rather than, say, a deserted wilderness, to maximise the reaction.

Do you think the presence of dozens of video cameras was a factor in the bombers' calculations?

> As for a city shutdown, that could just as easily be interpreted as 'whole city cooperates to catch bombing suspect.'

And this is where I disagree. Much of the shutdown was, in one way or another, directed from the top.

That's kind of my point. The terrorists chose to plant the bomb at a marathon rather than, say, a deserted wilderness, to maximise the reaction.

Do you think the presence of dozens of video cameras was a factor in the bombers' calculations?

Of course, but what are we supposed to do - impose a news blackout as China does in Tibet?

directed from the top

I feel fine about that. Coordination isn't the same as coercion, and there was no curfew or mandatory aspect to this.

Yeah, I'm sure the 19 year old bleeding in the boat was feeling pretty victorious. I'm sure shutting down Boston for a day was basically his life's goal.

If the goal of terrorists is to make Americans live in fear every day, it certainly seems to me like they are losing, badly. If the goal is to make Americans uneasy for a day, whatever. I have no problems admitting I am uneasy about a guy roaming the neighborhood, armed and running from the cops. Did the terrorists just win when I admitted that?

As the original article points out, these two kids achieved something that the worst of the World War Two bombing of London was not able to do, which is to shut down a major city for a day.

Rightly or wrongly, terrorists will view this as a spectacular success, in some ways greater than 9/11 since it only took a couple of kids to pull off.

I don't know if that kid feels victorious but you can be darn sure that his peers are throwing high fives all around.

these two kids achieved something that the worst of the World War Two bombing of London was not able to do

Sure, but I'm still unsure that anybody would actually care. It seems like a "Guinness Book of World Records" achievement, not a global politics achievement.

Who would care? People who want to disrupt the US economy with minimal effort and resources. The terrorist 'incubators' around the world are certainly buzzing right now.

Personally, I wonder if this wasn't exactly the right sort of response. They say that severity of punishment is not nearly as effective a deterrent as certainty. If the image of the entirety of Boston so quickly working against these two men isn't the very picture of swiftness and certainty/inevitability, I don't know what is.

Would you advocate shutting down the city every time there's a hit-and-run incident?

Surely, discouraging reckless driving would save FAR more lives than discouraging terrorists.

The next time you see a premeditated hit-and-run incident that critically injures 130+ people and involves TV-style shootouts with the police, people might consider it.

From your first comment, I thought you were talking about public safety and deterring criminal acts. But it's clear now that what's really got your blood pumping is the sense of spectacle.

I guess I should congratulate the terrorists for putting on such a good show.

In my first comment I wasn't talking about safety, I was talking specifically about deterrence. In my second comment, I was doing a poor job of getting to the part where you need to get the populace on board to drive this. This is why the magnitude of the incident is important. People are much, much more interested in stopping the bomber who injures 130 than the driver who flees an accident. Maybe it's not rational, maybe proportionality can be called into question, but the whole damn world was on board for catching these two men.

I was trying to avoid typing an essay on a subject I can't write a good essay about, but to try and keep things short my theory is that terrorists evoke an unusually strong response because it feels more personal, for a number of reasons. The first that I always think about is the magnification through social connections. Those 130+ people probably have at least 5 family members, 5 friends, and 5 co-workers each. So we've got at least 2,000 people who feel directly impacted- someone they know was personally hurt. Fan that out to only one more degree, and you've got 30,000 people who know somebody whose friend was injured.

Summary: You've got to get the people on-board to make such an effort. Terrorism can get people on-board like nothing else, aside from open war.

Friends and family I've lost to:

- vehicle accidents: 4

- terrorism: 0

But that's not really the issue.

If you believe that this was a matter of community cohesion -- of a society being strengthened by the annealing blows of terrorists incidents -- then I'd concede your point. But, judging from earlier experience, something else is happening. A climate of fear is being generated that is vastly disproportionate to the objective risks.

Remember: the people at the marathon were not the target. That was just a means to an end. The real target was the American psyche. Did they succeed?

