8 ms·

I completely agree that we've overreacted, but I've always rejected this argument, and here's why: Terrorism is not about numerical risk, it is about public per

I completely agree that we've overreacted, but I've always rejected this argument, and here's why: Terrorism is not about numerical risk, it is about public perception. That means that it plays in the same game as everything else in the PR world: politics, advertising, social signaling, and so forth. The last thing it has anything to do with is logic. It would be great if we could tally up all the things that kill us and spend proportionally on those. It's the logical thing to do. Heart disease would come first, then cancer, and so on. But instead we spend and give attention to those things that the public perceives we should: AIDS research, nuclear war deterrence, terrorism. And if you think about it, that's the way it ought to be. Spending and making laws are all about the consent of the governed, doing things they want. They're not about math or logic. The problem here is that, with the Cold War over, the defense and intelligence industry saw 9-11 as a call to arms. They're going to go out and do things a good defense and intelligence industry should. And as Americans we have traditionally been forgiving of having our civil liberties temporarily trampled on during times of war. But you can't have a war forever. A democracy cannot survive this. Instead of the natural overreaction to a war that always happened, we started creating permanent infrastructure to address all terrorism, forever. We're fighting a war with nobody to surrender, and no amount of spending or government monitoring will ever be enough. The original laws around 9-11 were temporary, and for a very good reason. But somehow politics has gotten to the point where terrorism is the new third-rail: some national politicians might grandstand a bit, but nobody is going to do anything except for give the security state apparatus whatever it says it needs. Otherwise they'd be thrown out of office. Public perception demands it. Adding up numbers has nothing to do with it, unless you're using them to make some kind of persuasive argument, and then we're right back to public perception and politics. You're in the same boat as those who asked for more cancer research instead of AIDS research. Different people, rightly, see things differently, and everybody deserves to be represented. We're running a country, not an insurance agency.

