3 ms·

I resent (and reject the need for) the growth of the "security" apparatus as much as (almost) anybody else, but it's worth pointing out that what works for catc

by srl 13y ago

I resent (and reject the need for) the growth of the "security" apparatus as much as (almost) anybody else, but it's worth pointing out that what works for catching the "pros" is quite different from what works for catching amateurs. Pros are capable of inflicting greater damage, and are therefore a greater threat in that respect, but tend to organize in order to get access to larger resources. That means there's a larger target to "hit" when probing for information, and it makes picking up on plots much easier. An amateur can't inflict as much damage, but can do so practically undetected, and there's really not much that can be done about it AFAIK. Thought experiment: suppose you wanted to kill as many people and cause as much chaos as you could. How would you go about it? And how easy would it be for the security apparatus to catch you? Would you be able to, evading capture, perform another attack a week later? How long could you go on? It's really quite fortunate that the sort of people who want to do large amounts of violence, are exactly the sort of people who tend not be very good at it.

6d0debc071 13y ago
> Thought experiment: suppose you wanted to kill as many people and cause as much chaos as you could. How would you go about it? I was about to answer this and then realised how stupid it would be to give people ideas on how to kill vast numbers of people with off the shelf equipment. I will say that it doesn't seem like a hard problem to me, and I can see ways you could achieve rates in the hundreds of people a month. > And how easy would it be for the security apparatus to catch you? Pretty much impossible beforehand. Depending on what one did and where, it wouldn't necessarily be that hard. Some of the ideas I had seem long-term viable though - the sort of thing you could repeat with little chance of getting caught. > Would you be able to, evading capture, perform another attack a week later? How long could you go on? Some currently vulnerable infrastructure would probably harden over time but I've put like five seconds thought into this, I'm sure there are other things that one could do as well. And even if the number of deaths might not be huge - 20 people here, 20 people there, maybe a few hundred with a higher concentration target - the fact that you could strike many targets at once, and how difficult it would be to secure against you.... I think you could do very significant damage. The fear you'd induce in people, every day knowing that, for instance, if their kids go to school, maybe they never come home again. Or if they go shopping, or.... It's a horrible thing to think about. If that sort of crap was going on, and the police weren't catching this guy, I'm not sure I could bring myself to send my daughter out in public even knowing that statistically the risk per person would still be very low. I'm not sure that people could get used to the idea that every month a few hundred of them were going to die. Maybe we'd just learn to live with it but it'd require a major shift in how we reacted to visible risks.
- dragonsky 13y ago
  I'm certain that people would get used to it. They seem to live with the fact that every month hundreds of people are killed and maimed in car accidents. The British got on fairly well during the Irish Troubles, with the fact that the IRA was fairly effective at striking against English targets. You seem to forget that people have a very strong urge to believe that "it won't happen to me".
  - 6d0debc071 13y ago
    Well, that's true and I agree with you on the numbers thing - 125 people died in England during the troubles, after which the UK government effectively threw the towel in, and people generally seem to believe that they have some sort of control over their risks in the case of driving. ~ 194 people a month die from car accidents in the UK - which you could be competitive with. I'm not sure at the moment that they'd respond the same way to a continual and chaotic threat of a higher magnitude than the troubles though. I'm not saying that I think they wouldn't get over it, mind. I'm just not sure that there's enough data to choose one way or the other. It seems to me, if you could get a bunch of people to copy you - (and the first order of business if you just wanted to cause as much damage as possible would probably be anonymously mass mailing a guide that let other people do it too) - that a closer analogue would be somewhere like Mexico. But even there the killings aren't precisely random.
uptown 13y ago
"The federal government added the name of the dead Boston Marathon bombing suspect to a terrorist database 18 months before the deadly explosions, U.S. officials told The Associated Press on Wednesday." http://bigstory.ap.org/article/officials-dead-bomber-name-terrorism-database http://bigstory.ap.org/article/officials-dead-bomber-name-te...
- wisty 13y ago
  > About a year ago, there were some 745,000 people listed in the database. Wow. Suspected terrorists outnumber the Army and Marines, put together!

by srl 13y ago

6d0debc071 13y ago

> Thought experiment: suppose you wanted to kill as many people and cause as much chaos as you could. How would you go about it? I was about to answer this and then realised how stupid it would be to give people ideas on how to kill vast numbers of people with off the shelf equipment. I will say that it doesn't seem like a hard problem to me, and I can see ways you could achieve rates in the hundreds of people a month. > And how easy would it be for the security apparatus to catch you? Pretty much impossible beforehand. Depending on what one did and where, it wouldn't necessarily be that hard. Some of the ideas I had seem long-term viable though - the sort of thing you could repeat with little chance of getting caught. > Would you be able to, evading capture, perform another attack a week later? How long could you go on? Some currently vulnerable infrastructure would probably harden over time but I've put like five seconds thought into this, I'm sure there are other things that one could do as well. And even if the number of deaths might not be huge - 20 people here, 20 people there, maybe a few hundred with a higher concentration target - the fact that you could strike many targets at once, and how difficult it would be to secure against you.... I think you could do very significant damage. The fear you'd induce in people, every day knowing that, for instance, if their kids go to school, maybe they never come home again. Or if they go shopping, or.... It's a horrible thing to think about. If that sort of crap was going on, and the police weren't catching this guy, I'm not sure I could bring myself to send my daughter out in public even knowing that statistically the risk per person would still be very low. I'm not sure that people could get used to the idea that every month a few hundred of them were going to die. Maybe we'd just learn to live with it but it'd require a major shift in how we reacted to visible risks.

dragonsky 13y ago
I'm certain that people would get used to it. They seem to live with the fact that every month hundreds of people are killed and maimed in car accidents. The British got on fairly well during the Irish Troubles, with the fact that the IRA was fairly effective at striking against English targets. You seem to forget that people have a very strong urge to believe that "it won't happen to me".
- 6d0debc071 13y ago
  Well, that's true and I agree with you on the numbers thing - 125 people died in England during the troubles, after which the UK government effectively threw the towel in, and people generally seem to believe that they have some sort of control over their risks in the case of driving. ~ 194 people a month die from car accidents in the UK - which you could be competitive with. I'm not sure at the moment that they'd respond the same way to a continual and chaotic threat of a higher magnitude than the troubles though. I'm not saying that I think they wouldn't get over it, mind. I'm just not sure that there's enough data to choose one way or the other. It seems to me, if you could get a bunch of people to copy you - (and the first order of business if you just wanted to cause as much damage as possible would probably be anonymously mass mailing a guide that let other people do it too) - that a closer analogue would be somewhere like Mexico. But even there the killings aren't precisely random.

uptown 13y ago

"The federal government added the name of the dead Boston Marathon bombing suspect to a terrorist database 18 months before the deadly explosions, U.S. officials told The Associated Press on Wednesday." http://bigstory.ap.org/article/officials-dead-bomber-name-terrorism-database http://bigstory.ap.org/article/officials-dead-bomber-name-te...

wisty 13y ago
> About a year ago, there were some 745,000 people listed in the database. Wow. Suspected terrorists outnumber the Army and Marines, put together!