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Comment by burke | Hacker News Reader

Further, even assuming that number is correct, how many people do you figure die in the average successful terrorist plot? Let's say 100 as a high average.

That means 300,000,000 Americans (and billions of foreigners) are having their rights violated and wallets emptied via taxation every day to save 5400 lives over the course of 14 years.

Admittedly, it's 55% more likely than getting struck by lightning, but...

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According to this[1] list, 100 would be vastly over estimating. Even including 9/11, and disregarding all incidents with no fatalities, the average based on the GTD data is about 12.5. If you are willing to concede that 9/11 was a once-in-ever event that is unlikely to be matched, then the number drops below 2.

And that's probably still a vast overstatement of the likely fatalities for any given plot, given that 2103 of the 2381 recorded by the GTD have 0 fatalities.

[1] http://www.start.umd.edu/gtd/search/Results.aspx?chart=fatal...

What is up with those fatality numbers? Kinda weird it's exactly 1382 for both towers.

My assumption is that they took the total fatalities for the incident, then divided it between the two. So in actuality, the number of fatalities was 2,764, but they divided it between the two sites of attack.

That's my assumption though and it could be completely off base.

Ahh yeah makes sense. Both the summaries have the same number stating the combined total of both towers (2603). Best I can figure is 2603 + 88 (Flight 11) + 59 (Flight 175) + 10 hijackers = 2760

I'm not saying your conclusion isn't wrong, but your argument probably is - largely because there are many costs of terrorism beyond simply loss of life - it's an incredibly efficient way to disrupt a nation.

For example, some estimates of the cost of 9/11 (I think including the costs of Iraq and Afghanistan) suggest that each American is out to the tune of $10,000 [0]. If the NSA were able to prevent one 9/11 style event, they'd in one step justify their budget for 300 years (if you ignore Iraq and Afghanistan, it goes down to 75 years, but in many ways at least Afghanistan was very much caused by 9/11).

[0] - http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/09/08/us/sept-11-rec...

> it's an incredibly efficient way to disrupt a nation

As other commenters pointed out, it's only efficient at disrupting a nation if the nation itself decides to disrupt itself.

The right way to react to a terrorist attack is to ignore it. Simple as that. You chase the perpetrators like ordinary members of an organized crime group. Anything above that is achieving the terrorists' plan.

All the money America spends on "War on Terror", including NSA, is actually the cost of 9/11. If the US wanted to really effectively prevent further terrorist attacks, it would defund the NSA. Right now all that counterterrorism measures are only actively inviting further attacks - everyone can see that it takes only a bunch of civilian casualties to make the nation go completely nuts and drive itself to destruction.

http://www.opencongress.org/vote/2013/h/412 looks like it was a relatively close fail to pass the amendment to prohibit this type collection.

You can't really blame the terrorists for the response. Spain, France, Norway and Germany have all dealt with terrorism over the last decades and not a single one of them has invaded other countries in response to such an attack.

And to say that Afghanistan was caused by 9/11 is a total reversal of what actually happened, 9/11 happened because of CIA involvement in Afghanistan.

Clearly different circumstances however Spain, France, Germany, Norway all invaded Afghanistan, and Spain and Norway also invaded Iraq. Perhaps not as a direct response, though.

To your second point, it's clearly a very complicated blame game, but trying to distill it down to fit your own point is not helpful. We can easily follow the chain of events backwards - for example had the USSR not invaded Afghanistan, this might have all been avoided.

Certainly the trigger point was the Taliban refusing to hand over Bin Laden, thus providing a safe haven for him and other like minded folk.

This all seems to be besides my original point, which was that terror attacks clearly cost far more than the lives of the people killed, and so arguing that the benefit of the NSA is minimal by considering only a tiny fragment of its potential benefit is fallacious.

> and so arguing that the benefit of the NSA is minimal by considering only a tiny fragment of its potential benefit is fallacious.

It's indeed fallacious because there is no benefit of the NSA at all - its current activities are the very cost of 9/11 attacks. Civilian deaths are not the goal of a terror attack, they're just collateral damage, means to an end. The goal of an attack is to, as you wrote, "disrupt a nation" - which is not something that the bombs do, it's something that the nation does to itself by having a crazy overreaction.