3pt14159 13y ago
When the public act like children our response should not to be lauding the misuse of funds because of their unreasonable demands but to educate them. Failing that, we should ignore them and actually do the things that are in their best interests. The litmus test for me would be this: If I took a sample of the population, thoroughly educated them about the matter to the point where there was no reasonable doubt left, would the majority have changed their position to mine. If so, and if we do not have the resources to teach the public about the nuances of every issue, then acting according to what they would come to believe is ethical. Furthermore it isn't even that simple. Not only is the public damaging itself, but it is also infringing on my rights. The added likelihood that I will die in a car crash vs a plane crash due to the extra hassle and delays at the airport is unsanctionable, regardless of claims to "consent of the governed".
- sopooneo 13y ago
  Though, in a general sense, thorough education might change your own opinion.
kiba 13y ago
And if you think about it, that's the way it ought to be. Spending and making laws are all about the consent of the governed, doing things they want. They're not about math or logic. Righhhhhhhhhhhhht.. Let throw out thinking, ethics, and morality just for some "heart". No, this is not how humanity should conduct themselves. Emotion should be calibrated to logics and numbers, not the other way around. If heart attacks and motor accidents isn't photogenic as terrorism, the response shouldn't be to cater to the terrorism fearing population, but making heart attacks and motor accidents photogenic. Let do what we really want rather than we think we want. Know ourselves, and we will know that pursuing terrorists by losing our liberty should not be our future.
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  It's an interesting question though- which is better, to feel safe or to be safe?
  - gregpilling 13y ago
    Rollercoasters - I get an adrenaline rush when I am safe, but it doesn't feel safe.
    - sliverstorm 13y ago
      Irrational fears- they make your life miserable, even if you know you are probably safe, but don't feel safe.
      - cgmorton 13y ago
        There's a reason 'Phobia' is a clinical diagnosis, not a policy justification.
  - resu_nimda 13y ago
    To be safe. It may be more difficult for people to swallow initially (which explains why no administration has or will act that way, gotta maintain that power now), but I think we would all be better off if society were pushing us towards logic-based policy rather than pandering to irrational emotions. We're sociopolitically treading water (or worse, slowly drowning) by continuing that. Why do we still go to war? Sending our own people to die senselessly by the thousands, for what again? It's 2013 and America is still spending vast sums of money on weapons and war. Utterly ridiculous. But that is what people have done since the dawn of civilization, and despite all of our knowledge and "enlightenment," we're still catering to these primal animal urges. The nihilist in me says "fuck it, if that's what they want, that's what they get," but the idealist weeps at the thought of the existence we could have built...
jivatmanx 13y ago
The purpose of terrorism is to cause fear and overreaction. If we overreact, they win.
- fennecfoxen 13y ago
  "The purpose of terrorism is to cause fear and overreaction." That reminded me of a similar take on that topic from The Economist's latest, which may be worth considering here: "... conventional terrorism poses no major threat to America or to its citizens. But that's not really what it aims to do. Terrorism is basically a political communications strategy... For the president the war on terror is what the Vietnam War was to Lyndon Johnson: a vast, tragic distraction in which he must be seen to be winning, lest the domestic agenda he really cares about (health-care, financial reform, climate-change mitigation, immigration reform, gun control, inequality) be derailed. It's no surprise that he has given the surveillance state whatever it says it needs to prevent a major terrorist attack." - http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2013/06/why-we-spy http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2013/06/wh...
  - DanielBMarkham 13y ago
    Exactly. Computing how many people die from terrorism is completely beside the point. For the terrorists, terrorism isn't about counting up dead enemies. It's about enacting political change. We'd be fools not to understand the war on the terms it is being fought.
    - lutorm 13y ago
      We're fools if we play into their hands, which is exactly what we do when we give in to the irrational fears they want to create.
      - mpyne 13y ago
        Do you honestly believe AQ has been fighting for decades just to get the NSA to take phone records from Verizon? You think Ayman is snickering in a cave somewhere chalking up a tally in the Win column because of that? They have actual political goals, but they don't necessarily care about what America does internally. Certainly they don't send people to die just to give a farmer in North Carolina "irrational fear". They do it for strategic goals all their own. In a manner of speaking, a full embrace of all civil liberties plays directly into their hands as it gives them much more freedom of communication and movement while affording the citizens only a very marginal increase in those civil liberties by comparison. Obviously it doesn't make sense to swing way too far the other way and to restrict our civil liberties so much that they turn into security theatre (like the TSA) without any marginal increase in our ability to deter and defeat terrorism. But acting like taking any change to deter terrorism "let's the terrorists win" is itself kind of missing the point. That's not even the game they're playing.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
belorn 13y ago
> Spending and making laws are all about the consent of the governed. Laws should be about the informed consent of the governed. Security built on a lie is still a lie even if people feel more safe. During the first days of 9-11, the military sent personal down to the airport to reinforce peoples perception of safe travel. What they did not tell anyone at the time, was that the guns did not have any ammunition in them. Instead, the military were basically posing as an "armed force", because having guns with ammunition at airport would then actually create a security issue at the airports. The security theater of the US feels somewhat like a doctor who has started to only give out placebos to his patients. If anyone feels better, sing praises, and if anyone get worse, give them more sugar pills. Soon, everyone start to get sick on the sugar alone, while the sugar pill manufacturer crave for more sick people. The security theater from 9-11 has gone on long enough. People are not going to feel more safe from it, and will just get sicker on the solution.
- finnw 13y ago
  > Laws should be about the informed* consent of the governed* That is a huge can of worms, because it depends on being able to determine who is and isn't "informed."
  - nasmorn 13y ago
    It sure doesnt help if the government constantly exagerates the severity of the issue. This naturally leads to disinformed consent. Not lying so much and not keeping so many secrets would go a long way. Just a decade ago Clinton faced impeachement for trying to keep an affair secret and then lying about it. Nowadays Obama can just do a "no comment" about how many vitizens he is secretly asassinating.
    - Terretta 13y ago
      And this is where an free and independent press comes in, ideally one not beholden to the institutions, government or corporate, on which it reports.
pyre 13y ago
| Spending and making laws are all about the consent | of the governed, doing things they want. They're not | about math or logic. The 'consent' that the public gives here is implicit, not explicit. You can't say that someone agrees with 100% of what their elected official does. It's an impossibility. And many times this should be about math and logic. Do we really know if all of the measures taken after 9/11 are what the public demanded? What if the politicians went over-board and the the American public just went along with it? What if the American public would have been ok with a much smaller reaction? It's not like there was a poll asking the American public: "How far should we go?"
gustavo_duarte 13y ago
I think the Economist did a great job on this in their recent piece: http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2013/06/why-we-spy http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2013/06/wh... Think about the incentives to the _President_ (whoever that is) to NOT let an attack happen, no matter what the cost. As Daniel says, it's not about numerical risk or objective damage, it's perception. Obama would have done anything not to have an attack during his terms. And that's the really sad part. Due to the political process, different interests, and so on, the terrorists WERE able to inflict grievous damage to us as a society.
- cobrausn 13y ago
  He (linked article) tries a bit too hard to paint Obama as a sympathetic figure who 'must' spy on everybody or else he won't be reelected so he can right all the social wrongs in America. His handling of prosecution of whistleblowers doesn't really show him as 'reluctant' to me.
  - gustavo_duarte 13y ago
    I agree with you that the post is soft on Obama, and personally I'm disappointed with the Administration in general. However, I think the main point of the article still holds and is important in our fight towards a stronger rule of law. There's a political game being played here, and we need to see it clearly. I don't mean to defend Obama at all, but _any_ administration is under extreme pressure to "fight terrorism" and this creates a huge distortion between the actual risks and consequences of an attack compared to the measures taken by the Executive branch to: 1) avoid attacks, and 2) create the perception they're doing all they can to avoid attacks. There are also other players, like the defense industry, federal departments, etc., with their own interests at play. Remember DFW's commencement speech? [0] In our situation the political game _is_ the water. We need to see it clearly to fight back and keep our societies lawful and free. While logic is important, it's not going to win an essentially political battle. 0: http://moreintelligentlife.com/story/david-foster-wallace-in-his-own-words http://moreintelligentlife.com/story/david-foster-wallace-in...
Symmetry 13y ago
We actually already have a very good framework for deciding if the number of lives saved by a given program will be worth the expense compared to other things we could be doing with the same money, the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. This isn't applied to defense issues, but I can very much see it being applied to things like terrorism or crime: http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/06/08/counterterrorism_cost_benefit_send_security_measures_to_oira.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/06/08/counterterror... There's also the fact that air travel restrictions probably cost lives on net, because the number of people encouraged to drive instead of fly who then go on to die in traffic accidents almost certainly exceeds the number of people they save from terrorist attacks.
- AnthonyMouse 13y ago
  I think it would be enormously enlightening to calculate the estimated cost-per-life-saved of various elements of the anti-terrorism budget, and compare it to alternative programs that could have used the money. When it comes out to be in the billions-per-life-saved range for anti-terrorism while alternatives like cancer and heart disease research and treatment come in at thousands-per-life-saved, maybe people will get the message.
moogleii 13y ago
>but I've always rejected this argument, and here's why: Terrorism is not about numerical risk, it is about public perception. Isn't that exactly what the article and the argument is getting at?
greghinch 13y ago
The never-ending "war" we insist on having is also highly related to the economy. Since WWII, we've essentially propped the US economy up on the defense industry. If you add up all the defense related spending, including contractors and subcontractors, it almost certainly amounts to a hugely significant portion of our economy, and more importantly employs a massive segment of the population. Folks on the right talk about not wanting to create a welfare state, to have a large segment of the population dependent on the federal government for their livelihoods. Yet those same folks will spend as much as possible on the defense industry, ostensibly doing just that.
gordaco 13y ago
If it was just a PR stunt, PRISM wouldn't have needed to be secret. (OTOH, you could say that all this is a PR stunt and Snowden is being paid to be part of it, but now that would be a conspiracy theory I'm certainly not willing to support)
flyinRyan 13y ago
> Terrorism is not about numerical risk, it is about public perception. Public perception is driven by media. Why was so much time spent covering the Boston bombing? The event claimed three lives, it should have been a byline on the local Boston news. If you self immolate, no news outlet will cover it because they want to discourage this kind of behavior. We need to do the same thing with terrorism for related reasons: terrorism makes people irrational. The risks of terrorism are practically non-existent but people get emotional and irrational about it. So the best thing is to just stop covering terrorist attacks.

