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Comment by cryoshon | Hacker News Reader

Chilling effect has been achieved, all according to plan.

To reiterate, the design of surveillance is population control,no more or less; terrorism is merely an excuse for technological implementation that was desired since time immemorial by the powers that be.

Now, onto the implications that the NY Times was too friendly to state:

1. People are self-censoring dissenting views in regular conversation outside of people they trust

2. People are self-censoring dissenting views in written communication

3. People are self-censoring their own minds as a result of #1 and #2

Therefore,

4. Dissenting communications and dissenting thoughts are reduced in frequency, leading to a snowball effect as ideas are more and more suppressed

In terms of the scope, while the poll was only of writers, it seems as though the majority of writers consider themselves to be victims here.

I think it's safe to say that the implications I listed are also applicable to other segments of the population-- most importantly, the segments of the population that are the usual hotbeds of dissent, because they are more likely to be paying attention to advances in government power which would create a chilling effect.

The chilling effect produced by the endless rounds of disclosure of government abuse of surveillance is probably not going to go away anytime soon. Unfortunately, self-censorship is one more nail in the moribund democracy here in the US. Keep in mind that even if a person does not self censor, the mainstream media (which should now be understood as including major internet news hubs such as reddit) will likely prevent off-narrative news from spreading.

So, what's the solution? I don't know. Still waiting on a hot new SV startup to "disrupt" the surveillance state.

View on HN

The problem is that today's jello-spined journalists give too many shits about surveillance. Sure, every single journalist should take massive precautions to encrypt every single thing and source, no matter how banal; but once the proper precautions have been taken they should go on balls to the wall attack. Shame, de-obfuscate, highlight, an expose the hell out of government and business. There should be zero mercy! If journalists should fear anything, it is that some other warrior-journalist will slay a corrupt government agent or business crook and gain all the praise.

Dear journalists, it's time to drive the rats out of America. It is your responsibility as the fourth branch of government to open the curtains, let in the burning sunlight, and exterminate the vampire roaches. Show no mercy, and provide no harbor. Your job is only done when you die exhausted from seeking out the source of the constant stink of corruption. Make people understand complex matters of corruption, do your jobs, do what you wanted to be.

Michael Hastings tried that. His car crashed then exploded - possibly in that order depending on who you ask, or what theory you believe.

As did Gary Webb. Remember what was done to him..

Wow, according to Wikipedia he died of suicide by two to the head. And here I thought stories of suicide via two self-inflicted head shots was a myth restricted to conspiracy theorists.

Not every head gunshot wound is fatal or incapacitating. The WP entry should have a few links to studies where they find a small amount of suicides require multiple shots to work.

It does: it links to the "multiple gunshot suicide" page. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_gunshot_suicide

Even if it was a legit suicide, there's a reason the movie is called "Kill the Messenger". It's shameful how much other journalists focused on him rather than what he was reporting, and even worse since he was right.

The capital of the world's sixth largest economy uses a coroner and not a medical examiner? For reference, a medical examiner is a forensic pathologist, and generally one with a forensic fellowship. A coroner is anybody with a pulse, either elected or appointed.

That said, it looks like the Sacramento coroner does in fact employ at least one forensic pathologist, so that lends a little more credence to the finding. Also, in these high profile cases there are often quite a few witnesses to the autopsy, which makes it more difficult to squash evidence.

And, yes, there are plenty of stories of people surviving a gunshot wound to the head, even remaining conscious.

A journalist's career depends on not doing that which is why you don't see very much serious criticism from journalists.

Sounds like we need Spider Jerusalem.

(Transmetropolitan, if you enjoy cyberpunk + gonzo journalism, highly recommended)

The sad thing is that you don't have to have real surveillance to do this. All you need is the belief that the surveillance is going on.

It would be a great plot for a movie: Snowden et al, were given fake information to lead the world to believe it was being surveilled, eliminating a lot of bad behavior.

Except it doesn't it really eliminate bad behavior- it just stifles innovation and civil liberty.

I'm sure it eliminates some bad behavior too. Just not bad behavior from the very determined.

In general, no. When you start assuming everyone is a bad guy you end up with everyone from journalists to drug dealers to captains of industry trying to make sure their own secrets are safe from the surveillance machine.

