12 ms·

Just how many lives has terrorism claimed in the past decade? Smoking has probably claimed more lives just today than terrorist attacks on US soil in the past

by carlob 13y ago

Just how many lives has terrorism claimed in the past decade? Smoking has probably claimed more lives just today than terrorist attacks on US soil in the past decade. So I don't think it warrants any action at all. Let's face it the aim of terrorism is to scare people and if we are so scared that we're giving away basic human rights (and correspondence secrecy is a basic human right) then the terrorist won.

hnriot 13y ago
You're missing the first rule of any bureaucracy like the NSA, it has nothing to do with catching terrorists, but far more to do with perpetuating the bureaucracy and increasing it's budget. Catching anyone is a distant second.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
wicknicks 13y ago
I cringe at the idea of traveling nowadays because of all the drama at the security checkpoints. Taking off hoodie, shoes, keys, laptop.. Its painful enough to remember to put them on once, that I need to do it again at the airport with a long line behind me.
3am 13y ago
"Decade" is a very convenient window. How about 15 years (or even 12)? Also, smoking is an awful example because - due to the dishonesty of the cigarette industry and the real health risks - there was massive federal regulation of tobacco consumption and marketing starting in the 1970s, as well as the $200B+ Tobacco Master Settlement that came later. There was enormous public action at the state and federal level against the tobacco industry. EDIT: I dont' care about karma any more, but you downvoters suck. pg, mark my words that this Snowden/NSA crap will be the end of HN as a quality forum. It's unreadable lately. Every tin-foil hatter or teenage naif out there is using it as their personal forum in this pissing match of who can be more strident over something that any halfway intelligent person had assumed was happening already.
- mikeash 13y ago
  You can include 9/11 in the window, it doesn't make any quantitative difference. Terrorism is a negligible threat no matter how you slice it. 9/11 was less than a month's worth of American traffic fatalities. Why don't reckless drivers get even 1/100th of the attention?
  - 3am 13y ago
    Are you joking? Do you know the cumulative cost of policing US roads, prosecuting offenders, and jailing the felonious vehicular offenders? I bet it's a lot more that 1% of the NSA budget. Also, I'm going out on a limb and assuming you know no more than me about the probability of future terrorist threats, and the value of your opinion is equally negligible.
    - mikeash 13y ago
      Almost none of the policing you mention is directed at reckless driving. The vast majority of highway policing is for excessive (but generally safe) speed, and much of the rest is enforcing bureaucratic nonsense (expired tags!). They get close with DUI enforcement, but non-drunken reckless driving goes basically ignored. None of us can predict the future, but why would you assume terrorism wouldn't continue to be a negligible threat? Sure, it could suddenly become a leading cause of deaths in the USA, but so could kittens, in theory. If you want the government to continue to pour billions (arguably trillions if you count certain military actions on the ledger) into defending against terrorism, you'd better have an argument that goes beyond "nobody knows, but it could get bad!"
      - lupatus 13y ago
        I think your metrics for concern about potential threats is a little skewed. You seem to be looking at "concern about a potential threat" has having a 1-dimensional score. Yes, there are more instances of death by hammer in the USA in a given year than there are terrorist attacks. But, the terrorist attacks have the potential for much larger impact (see links, below). Consider a 2-dimensional score for threat scenarios where we multiply likelihood of occurrence by potential impact for the following scenarios: Scenario A: Bludgeoned to death by a hammer. Scenario B: Terrorists recover a missing Cold-war era nuke, and detonate it over Iowa, during the winter. Effects are: nuclear explosion, EMP pulse disrupting power grid and electronics, disruption in home heating and food/medical supplies, downwind radioactive fallout over Chicago, Ohio, Pittsburgh, Philly, Boston, New York, Baltimore, DC, etc.. Scoring (pulling these numbers out of my arse for illustration purposes): Scenario A: 6000 occurrences per year * 1.2 deaths per occurrence = 12000 Scenario B: 0.2 terrorist occurrences per year * (10 million fatalities + ((0.5 fatality / endangered) * 150 million endangered) = 17 million As you can see, the terrorism is a lot more serious than hammers (or kittens). And, something like the NSA program could catch these potential large-impact events, because there are a lot of realistic and very scary scenarios: (A short list from some quick duckduckgo-ing) http://www.natureworldnews.com/articles/1002/20130325/deadly-virus-sample-goes-missing-texas-lab.htm http://www.natureworldnews.com/articles/1002/20130325/deadly... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ksYDuIuuAE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ksYDuIuuAE http://www.cfr.org/weapons-of-terrorism/loose-nukes/p9549 http://www.cfr.org/weapons-of-terrorism/loose-nukes/p9549 http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Los-Alamos-can-t-find-two-vials-of-plutonium-2608951.php http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Los-Alamos-can-t-find-two... http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2011/09/usa-lost-tons-nuclear-weapon-uranium http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2011/09/usa-lost-tons-nuclea... http://www.mentalfloss.com/article/17483/8-nuclear-weapons-us-has-lost http://www.mentalfloss.com/article/17483/8-nuclear-weapons-u... http://rense.com/general33/mss.htm http://rense.com/general33/mss.htm http://www.nbcnews.com/id/9355413/ns/health-infectious_diseases/t/plague-infected-lab-mice-missing-new-jersey/#.Ucnk7_nOnbM http://www.nbcnews.com/id/9355413/ns/health-infectious_disea... P.S. Hello, NSA! I'm guessing this comment has gotten caught in some of your filters. I just want to say, keep up the good work. My brother-in-law works at Fort Mead, too. -Updated for grammar.