Or, since you started by talking about deterrence, let's look at it through the eyes of potential future terrorists. What are they thinking right now? Are they thinking, "Oh no. Those guys got caught. I guess I'd better not try anything like that." Or are they thinking, "OMG they shut down the whole city. We got the attention of the whole damn WORLD! AWESOME!"

"Cohesion" is a nice way to sum up what I was attempting to get to.

As for potential terrorists, I guess I still struggle with what their goals are. I think a lot of people are way off the mark. How many terrorists celebrate that Americans take off their shoes at the airport? Many people seem to think terrorist ballads must be written about American Shoe Removal, but I personally don't think they give a crap.

As for simply giving the event attention, I don't think there's any way around that. People hate it when the government tries to hide things. Now, villain-worshipping the two men (comparing how their "score" compares to other attacks, etc) is certainly a terrible idea, but I am hoping we won't go there this time.

> As for potential terrorists, I guess I still struggle with what their goals are. I think a lot of people are way off the mark.

Hmm. You're right

The grievances that drive terrorism are well understood. But beyond that I'm making confident assumptions that, on examination, I can't back up with any solid evidence or experience. I guess this is a case of "more research is needed".

> As for simply giving the event attention, I don't think there's any way around that.

You're right, of course, but I'll continue to rant about it.

If traffic accidents received anything like the attention that terrorism did -- if videos of fatal car crashes were replayed ad nauseum on the nightly news -- maybe some of those 4 people I mentioned above might still be alive today.

That's the most unlikely line of argument I have heard today. Do you really think most terrorists expect to get away with their attacks? Haven't you noticed how many of them make suicide a part of the plan? It's as if you've been living under a rock for the last twenty years.

There's clearly two types of terrorists. Some may even hope to die as part of the attack, but if what I have read is to be trusted these guys had a flight booked to Russia, and tried to rush their car out of the shop very shortly after the bombing, which was in for repairs.

I could be wrong here, but I personally associate suicide terrorists with the operations out of the middle east. To my knowledge, terrorism from other sources isn't usually suicidal.

Still, terrorism is not a crime of opportunity. You need a very strong motivation to do it, and even though you may not necessarily seek death and may make escape plans, you certainly have to accept the possibility that you will get caught.

Also, if these guys were seriously trying to get on a plane, they would have been caught even without the lockdown.

Agreed. Any other police job, people wouldn't support to that extent. This was different, and appropriate.

America may have its share of problems but the American peoples ability to help each other in times of crisis is remarkable.

I imagine very few people will question the political decisions here because it requires imagination to account for the unseen. Hazlitt famously wrote about this in Economics in One Lesson. What ground breaking research at MIT didn't get done Friday? What important meetings were delayed? And then what does that add up to when you multiply it by millions?

"I don’t think that’s quite right. I’d bet the American people, if given the opportunity, are as capable as the Israelis and the Brits of withstanding the occasional deadly attack by extremist groups or individuals [...]

It’s the authorities and the media that tend to go a little crazy, and their actions reinforce each other."

So the Israelis and Brits don't have authorities or media? Or are their authorities and media not Israelis and Brits? Or does he mean that the authorities and the media in America are not made up of American people?

Seems quite a stretch to make this distinction without a difference to try and sidestep any actual discussion of why these differences among cultures exist. Cheap rhetorical trick. Not that I can blame him I guess, it's "un-american" to propose rational reactions that might decrease terrorism rather than scorched-earth vengeance seeking.

Reads like someone was upset their train was canceled.

Pretty damn clear why some airspace needed to be closed isn't? Fool.

"Boston is probably the only major city that if you fuck with them, they will shut down the city, stop everything, and find you."

Happy Gilmore

1. I'm getting really good at predicting what the intellectual hipster perspective on a particular issue will be. I knew yesterday we would see op eds like this.

2. Not Hacker News. Flagged.

“Everyone has a different definition for hipster. Usually, they just find a person with qualities they don’t like and say “That’s a hipster”.”

http://bearskinrug.co.uk/hipsters/

I'm using this definition of 'intellectual hipster'.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/2pv/intellectual_hipsters_and_metaco...

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