The surveillance people have a saying. To find a needle in a haystack first you need a haystack. But you don't want a bleeding haystack, you just want the needle -- and now you've put a haystack on top of it. Now all the good guys are developing and using anti-surveillance methods.

The bad guys were already assuming they were under surveillance. They aren't being deterred by surveillance of everybody else, they're just getting access to new tools developed by the good guys, and are aided by the fact that anti-surveillance methods are no longer suspicious.

> It would be a great plot for a movie: Snowden et al, were given fake information to lead the world to believe it was being surveilled, eliminating a lot of bad behavior.

Potentially saving the government a lot of money in the process. Money, which in the movie of course went to private hands of evil politicians and businessmen instead of being saved. As the plot develops, the protagonist slowly uncovers the evidence of that widespread conspiracy and in the climax (after enough scenery porn and helicopter chases to justify the budget for 3D version) heroicly exposes corrupt actors for what they are to the entire world. Cue in happy ending and closing credits, as behind them the whole world tears itself apart in a yet another case of Hollywood not thinking through the morality and consequences of protagonist's actions.

I'd definitely go see that movie.

I would too, except that the way you've described it, the script will probably go to Michael Bay.

Nah, I'd go regardless.

I was aiming for an even funnier twist of Government Was Right After All, Asimov's "The Dead Past"-style. The world goes to hell because the illusion of surveillance was actually effective in preventing terrorism (also sneaking in a jab at the ending of "Surrogates").

Even better: prosecute people in high profile case, but they turn out to be completely fake personas -- actors hired to appear in court to look like they're coming down hard.

A "fun" conspiracy theory I've been mulling over for a bit... What if Snowden was a false flag operation? After all, what good is panopticon if nobody is aware of it?

> what good is panopticon if nobody is aware of it?

You can blackmail all those in positions of power (politicians , judges, etc) into doing what you want? Who cares what the rest of the population (those low-life sheep) think.

(This is what most likely goes on in their minds.)

About as much as a doomsday device.

The best false flag is when the actor doesn't know he's in on it. See Snowden doing the things he's doing, let him do them with minimal restraint, and let the truth into the wild.

However, I don't actually believe it. This assumes competence above and beyond reasonable suspicion. It's much more believable that security was really just very poor. At some point somebody might have done a little less than possible to let him go, but that's about as much as I'm willing to believe.

God damnit I don't know what to believe any more.

Snowden steered the conversation towards the US political establishment's _massive_ hypocrisy. At the time, the US was wagging their finger hard at Chinese tech companies, as if to say US tech companies would never stoop to the level of backdooring consumer hardware or spying on their users and handing that data over wholesale to government spies.

In addition to embarassing the American political establishment, Snowden revealed JTRIG; he revealed acts of industrial and political espionage; and he revealed the undermining of public cryptographic standards by government henchmen. This to me is the big one, and it's why it's so unlikely for Snowden to be a limited hangout.

Prior to Snowden, if you weren't being paranoid, you were just sticking your head in the sand. You would be exposing yourself to the risks of parallel construction, backdoors in hardware, sabotage of public cryptographic standards, and the manipulation of online discourse if Snowden hadn't given people like me the power to credibly parry critics who are all too quick to discredit with terms like "troll" and "conspiracy theorist".

Snowden showed James Clapper to be a criminal, too. And the IRS claiming its own electronic paper trail of criminality could be somehow "lost" in this age of pervasive surveillance lends credibility to the idea of there being a clear divide between those who are above the law, and the rest of us. The Rulers and the Ruled.

Yet no one has been indicted, apart from Snowden (well 'criminal complaint', not an indictment, but even Obama mixed them up).

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2013/12...

> you don't have to have real surveillance to do this. All you need is the belief that the surveillance is going on

A standard play these thugs often set up is a single intricate surveillance incident where the mark knows they're being watched very closely, then do another one much later on. This is intended to leave the victim in a state of constant paranoia during the majority of the times they're not being watched. It takes a lot of self-control to remain calm most times when this one's used against you.

