6 ms·

For every attack that they "didn't see coming" there are, most likely, plenty of attacks that they "did see coming" and stopped. Even more likely is that we don

• fweespee_ch 11y ago
  1) Surveillance doesn't work. 2) Finding real plots are too hard so they entrap people and even then, they don't find many. 3) They aren't spreading around their "successes" because they are absurdly few and borderline entrapment. 4) Homegrown threats are a greater danger and largely being ignored. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/25/us/tally-of-attacks-in-us-challenges-perceptions-of-top-terror-threat.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/25/us/tally-of-attacks-in-us-... > But the breakdown of extremist ideologies behind those attacks may come as a surprise. Since Sept. 11, 2001, nearly twice as many people have been killed by white supremacists, antigovernment fanatics and other non-Muslim extremists than by radical Muslims: 48 have been killed by extremists who are not Muslim, including the recent mass killing in Charleston, S.C., compared with 26 by self-proclaimed jihadists, according to a count by New America, a Washington research center. > Non-Muslim extremists have carried out 19 such attacks since Sept. 11, according to the latest count, compiled by David Sterman, a New America program associate, and overseen by Peter Bergen, a terrorism expert. By comparison, seven lethal attacks by Islamic militants have taken place in the same period. > The contentious question of biased perceptions of terrorist threats dates back at least two decades, to the truck bombing that tore apart the federal building in Oklahoma City in April 1995. Some early news media speculation about the attack assumed that it had been carried out by Muslim militants. The arrest of Timothy J. McVeigh, an antigovernment extremist, quickly put an end to such theories. http://www.nbcnews.com/news/other/nsa-program-stopped-no-terror-attacks-says-white-house-panel-f2D11783588 http://www.nbcnews.com/news/other/nsa-program-stopped-no-ter... > A member of the White House review panel on NSA surveillance said he was “absolutely” surprised when he discovered the agency’s lack of evidence that the bulk collection of telephone call records had thwarted any terrorist attacks. https://theintercept.com/2015/11/17/u-s-mass-surveillance-has-no-record-of-thwarting-large-terror-attacks-regardless-of-snowden-leaks/ https://theintercept.com/2015/11/17/u-s-mass-surveillance-ha... > And even before Snowden, the NSA wasn’t able to provide a single substantiated example of its surveillance dragnet preventing any domestic attack at all. https://news.vice.com/article/the-line-between-fbi-stings-and-entrapment-has-not-blurred-its-gone https://news.vice.com/article/the-line-between-fbi-stings-an... > A report released this week from Human Rights Watch highlights how, consistently, FBI sting operations are over aggressive and premised on the racist profiling of Muslim communities — that old building block of our contemporary national security state. Based on 215 interviews and focusing on 27 post-9/11 cases of alleged terror plot thwarting, HRW's findings call into question the very legitimacy of the FBI's counterterror work. The authors go as far as to call a number of stings "government-created" terror plots. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/nov/16/fbi-entrapment-fake-terror-plots http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/nov/16/fbi-entrapment-... > But the issue is one that stretches far beyond Newburgh. Critics say the FBI is running a sting operation across America, targeting – to a large extent – the Muslim community by luring people into fake terror plots. FBI bureaux send informants to trawl through Muslim communities, hang out in mosques and community centres, and talk of radical Islam in order to identify possible targets sympathetic to such ideals. Or they will respond to the most bizarre of tip-offs, including, in one case, a man who claimed to have seen terror chief Ayman al-Zawahiri living in northern California in the late 1990s. http://www.wired.com/2013/02/american-muslim-terrorism/ http://www.wired.com/2013/02/american-muslim-terrorism/ > Since 9/11, Kurzman and his team tallies, 33 Americans have died as a result of terrorism launched by their Muslim neighbors. During that period, 180,000 Americans were murdered for reasons unrelated to terrorism. In just the past year, the mass shootings that have captivated America’s attention killed 66 Americans, “twice as many fatalities as from Muslim-American terrorism in all 11 years since 9/11,” notes Kurzman’s team. > “Until public opinion starts to recognize the scale of the problem has been lower than we feared, my sense is that public officials are not going to change their policies,” Kurzman says. “Counterterrorism policies have involved surveillance — not just of Muslim-Americans, but of all Americans, and the fear of terrorism has justified intrusions on American privacy and civil liberties all over the internet and other aspects of our lives. I think the implications here are not just for how we treat a religious minority in the U.S., but also how we treat the rights & liberties of everyone.”
  • cafard 11y ago
    Right, but this was in Belgium.
    • cholantesh 11y ago
      But surely it will trickle back into the conversation in NA. Here in Canada, the Liberal government has been unwilling to commit to scaling back programmes put in place by their Conservative predecessors. I think it's a legitimate concern that an incident like this gives them resolve in continuing such programmes.
• prebrov 11y ago
  People are comparing it to the times when here was less screening. Some people probably also assume that higher perceived level of threat that justifies tighter security is not a result of natural development, but of direct action by governments when carrying out their foreign policies. The vicious circle of "we go and do good in the faraway, they blow us up, we tighten local security and do more good in the faraway,…" begs to determine causation in this correlation.
• AnthonyMouse 11y ago
  > For every attack that they "didn't see coming" there are, most likely, plenty of attacks that they "did see coming" and stopped. Even more likely is that we don't hear about these stopped attacks because they aren't sexy news. Or, when attacks ARE stopped, and it's published, people question whether it's just blustering by the government to justify their jobs. The problem with this argument is that it can be used to justify any security measures, no matter how costly or stupid. Because maybe it's really very effective in practice but we can't tell you about it? You're basically saying "trust us, we're the government." It's the recipe for total unaccountability. So no, they have to justify that the costly and stupid security measures actually work. Or we'll have nothing but costly and stupid security measures that don't actually work.
  • tmptmp 11y ago
    >>So no, they have to justify that the costly and stupid security measures actually work. Or we'll have nothing but costly and stupid security measures that don't actually work. How exactly do you want them to justify. Your demand is too vague to be even considered. How do you propose, they should advertise every thwarted terrorist attack, without alerting the other terrorists? All security is plain unproductive overhead, which is compulsory in the presence of adversary. >>You're basically saying "trust us, we're the government." It's the recipe for total unaccountability. You're basically saying, "don't trust the govt" and that is the recipe for total anarchy, which is heaven for terrorists.
    • AnthonyMouse 11y ago
      > How exactly do you want them to justify. Your demand is too vague to be even considered. How do you propose, they should advertise every thwarted terrorist attack, without alerting the other terrorists? How about they stop doing it and if the level of terrorism remains in the "still kills fewer people than bathtubs" range, we realize we didn't need it. > All security is plain unproductive overhead, which is compulsory in the presence of adversary. All security is compulsory? Madness. Security is risk management. All government activity is risk. You spend a dollar on surveillance technology instead of scientific research that would have led to safer products or life saving medicine and people die. You take a dollar from the taxpayer who now can't afford those products or medicine and people die. Government waste kills more people than terrorism. To say nothing of the people bad governments kill much more directly. > You're basically saying, "don't trust the govt" and that is the recipe for total anarchy Only if by anarchy you mean democracy.