That only works if you assume that there's only ever one attack. If it thwarts another, then it's benefiting. In any case, I wouldn't really argue that the NSA 'disrupts' the nation at all - the spending on it is only a little larger than at the end of the cold war, and apart from the recent news stories only a very small minority will actually be affected by it in their daily lives.

>the spending on it is only a little larger than at the end of the cold war

I hope you realize that this means the spending on it is quite high, indeed.

So many people fail to realize your last point.

The reason Osama bin Laden wore that united states military jacket is because it was given to him during the CIA armament of the afghanis against the russians...

> it's an incredibly efficient way to disrupt a nation.

Only if a nation builds a domestic spy program, and intrusive and expensive domestic security apparatus, and starts multi-trillion dollar wars in places that say Graveyard of Empires right on the label. Who would be such idiots?

Well, the fact is that we are such idiots, and it's easier to stop terrorist attacks than to change that.

I see no evidence of this. The "ease of stopping terrorist attacks" seems entirely fabricated.

Regardless of how hard it is, it's still easier than making the entire population of the US immune to fear.

that's not really the cost of the terrorism, though. that's the cost of the cowardly, panicked response. other countries have responded to terrorism with more dignity and poise, and it's cost them less money.

Other developed country have arguably not suffered a proportional injury from terrorism (in terms of deaths per capita per incident). The nearest example I can think of is Norway's massacre carried out y Anders Brievik, and it's questionable as to whether an atrocity by an individual actor meets the operational definition of terrorism, since the threat of future attacks could be neutralized by the capture of a single individual; 'terror' surely implies a non-zero risk of future attack, as opposed to the 'horror' of a previous one that has a zero probability of being repeated.

Ah, the 'no true terrorist' fallacy. Joking aside, there are many more idiots like Breivik, so there is a risk of future attacks.

But they're unlikely because the Norwegians kept their heads cool, didn't turn him into a martyr but showed him for what he is, a deranged sociopath.

Preventing the cowardly, panicked response isn't the NSA's department. All they can do is try to prevent the attack.

They could also comply with the law, especially important laws like the Fourth Amendment. That's another option they have.

edit: it's occurred to me there's a huge flaw in this claim:

  Preventing the cowardly, panicked response
  isn't the NSA's department.

The NSA has lied about the effectiveness of its mass data collection, claiming that it foiled terrorist plots. The claims don't actually hold up under investigation.

But in the process of exaggerating the effectiveness of this particular alleged solution to terrorist danger, they also exaggerated the pervasiveness of that danger, which probably did make the panicked, cowardly response in question both more panicked and more cowardly.

Come on, even comedians know better than to think they are actually breaking any laws. Why take that risk when you can just legalize whatever you want to do without telling anyone?

Yeah I think you can argue those are the costs of bad policy or reaction, not the attack.

How many people could have been saved from heart disease with the same amount of money?

That's not the NSA's problem, though. By all means criticise the US as a whole for that. I'm less in agreement with your second point - you can easily apply it to any slightly frivolous spending.

If petrol usage efficiency in the US went up by 10% for example (should be easily achievable for not much cost), in principle the money saved overall would be over $10 billion in 2014.

That'd save a lot of lives, too.

Fair, but there have to be some diminishing returns there. If there had been two 9/11 style events in short succession, would we have gone to twice as many wars?

We didn't really go to war because of 9/11. It was a direct result of existing interventionist foreign policy. 9/11 just escalated an ongoing conflict.

You're right, though, the impact of each successive event is less.

I'm not saying your conclusion isn't wrong, but your argument probably is

I'm not saying that wasn't a bad play of words.

You may be willing to give up your liberty, but I, and many with me, are not. Terrorists are trolls; dear people of US and the world, please stop feeding them. The same goes for war mongers of all stripes.

You are comparing an intangible number to a different tangible number, but ignoring the intangible side of the second number. What is the intangible costs to Americans for TSA's security theater? Lost time, lost items, lost privacy, lost security, even lost lives?

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