Another technique when the surveillers have less control is the fatwa. I was in Hong Kong about 12 years ago on a ferry from some outer island when one (a young Australian-sounding male) of two people talking a few seats behind me suddenly said to the other (a young North American girl) "There's some people back home who want to know where in the world that guy up there is at all times. I better ring this in." He then talked loudly on the phone giving some details about me. The girl he was with had an embarrassed expression on her face like she couldn't believe what she was hearing. This all happened while I was moving from Melbourne (Australia, not Florida) to China to live. Unfortunately, that surveillance fatwa against me seems to still be in place over a decade later, and those who issued it are even willing to nudge along local people in China to use methods that would be illegal back in Australia/NZ.

Perhaps good news is that those in control of the surveillance always use intermediaries to hide themselves, and most intermediaries have a need to show off rather than hide themselves. By doing things like talking to yourself or "to God" a lot out loud within hearing of where bugs may be, changing what you say for different locations, you can often find out something about probable actors involved when stuff you've said comes back to you.

Why was there a fatwa against you?

You won't find the reason in any public court document, nor will asking the populace involved reveal the real intent because the reason such puppeteers give their intermediaries, often different reasons to different intermediaries, is never the real purpose behind surveillance. Much targeted surveillance using human agents becomes interference of some sort by those same agents. Often when surveillance becomes interference, the puppeteers tell their intermediaries they're trying to "help" the mark, but in reality, they're only pretending because the real intent of anyone behind this type of activity is always to harm. I experienced this when someone up here tried to shunt me out of work teaching college students and into work teaching children, telling people I should do the work that pays the most. They pretended to be helping so they would appear to be "good guys" to their intermediaries, but their puppeteers were really conducting harmful manipulation for their own ends. They ultimate reason behind surveillance, whether one-to-one or broadcasted "fatwas", seems to be to protect free cash flows, or maintain power structures, and what not.

A day after posting the above reply came an event I was half anticipating: the Person of Interest episode 79 broadcast on 6 Jan 2015 in the U.S. featured a preachment saying "Anyone who treats life as a game of chess, treating people like pawns, deserves to lose". This could have been placed in response to a bait comment I left on Hacker News 2 months ago ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8548483 ) but they are usually placed deniably. I've learnt from experience what the lagtime is between letting on I watch some TV show and something apparently targeted at me appearing in it, though this is the first time I left one on purpose.

The preachment as presented was only pretending to be aimed at me, but was actually aimed at others. What I was being told was "My blog is bigger than your blog, our budget is bigger than your budget", a message given many times via CBS, ABC, Fox, etc over the past few years. The actual preachment line is for certain TV viewers, especially in places like Australia and China, saying it's OK to target me because I treat other people like pawns. This latest fatwa-style call to arms is of a similar method to many previous ones for surveillance like the one that came from Melbourne Australia 12 years ago which I mentioned 3 comments up in this thread.

The preachment relies on erroneous assumptions of course. I never liked fighting other people, prefering instead co-operation and group activities like bush hiking (tramping) and camping, but I've since learnt that a more appropriate line instead of Harold Finch's is one by Leon Tolstoy: "You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you". I've been attacked in various psychological ways over the past few decades, which I now recognize as being a formulaic and ongoing operation by some people to wear me down, originating in New Zealand but spreading to Australia and the U.S. These are the people the Groovy/Grails managers got into bed with when I first started to respectfully work my way into that community. And I've since learnt I have to respond to war with war, using many varied tactics such as timing bait comments with a 2 month lead.

Another erroneous assumption in that preachment is that I use other people like pawns. I don't know any other people very well, and if I make an effort to build relationships with others, sometime down the line they'll start to experience anonymous harrassment in an apparent attempt to get to me. Warning someone that this might happen isn't sufficient because a warning is only words, and they wouldn't really know what I was talking about until it starts happening to them. I know this because 20 years ago someone in NZ said the same to me about himself and I had no concept of what they were really saying. I wouldn't want to ever knowingly be the cause of this to be in someone's future. It's the sociopaths behind these fatwas, who hide themselves behind layers of intermediaries, who are the real users of other people. I'm fighting the war as a lone guerrilla.

Anyone involved as an intermediary in some action against me should realize that the reason they're being given is just a cover story to make their handlers look like "good guys". I know far more names of people involved than the very few I've mentioned on my blog but only wanted to name and shame the sociopath puppeteers, not their pawns, because the intermediaries "know not what they do". The only smart response by someone to a fatwa to fight me is to refuse to take part, but of course that might also suit the sociopaths now that I'm "losing" as a result of their previous attacks.

