5 ms·

Agreed. It takes 10 minutes to find a hardware store shopping list and bomb recipe. Even then, a lot of ingredients can be purchased over time without raising a

Agreed. It takes 10 minutes to find a hardware store shopping list and bomb recipe. Even then, a lot of ingredients can be purchased over time without raising any flags. Buy bleach at one store and ammonia at another, say you're cleaning if anybody asks, then find a public place to mix the two. Once someone decides to kill a lot of people, it's already too late. There is no, repeat, no way to prevent every mass murder. A determined killer will always find a way. Nobody wants to soberly admit that the only way to prevent terrorist attacks are to keep people from wanting to do so in the first place, which is a long and imperfect process with absolutely no guarantee of success. A lot of America's mass shooters are simply deranged and hungry for national infamy.

blowski 10y ago
It sounds like you're saying that because it can't be 100% effective, we shouldn't do it at all. You could say the same about having a lock for your front door, but I bet you've got one.
- throwawayawaya 10y ago
  I have a lock so that if I am burgled my insurance will pay out.
- toyg 10y ago
  The lock on my door is basically a legal seal: the door itself is often so flimsy, you could probably kick it in, but because there is a lock, you can't then claim you entered by accident or that you assumed it was ok to enter. This is why effectiveness is relatively secondary. This sort of surveillance, on the other hand, is supposed to be all about effectiveness... But it ain't.
- CWuestefeld 10y ago
  No, I think you're taking it too far. We only need to conclude that the minimal benefits from the proposal (i.e., few attackes would actually be averted) are vastly outweighed by the extreme cost to our civil liberties. There do exist more reasonable compromises. For example, we as a society have already said that you can search someone's property if you get a court order. That's a smaller cost, because the authorities are forced to go through a supervised process before anyone's privacy is in jeopardy, and it's still sufficient to find the evidence in a huge proportion of cases. But the proposal on the table is extreme. It affects everyone's privacy, before there's even a notion that a crime has been considered.
  - blowski 10y ago
    Other people - probably the majority of the UK population based on opinion polls and elections - weigh the balance differently. We (HN readers) are probably in the extreme minority, and we are not necessarily right.
    - EdHominem 10y ago
      The opinions of laymen only carries weight with those proposing idiotic solutions. Burning down the house to kill a spider is stupid no matter how many people vote for it.
Fiahil 10y ago
> say you're cleaning if anybody asks Why would anybody asks? But, your point stands: I've been absolutely amazed that nobody had blown up our (Parisian) metro at 8:30 in the morning already. If you want a maximum casualty count, just bring a bunch of stuff and shake it in a pressure cooker. Just synchronize payload over multiple lines, and boom, you got something around thousand of casualties, plus a massive panic mouvement, and a genuine fear of public transportation for a while.
- rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
  Exactly about the fear of public transportation. Terrorism is meant to terrify people. Israelites have been dealing with terrorism for decades and it's usually met with a sober reaction reminiscent of the Japanese getting the trains back to running the day after Hiroshima. Terror attacks do happen, but there is hardly the kind of freak out one might find in, say, America.
tomjen3 10y ago
You don't even need to mix anything. Gasoline can be purchased freely in any country and is deadly when poured under doors, especially those doors are blocked.

blowski 10y ago

It sounds like you're saying that because it can't be 100% effective, we shouldn't do it at all. You could say the same about having a lock for your front door, but I bet you've got one.

throwawayawaya 10y ago
I have a lock so that if I am burgled my insurance will pay out.
toyg 10y ago
The lock on my door is basically a legal seal: the door itself is often so flimsy, you could probably kick it in, but because there is a lock, you can't then claim you entered by accident or that you assumed it was ok to enter. This is why effectiveness is relatively secondary. This sort of surveillance, on the other hand, is supposed to be all about effectiveness... But it ain't.
CWuestefeld 10y ago
No, I think you're taking it too far. We only need to conclude that the minimal benefits from the proposal (i.e., few attackes would actually be averted) are vastly outweighed by the extreme cost to our civil liberties. There do exist more reasonable compromises. For example, we as a society have already said that you can search someone's property if you get a court order. That's a smaller cost, because the authorities are forced to go through a supervised process before anyone's privacy is in jeopardy, and it's still sufficient to find the evidence in a huge proportion of cases. But the proposal on the table is extreme. It affects everyone's privacy, before there's even a notion that a crime has been considered.
- blowski 10y ago
  Other people - probably the majority of the UK population based on opinion polls and elections - weigh the balance differently. We (HN readers) are probably in the extreme minority, and we are not necessarily right.
  - EdHominem 10y ago
    The opinions of laymen only carries weight with those proposing idiotic solutions. Burning down the house to kill a spider is stupid no matter how many people vote for it.

Fiahil 10y ago

> say you're cleaning if anybody asks Why would anybody asks? But, your point stands: I've been absolutely amazed that nobody had blown up our (Parisian) metro at 8:30 in the morning already. If you want a maximum casualty count, just bring a bunch of stuff and shake it in a pressure cooker. Just synchronize payload over multiple lines, and boom, you got something around thousand of casualties, plus a massive panic mouvement, and a genuine fear of public transportation for a while.

rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
Exactly about the fear of public transportation. Terrorism is meant to terrify people. Israelites have been dealing with terrorism for decades and it's usually met with a sober reaction reminiscent of the Japanese getting the trains back to running the day after Hiroshima. Terror attacks do happen, but there is hardly the kind of freak out one might find in, say, America.

tomjen3 10y ago

You don't even need to mix anything. Gasoline can be purchased freely in any country and is deadly when poured under doors, especially those doors are blocked.