3pt14159 13y ago

When the public act like children our response should not to be lauding the misuse of funds because of their unreasonable demands but to educate them. Failing that, we should ignore them and actually do the things that are in their best interests. The litmus test for me would be this: If I took a sample of the population, thoroughly educated them about the matter to the point where there was no reasonable doubt left, would the majority have changed their position to mine. If so, and if we do not have the resources to teach the public about the nuances of every issue, then acting according to what they would come to believe is ethical. Furthermore it isn't even that simple. Not only is the public damaging itself, but it is also infringing on my rights. The added likelihood that I will die in a car crash vs a plane crash due to the extra hassle and delays at the airport is unsanctionable, regardless of claims to "consent of the governed".

sopooneo 13y ago
Though, in a general sense, thorough education might change your own opinion.

kiba 13y ago

And if you think about it, that's the way it ought to be. Spending and making laws are all about the consent of the governed, doing things they want. They're not about math or logic. Righhhhhhhhhhhhht.. Let throw out thinking, ethics, and morality just for some "heart". No, this is not how humanity should conduct themselves. Emotion should be calibrated to logics and numbers, not the other way around. If heart attacks and motor accidents isn't photogenic as terrorism, the response shouldn't be to cater to the terrorism fearing population, but making heart attacks and motor accidents photogenic. Let do what we really want rather than we think we want. Know ourselves, and we will know that pursuing terrorists by losing our liberty should not be our future.