You appear to be a victim of Gang Stalking otherwise known as Organized Stalking. I am also a victim of similar tactics.

“Gang stalking” – also known as “organized stalking” – is a slang term for a set of tactics used in counterintelligence operations involving the covert surveillance and harassment of a targeted individual. The goal of such operations – in the parlance of counterintelligence personnel – is to “subvert” or “neutralize” an individual deemed by a government agency (or corporation) to be an enemy.

http://fightgangstalking.com/what-is-gang-stalking/

Who are you an enemy of? Who is doing it to you, and why?

Thanks for the link, I've read through it, and lots of it resonates.

> fake information to lead the world to believe it was being surveilled

This already exists... and has for thousands of years. It's called "religion." ;)

Counter-terrorism is a real motivation, but unfortunately the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

Certainly, some people help the surveilance because they want to fight terrorism.

But the people that designed it would have designed something that actually helps fighting terrorism if that was the goal.

    1. People are self-censoring dissenting views in regular conversation outside of people they trust
    2. People are self-censoring dissenting views in written communication
    3. People are self-censoring their own minds as a result of #1 and #2
    4. Dissenting communications and dissenting thoughts are reduced in frequency, leading to a snowball effect as ideas are more and more suppressed

It's not just the government that is producing these effects. The "mainstreamed" culture of the present day Internet is distinctly anti-intellectual and produces precisely these effects. "Slacktivists" of all political leanings engage in programs of intimidation to silence those they disagree with, which is entirely antithetical to having a pluralistic society. I just had a "discussion" with someone who was incapable of distinguishing the meaning of "lies" and "lying" in the context of deliberately falsifying or omitting facts versus someone having an ideology one disagrees with. Yet this person regards themselves as a "thinker" and "intellectual." This sort of person seems to comprise the majority of people in the Bay Area.

I used to be able to hang out with nerds and I could reasonably assume that no one around would be so scientifically illiterate as to believe that a person thrown out an airlock would freeze solid in two seconds flat. Everyone would know what "frequency response" was and be able to apply the concept. Now, a lot of "nerds" will just pattern match that as an "audio-woo" word and shut their brains off, yet you can ask them about the Fourier Transforms they studied as an undergrad. It's like we're the version of Brasil Richard Feynman visited. <http://v.cx/2010/04/feynman-brazil-education> Most importantly, I could hang out with "nerds" and assume that the vast majority of those around actually knew how to think and apply logic and actually discuss things with people they didn't agree with. Somehow, we've arrived at a state where most people tell themselves they're thinking, but they're actually just parrotting their friends after crudely pattern-matching the conversation. How can I tell? Because it's now very difficult to agree (yes, agree) ideologically with someone but point out they've arrived at their conclusions erroneously. Almost no one actually listens to and really examines facts and logic. They just determine if it vaguely sounds "truthy" in a way that aligns with their politics.

(Worse still, lots of self-identifying "nerds" will use the above process in discussions involving physics!)

Love this post but I do not understand your example about frequency response. Are you an audiophile whose friends refuse to believe that one amplifier can sound better than another? or are you a guy whose friends mistakenly believe one amplifier can sound better than another? Or something else?

> Love this post but I do not understand your example about frequency response. Are you an audiophile whose friends refuse to believe that one amplifier can sound better than another? or are you a guy whose friends mistakenly believe one amplifier can sound better than another? Or something else?

I'm a musician, avocationally. I have a pair of Etymotics earplugs that have much flatter frequency response than the foam ones. (Well relatively. Most frequency response graphs of things one puts in or over ones ears don't really look all that "flat." <http://www.etymotic.com/er20.html> No, I don't work for them or know them.) I wear these as a means to control volume in situations where I wouldn't otherwise be able to, but still need to hear things clearly, and they work. As a result, I've had occasion to answer questions about them in public places like conferences in the Bay Area, and I've noted a few condescending and smarmy responses, as well as a "I don't know what that is."

(EDIT: Seems like you're pattern-matching me a bit, based on "stuff you saw on the Internet." However very big changes in frequency response can make big, measurable and predictable differences, even in how well one can understand speech. I've had occasion to undo naive sound-person's adjustments to bring out bass and treble, but as most speech information is carried in the "midrange" frequencies, this makes announcers less comprehensible.)

