Comment by lifeisstillgood | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lifeisstillgood | Hacker News Reader

lifeisstillgood

I think it is worth reviewing the "Schneier Doctrine" as I understand it:

Principles

* Security is a trade off between safety and freedom / cost

* Prevention is not always the most cost effective trade-off. Emergency response is often better.

* Stories make a huge difference in how humans perceive threats around us - and can therefore make a difference in correcting the perceived threat model to match the actual threat model.

Doctrine (not sure he has ever voiced these...)

* Define National Security quantatively (less than 1,000 expected deaths, or loss of less than 1% GDP its not national security). If someone slaps a National Security Letter on you today, its laughable, if personally threatening. If they slap a NSL on you when that means they seriously think a 1,000 people could die if you do not comply its not laughable.

* Massively increase spend on post-event support (ambulance, decontamination).

* Run public security "games" where teams of experts kill as many of us as possible using only items found in CostCo. (Trying to reframe the perceived threat model to meet the actual threat model). Simon Cowell could present it.

You're basically correct about his principles, but I feel like your post makes it sound like Schneier's just trying to save money and doesn't care about the actual lives involved.

I think an important point is that it is literally impossible to prevent all crime. Not only is it impossible, but as you try harder and harder to prevent it, you get diminishing returns and an increase in false positives (which we also want to avoid). So yeah, there has to be a tradeoff. If you can't ever get the number of deaths down to zero, then you have to decide, how low is close enough and how much are you willing to sacrifice to get there?

Right now, we're sacrificing a crap ton, and it's really not clear that it's gaining us all that much.

I beleive Schneier does care and was not intending to come across as belittling such things. Despite the Chuck Norris meme I am sure he is as human as the rest of us :-)

Its just we do live in a world where somehow we must efficiently allocate resources. In the UK we use a term QALY (Quality years of life) which is used to decide between which operations should go ahead (likelihood of success x expected number of qualifty years) - so a 80 year old looking for kidney dialysis is lower down the list than a youth looking for a common hip replacement. The US does it simply on income.

We should I feel have a debate on these things - why is it cars can kill thousands but a cancer drug cannot kill one or two. These trade offs get made in odd ways - and while I doubt we shall ever have politicians campaigning on the slogan "vote for me, only a tiny percentage of you will die because of it" its an important discussion.

I would suggest also a poll taken in the security / check-in lines at JFK:

  Would you support allowing one major terrorist outrage 
  a year if it would reduce queueing at airports by 

  a) 1 hour, 
  b) 2 hours 
  c) eliminate queues completely?

:-)

NSL's need to be seriously restricted. First off, they shouldn't be used for drug-related cases and "other" type of situations. They should be used for "imminent national security threat" sort of thing.

Second, all NSL's should be declassified after 6-12 months. Then we can see if the NSL was indeed used properly, or it if was abused.

Then again, why are NSL's given without a warrant in the first place? Would there be such a big difference in reponse time if they had to go through a judge first? I'm very uncomfortable with all these new laws trying to bypass the judicial process to "make things faster". Making things faster should not really be the point.

Note that 1% GDP of US is 0.1 trillion USD

OK, doesn't that just show how few things are threats to "national security"?

Or maybe it shows that most "threats" to "national security" are just hokum and hooey.

Also to compare: the bailout apparently totaled around 30 trillion USD at the end of 2011, two orders of magnitude more.

And the cost of Katrina was less than 1% of GDP (80 billion < 150 billion)

http://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/top-5-most-expens...

Do you find something as big as Katrina "not something worth of National Security?"

I am certainly surprised the "national security" button was not pressed during the bailout. The thought of a few years in Gitmo would have helped various CEOs consider carefully the meaning of fiducary duty.

However whereever you place the cut-off, we can find a example that will look silly. I am not arguing that a specific number of dollars is or is not an national emergency. I am simply arguing that at a certain point things look so bad we as a society want to say "You, you get carte blanche, do whatever, kill whomever, just fix it. We will review it all in 6 months".

This takes us away from can we trust the security services and into the security services as a national emergency response team.

What the NSA, CIA etc have done and are capable of, is in some respects utterly awesome. When they throw around that kind of capability and weight it should be respected, not feared or ridiculed.

At the moment we hear sirens and think "cops hurrying to the doughnut shop" not "fire engines rushing to save lives"

Maybe I am romanticising the role of the security services, but if they are not there for emergencies, then what are they there for?

I'm afraid that you are romanticising the role of the CIA and NSA etc. The CIA has become something like "The President's Private Army". I don't know what the NSA has become, but neither appears to "be there" in emergencies.

I love the last point, but there really is an argument to be made for keeping the unwashed masses ignorant of the best ways to harm people.

Is there? It seems to me that the majority of people are not murderers and have no intention of doing each other harm. People have plenty of obvious ways to harm each other at their disposal, but few people actually do so (and this is in a country with the highest violent murder rate of any developed nation).

To put it another way, everyone knows that a knife can be a deadly weapon. Yet we all have at least a few knives in our kitchens, and we are not piling up dead bodies. Would it really matter if everyone knew that, in addition to knives, they could also use some other common household item?

It is also the case that we learn how to kill/seriously injure people from our TVs all the time. Even countries with much lower murder rates have such violent entertainment.

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