sliverstorm 13y ago
It's an interesting question though- which is better, to feel safe or to be safe?
- gregpilling 13y ago
  Rollercoasters - I get an adrenaline rush when I am safe, but it doesn't feel safe.
  - sliverstorm 13y ago
    Irrational fears- they make your life miserable, even if you know you are probably safe, but don't feel safe.
    - cgmorton 13y ago
      There's a reason 'Phobia' is a clinical diagnosis, not a policy justification.
- resu_nimda 13y ago
  To be safe. It may be more difficult for people to swallow initially (which explains why no administration has or will act that way, gotta maintain that power now), but I think we would all be better off if society were pushing us towards logic-based policy rather than pandering to irrational emotions. We're sociopolitically treading water (or worse, slowly drowning) by continuing that. Why do we still go to war? Sending our own people to die senselessly by the thousands, for what again? It's 2013 and America is still spending vast sums of money on weapons and war. Utterly ridiculous. But that is what people have done since the dawn of civilization, and despite all of our knowledge and "enlightenment," we're still catering to these primal animal urges. The nihilist in me says "fuck it, if that's what they want, that's what they get," but the idealist weeps at the thought of the existence we could have built...

jivatmanx 13y ago

The purpose of terrorism is to cause fear and overreaction. If we overreact, they win.

fennecfoxen 13y ago
"The purpose of terrorism is to cause fear and overreaction." That reminded me of a similar take on that topic from The Economist's latest, which may be worth considering here: "... conventional terrorism poses no major threat to America or to its citizens. But that's not really what it aims to do. Terrorism is basically a political communications strategy... For the president the war on terror is what the Vietnam War was to Lyndon Johnson: a vast, tragic distraction in which he must be seen to be winning, lest the domestic agenda he really cares about (health-care, financial reform, climate-change mitigation, immigration reform, gun control, inequality) be derailed. It's no surprise that he has given the surveillance state whatever it says it needs to prevent a major terrorist attack." - http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2013/06/why-we-spy http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2013/06/wh...
- DanielBMarkham 13y ago
  Exactly. Computing how many people die from terrorism is completely beside the point. For the terrorists, terrorism isn't about counting up dead enemies. It's about enacting political change. We'd be fools not to understand the war on the terms it is being fought.
  - lutorm 13y ago
    We're fools if we play into their hands, which is exactly what we do when we give in to the irrational fears they want to create.
    - mpyne 13y ago
      Do you honestly believe AQ has been fighting for decades just to get the NSA to take phone records from Verizon? You think Ayman is snickering in a cave somewhere chalking up a tally in the Win column because of that? They have actual political goals, but they don't necessarily care about what America does internally. Certainly they don't send people to die just to give a farmer in North Carolina "irrational fear". They do it for strategic goals all their own. In a manner of speaking, a full embrace of all civil liberties plays directly into their hands as it gives them much more freedom of communication and movement while affording the citizens only a very marginal increase in those civil liberties by comparison. Obviously it doesn't make sense to swing way too far the other way and to restrict our civil liberties so much that they turn into security theatre (like the TSA) without any marginal increase in our ability to deter and defeat terrorism. But acting like taking any change to deter terrorism "let's the terrorists win" is itself kind of missing the point. That's not even the game they're playing.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

belorn 13y ago

> Spending and making laws are all about the consent of the governed. Laws should be about the informed consent of the governed. Security built on a lie is still a lie even if people feel more safe. During the first days of 9-11, the military sent personal down to the airport to reinforce peoples perception of safe travel. What they did not tell anyone at the time, was that the guns did not have any ammunition in them. Instead, the military were basically posing as an "armed force", because having guns with ammunition at airport would then actually create a security issue at the airports. The security theater of the US feels somewhat like a doctor who has started to only give out placebos to his patients. If anyone feels better, sing praises, and if anyone get worse, give them more sugar pills. Soon, everyone start to get sick on the sugar alone, while the sugar pill manufacturer crave for more sick people. The security theater from 9-11 has gone on long enough. People are not going to feel more safe from it, and will just get sicker on the solution.

finnw 13y ago
> Laws should be about the informed* consent of the governed* That is a huge can of worms, because it depends on being able to determine who is and isn't "informed."
- nasmorn 13y ago
  It sure doesnt help if the government constantly exagerates the severity of the issue. This naturally leads to disinformed consent. Not lying so much and not keeping so many secrets would go a long way. Just a decade ago Clinton faced impeachement for trying to keep an affair secret and then lying about it. Nowadays Obama can just do a "no comment" about how many vitizens he is secretly asassinating.
  - Terretta 13y ago
    And this is where an free and independent press comes in, ideally one not beholden to the institutions, government or corporate, on which it reports.