Huh. Even iPods have selectable equalizer settings (presets only, alas, not fully adjustable, at least on my iPod Classic). I guess a lot of people aren't even curious enough to look.

(Fellow Etymotic user here)

I agree with much of this.

We should note, however, that the writers surveyed were all affiliated with the group doing the surveying, PEN, which is a writers' group devoted to the defense of free expression. These respondents can probably be expected to over-report the chilling effect, somewhat.

Again, though: none of this is to say that we should not be very concerned about state surveillance. We should be.

>To reiterate, the design of surveillance is population control,no more or less;

The biggest myth perpetrated by the US government is that they are in control of the country. That illusion must be protected at all costs. The government nibbles around the edges and catches a few criminals(<20%) but by and large the country is relatively safe internally not because of the police but because most citizens are good people.

That, and there is comparatively little resource scarcity. The government could easily steer the country into the economic ground, resulting in widespread suffering and eventual complete social breakdown.

Great post. Every morning the establishment get up and hope that today is not the day we all step over the line together.

It's policing by consent. Any time we've had enough that's it. We have to keep believing that otherwise we are enslaved.

So are those countries that are lawless and violent that way because the citizens are just bad people?

People aren't particularly good. Scourges like say bribery or spousal abuse are rife in much of the world, and commonplace among the populace. In places where they have been nearly eliminated, government has played an enormous role. Not because they catch all the bad guys, but because imposing and enforcing law creates social norms that affect the behavior of ordinary people. Someone in Pakistan isn't more likely to beat his wife than someone in the U.S. because he doesn't understand it's bad or because he isn't worried about getting caught. It's because the relative certainty of enforcement in the U.S. undergirds and sustains a social norm that makes wife beaters into pariahs.[1]

Moreover, murderers and the like aren't the biggest threat to society. What matters are organized groups exercising violence. A small armed group can terrorize a large population, as is demonstrated time and again in places like Pakistan or Iraq. To suppress such groups the government not only has to catch them, but make the retaliation so swift and inevitable that only the irrational would try to bypass the ordinary social and legal structures with force. And the government is very effective at doing this.

[1] This is, incidentally, why there are special laws against e.g. hate crimes, even though assault is already illegal. The generic social norm against assault isn't strong enough to protect a targeted group, and a new law can create a more powerful social norm to compensate.

This phenomenon is also evident in the discrimination context. People didn't just become better and less racist in the last 50 years of their own accord. Laws like the Civil Rights Act catalyzed the change by imposing new social norms. When discriminating in the workplace became illegal, people who discriminated became "bad people" which forced changes in behavior that have little to do with what percentage of people were caught.

>So are those countries that are lawless and violent that way because the citizens are just bad people?

I imagine they look out for people of their own tribe, but that kind of tribalism does not exist in the US. The point I rebutted was about population control. A good example is the federal governments inability to stop the legalization of pot. They absolutely oppose it but can do fuck all.

The U.S. isn't any less diverse than Syria or Iraq and the potential conflicts between the groups are no less serious. And at times this has resulted in violence. Ever watch Gangs of New York? So why aren't American Catholics fighting Protestants like Shi'ites fight Sunni? It's not because we're just better people on this side of the pond.

> they look out for people of their own tribe, but that kind of tribalism does not exist in the US

There's still a strong division into Blacks, Hispanics, and Whites in the US in most socio-economic settings.

"So are those countries that are lawless and violent that way because the citizens are just bad people?"

Look at the history of urban conflict -- it's virtually impossible even for a high-tech military actor like the USA to effectively police a dense urban area without incurring unacceptable civilian casualties that would further radicalize the population.

You can nuke a city, sure. That's easy. But policing a dense city of millions of people even with heavy surveillance and military force is damn hard.

If most people weren't basically good, we would indeed live in a lawless hellhole.

> So are those countries that are lawless and violent that way because the citizens are just bad people?

No, it's probably because they have unproductive economies, which of course can be caused by numerous things.

You have it backwards. They have unproductive economies because they're lawless and violent. You can see it in the evolution of societies like Singapore or India.

