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.
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.
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.
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?)
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