pyre 13y ago

| Spending and making laws are all about the consent | of the governed, doing things they want. They're not | about math or logic. The 'consent' that the public gives here is implicit, not explicit. You can't say that someone agrees with 100% of what their elected official does. It's an impossibility. And many times this should be about math and logic. Do we really know if all of the measures taken after 9/11 are what the public demanded? What if the politicians went over-board and the the American public just went along with it? What if the American public would have been ok with a much smaller reaction? It's not like there was a poll asking the American public: "How far should we go?"

gustavo_duarte 13y ago

I think the Economist did a great job on this in their recent piece: http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2013/06/why-we-spy http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2013/06/wh... Think about the incentives to the _President_ (whoever that is) to NOT let an attack happen, no matter what the cost. As Daniel says, it's not about numerical risk or objective damage, it's perception. Obama would have done anything not to have an attack during his terms. And that's the really sad part. Due to the political process, different interests, and so on, the terrorists WERE able to inflict grievous damage to us as a society.

cobrausn 13y ago
He (linked article) tries a bit too hard to paint Obama as a sympathetic figure who 'must' spy on everybody or else he won't be reelected so he can right all the social wrongs in America. His handling of prosecution of whistleblowers doesn't really show him as 'reluctant' to me.
- gustavo_duarte 13y ago
  I agree with you that the post is soft on Obama, and personally I'm disappointed with the Administration in general. However, I think the main point of the article still holds and is important in our fight towards a stronger rule of law. There's a political game being played here, and we need to see it clearly. I don't mean to defend Obama at all, but _any_ administration is under extreme pressure to "fight terrorism" and this creates a huge distortion between the actual risks and consequences of an attack compared to the measures taken by the Executive branch to: 1) avoid attacks, and 2) create the perception they're doing all they can to avoid attacks. There are also other players, like the defense industry, federal departments, etc., with their own interests at play. Remember DFW's commencement speech? [0] In our situation the political game _is_ the water. We need to see it clearly to fight back and keep our societies lawful and free. While logic is important, it's not going to win an essentially political battle. 0: http://moreintelligentlife.com/story/david-foster-wallace-in-his-own-words http://moreintelligentlife.com/story/david-foster-wallace-in...

Symmetry 13y ago

We actually already have a very good framework for deciding if the number of lives saved by a given program will be worth the expense compared to other things we could be doing with the same money, the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. This isn't applied to defense issues, but I can very much see it being applied to things like terrorism or crime: http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/06/08/counterterrorism_cost_benefit_send_security_measures_to_oira.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/06/08/counterterror... There's also the fact that air travel restrictions probably cost lives on net, because the number of people encouraged to drive instead of fly who then go on to die in traffic accidents almost certainly exceeds the number of people they save from terrorist attacks.

AnthonyMouse 13y ago
I think it would be enormously enlightening to calculate the estimated cost-per-life-saved of various elements of the anti-terrorism budget, and compare it to alternative programs that could have used the money. When it comes out to be in the billions-per-life-saved range for anti-terrorism while alternatives like cancer and heart disease research and treatment come in at thousands-per-life-saved, maybe people will get the message.

moogleii 13y ago

>but I've always rejected this argument, and here's why: Terrorism is not about numerical risk, it is about public perception. Isn't that exactly what the article and the argument is getting at?

greghinch 13y ago

The never-ending "war" we insist on having is also highly related to the economy. Since WWII, we've essentially propped the US economy up on the defense industry. If you add up all the defense related spending, including contractors and subcontractors, it almost certainly amounts to a hugely significant portion of our economy, and more importantly employs a massive segment of the population. Folks on the right talk about not wanting to create a welfare state, to have a large segment of the population dependent on the federal government for their livelihoods. Yet those same folks will spend as much as possible on the defense industry, ostensibly doing just that.

gordaco 13y ago

If it was just a PR stunt, PRISM wouldn't have needed to be secret. (OTOH, you could say that all this is a PR stunt and Snowden is being paid to be part of it, but now that would be a conspiracy theory I'm certainly not willing to support)

flyinRyan 13y ago

> Terrorism is not about numerical risk, it is about public perception. Public perception is driven by media. Why was so much time spent covering the Boston bombing? The event claimed three lives, it should have been a byline on the local Boston news. If you self immolate, no news outlet will cover it because they want to discourage this kind of behavior. We need to do the same thing with terrorism for related reasons: terrorism makes people irrational. The risks of terrorism are practically non-existent but people get emotional and irrational about it. So the best thing is to just stop covering terrorist attacks.