I suspect the comorbidity rate is nearly 100%. I suppose when I say "an unproductive economy causes violence," what I mean is that it's a better idea to spend resources bootstrapping a sustainable productive economy than just trying to stop violence.

I assume you mean to use Singapore as an example of where strict laws and reduced violence have had a positive effect on development? As opposed to India?

I'm not talking about strict laws, just the rule of law. The supremacy of the state over any challengers. In both Singapore and India, strong, effective government has enabled economic development. Vis-a-vis India, it's government isn't as effective as those in the West, but it's an interesting reference point, because India has been much more successful than neighboring Pakistan and Bangladesh. 100 years ago the wealth difference between the countries was nothing to speak of, but India has been more successful in developing its civil institutions and has been rewarded for that success economically.

Just because the government as a whole can't build bridges or a health care web portal or do whatever else would demonstrate the sort of control you are implying, doesn't mean that specific actors within the triumvirate of the executive branch, legislative branch and media don't very much control the acceptable window of social and political discourse. That sort of control is no illusion.

Also, I think that what the sibling comment says about resource scarcity is certainly a more reasonable justification for why there is relatively little internal strife in the US compared to other countries. What makes "citizens" or all American residents any better people than the residents of any other country?

No one likes surveillance but can anyone provide a better/cheaper option to prevent large scale crime like terrorist attack?

Stopping invading and occupying foreign countries would be a good start.

Not killing innocent people around the world?

It's folly to assume that "terrorism" is some really concrete class of crime that can be easily prevented using known methods, and I'd further argue that the efficacy of surveillance to this end is unknown, but I'd venture to say it's pretty insignificant. Knowing this, a better way of phrasing the same question is: What tradeoffs are we willing to make to reduce the risk of terrorism, and where is the right balance? I would argue that, since the risk of terrorism is so low, the tradeoffs we're currently making are grossly out of proportion. If we want to prevent deaths in aggregate, we should be pouring government money into fighting disease and starvation in poorer countries. Much better ROI there.

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/01/the_comparati...

Fighting terrorism isn't just about preventing X number of deaths.

The 9-11 attacks were profoundly disruptive in economic and social costs. Just in direct costs like buildings being knocked over, air travel being stopped, being not being able to get to work, was 200 billion dollars.

That's a little less than the GDP of Finland wiped out in one attack.

That is not to mention the cost of fighting the war on terrorism. All in it probably cost 5 Trillion.

You could say, hey, we didn't need to fight the war on terrorism. But the attacks were world changing events for the US. They caused fear, anger, confusion, and a need for revenge.

Whether it is rational or not, nobody is going to work in a skyscraper if every 20 months one gets knocked over. Just look at Israel and Palestine for what happens to cultures who expect terrorism (on both sides). It is caustic to a free society.

It is hard to tell how low the risk of terrorism is in a vacuum. There are certainly enough suicide bomb volunteers and other jihadists. Crossing the US border is pretty easy.

Some amount of intelligence is needed to make sure nobody is plotting something big.

How much of those costs were the direct result of the planes slamming into the buildings, rather than the (over) reaction to that event?

Cockpit door locks. The rest we could have probably done without, especially the 'war on terrorism', which as a by-product makes more terrorists.

What's the economic cost of car crashes? Or obesity? How many lives are lost in terrorist attacks vs slipping on banana peels?

What little terrorism actually exists is caused by the US government's own actions. So not only do we pay taxes to create terrorists with our sociopolitical skylarkings, we pay taxes to "fight terrorists" that are created by it. On top of this we all get spied on in the process.

I smell a raw deal.

They could just get warrants for surveillance, like they used to in olden times.

As distasteful as secret courts are, even they might be workable if everything becomes open after a certain time expires.

Apart the excellent points of cost-effectiveness and the USGOV being the biggest organized terrorist group in the world[0] made by other posters, I'd add one more thing.

We have to ask ourselves - what is the goal of terrorism? It's to force your target to do something you want (a political action) or totally waste resources. Civilian deaths are just collateral damage, means to an end. The 9/11 attacks scared the entire west to the point of insanity, made it waste money on wars and turn themselves into police states. If the terrorists' goal was to damage "our freedom", they most certainly succeeded - thanks to what can be only described as a severe immune overreaction on a societal level.

The right way to deal with such terrorist attacks is to mostly ignore them, and don't get yourself scared. As a terrorist, you have no reason to fly stuff into buildings if you know it won't buy you anything.

[0] - I can now forget my visa.

>As a terrorist, you have no reason to fly stuff into buildings if you know it won't buy you anything.

All that it has bought them is death. Their goal was to take down the US and it tremendously backfired, but we kind of squandered that goodwill. If they want to make money they kidnap Europeans who they know will pay the ransom.

US apparently seems to be taking itself donw just fine.

> If they want to make money they kidnap Europeans who they know will pay the ransom.

That's not terrorism, that's garden variety kidnapping for ransom.

It's huge revisionism to say that the 9-11 attacks were an attempt to destroy America by wasting resources. It's a popular factoid but it's total bullshit.

The idea was to get the US to just leave the middle east. And that was a pretty epic failure on Al Qaeda's part. The US is up the middle east's ass a lot further now than then.

Also "they hate us for our freedom" is some dumb Bush era idea. Al Qaeda doesn't hate America for our freedom. Al Qaeda explicitly explained why they hated us. 1) Troops in the Arabian peninsula, 2) support of Israel, 3) blockade of Iraq.

First I'd like to express disappointment that dharmach is being down voted just for asking a question. A question worth asking.

Second, this is an excellent answer.

If the government wants you to give up your civil liberties and uses the threat of a terrorist attack to get you to give them up, then they have become terrorists as well. However, I don't know if that is the explicit goal or not or just the outcome of a grossly over exaggerated response. I do know if someone wants to get their way they usually just say "terrorism" or "children."

Terrorist attacks are rare. Humans are terrible at evaluating risks.

> However, I don't know if that is the explicit goal or not or just the outcome of a grossly over exaggerated response.

I'm leaning towards the second. Governments, especially democratic, are complicated systems, and as such a collective failure resulting from many small actions guided in various forms of self-interest seems much more probable than a grand conspiracy. I believe that the US terror actions abroad are just that outcome of a grossly exaggerated response, a failure mode the Government can't find a way to get out of.

I was thinking more individual power grabs on multiple different levels more than grand conspiracy.

For what it's worth man, if we could deal with the decades long threat of nuclear annihilation of the world and preserve our civil liberties, I'm dumbfounded that the threat posed by terrorists even registers.

Stop invading and funding overseas? Double the savings!

But what about all that profit? Wars are nice little earners for the military industrial complex.

It's a myth that the primary purpose of surveillance is to prevent terrorism. The purpose of surveillance is to get advantage.

Yeah.

Don't create enemies (by invading foreign countries, putting lackeys in power to get their resources and messing with their politics) in the first place.

Worked wonders for most countries...

Downvotes? What exactly sounds controversial about the advice? Anybody read 20th century history?

Besides, it's not like "terrorism" is some constant in societies. With the exception of nutjobs, organized terrorism is a response to specific political circumstances and relations between countries. You don't see any terrorism between the Swiss and the French. But there has been between the Irish and the British, for the well known historical reasons. Or in Spain with the Basque countries. Or in the Middle East / Latin American.

It's a political issue, and can be solved at that level, not some natural force that we no other mean to stop except to always be prepared for it, like earthquakes.

How about we overthrow governments all throughout south america and the middle east, setting up puppet dictators that allow US corporations to come in and plunder everything while torturing and disappearing natives who speak out? That's sure to clear up our terrorism problem. Or how about we blanket bomb buildings with drones...surely we'll only kill terrorists. And if there's "collateral damage" surely the family members of the deceased will understand that their family members died for a good cause. Surely they will now cheer on the USA and its noble battle against the evils of this world. Surely they will not become poisoned against the USA and what it stands for (what do we stand for, again?)

No wonder there are so many "terrorists."

Don't have a foreign policy so shitty that people are willing to kill themselves flying planes into buildings just to attack you?

Hell, I bet we'd save money.

I love it. Someone posts a comment in public forum saying that people can't write dissenting thoughts because of the chilling effect of government surveillance. Someone else asks a question in response that doesn't quite fit with the political climate on HN, and is subsequently downvoted to the point where the comment is barely readable. Irony is dead.

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