walshemj 13y ago
Directly in the USA or world wide several hundred thousand I would imagine. or don't people like the young woman who wanted an education and was shot in the head for her pains? or the poor civilians caught up in the brutal and horrific wars in Africa where warlords use terror as a tool to control the population.
yeezusnice 13y ago
I'm not sure I'm hearing you right. Say you're President. How many lives would an act of pre-meditated terror have take to be worth your while? 10000? what if it were 100 a day for 100 days? Still less than car fatalities in a year. 9/11 happened.. ho hum.. call me when it's over
- mikeash 13y ago
  "9/11 happened.. ho hum.. call me when it's over" Imagine what the world would be like today if the US government had somehow managed to take this approach in 2001. (I say "somehow" because even if Bush and everyone around him wanted to do it this way, people were calling for blood.) Here's what I see: 1. Al Qaeda remains a global nuisance but ignorable. 2. The governments of Iraq and Afghanistan remain more or less like they were. The population of those countries is probably differently off than they are in reality, but not necessarily better or worse. 3. The US federal debt is several trillion dollars lower. 4. The US economy is doing better. 5. No PATRIOT act, nobody rotting away in Guantanamo, somewhat less ubiquitous surveillance. All in all, sounds like a big win. Do you disagree?
  - lnanek2 13y ago
    Don't wars help the economy?
    - mikeash 13y ago
      Eisenhower certainly didn't think so, and he lived through the main example people bring up to support it: "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed."
      - mpyne 13y ago
        That implies that the people who push and pay for guns and rockets would ever allocate that money to food or clothes, if it wasn't spent for the former. As far as resourcing goes food and clothing is as easy a problem to solve as the U.S. will ever encounter; it is the will to solve it that is necessary.
Fice 13y ago
Yes, and about 40,000 people die every year in car accidents in the US. Terrorism is nothing compared to that.
- jsz0 13y ago
  The comparison to automobiles is interesting because this is another example where we do sacrifice freedoms to enhance safety. At the state level we have licenses, registrations, speed limits, mandatory seat belt laws, insurance mandates, etc. At the federal level we have safety standards. Not sure it's terribly relevant just an interesting parallel.
  - mikeash 13y ago
    It's especially interesting because a lot of automobile safety revolves around mitigating damage once an incident occurs, and there's a fairly concrete number (IIRC around $3 million) for how much money it's worth spending to save one additional life. Neither one would be considered even remotely acceptable in counterterrorism.
    - malandrew 13y ago
      Some discussion here on that: http://www.nytimes.com/1995/01/29/business/how-much-for-a-life-try-3-million-to-5-million.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm http://www.nytimes.com/1995/01/29/business/how-much-for-a-li...
- Tangaroa 13y ago
  Cars do not deliberately kill people for thinking the wrong kind of thought. The victims of random car accidents were not killed for their political viewpoint, for speaking out against the wrong candidate, for being of the wrong religion, or for the colour of their skin. Terrorism threatens the entire society by discouraging people from exercising their rights and freedoms, and replacing that society's law with the whims of whoever can muster the most violent force.
jsz0 13y ago
Just how many lives has terrorism claimed in the past decade? It's easy to answer that question now. No one knew the answer to that a decade ago. No one knows how many lives terrorism will claim in the next decade. The government does have to plan for the worst case scenario.
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  > The government does have to plan for the worst case scenario. No more so than the government needs to consider all other scenarios, and the costs of any policy choice in those scenarios, and use the likelihood along with the potential costs and benefits of each scenario in assessing the desirability of the policy. Otherwise, planning for the worst case scenario just becomes a convenient excuse for policies that make life considerably worse for everyone in the most likely scenario.
- Spearchucker 13y ago
  That doesn't make much sense. What's the objective? If it IS saving lives, then a lot less money than the NSA burns up can be spent saving a lot more drug addicts, cancer sufferers, typhoid, HIV, and so on - there are millions more deaths than those caused by terrorism - no matter how unquantifiable those are.
- mikeash 13y ago
  Replace "terrorism" with "killer robots" or "sharks" or "bedbugs". Your statement remains as valid as ever, but somehow the government is only spending billions (or trillions) on one of them. Why?
  - malandrew 13y ago
    Don't know about the latter two, but they aren't worrying about the former because they own almost all of the killer robots.
  - jsz0 13y ago
    The NSA does a lot more than just fight terrorism and of course the US invests a huge amount of money in mitigating the impact of other risks like natural disasters. They have to look at all these different threats and divvy up the money accordingly.
mrt0mat0 13y ago
I actually agree with this argument. I do believe terrorism shouldn't be ignored, but terrorism isn't about killing. it's about terror. we are terrified of terrorists and anything that resembles them. therefore: the terrorists have already won. when we give up our basic civil rights to protect ourselves from them, that's terror. I'm honestly more threatened by my government than terrorists. Terrorists have one thing they can do, kill. They know it will probably cause their death and the death of their citizens. The government can torture you, ruin your life in many ways, and still kill you, and there seems to be no repercussions. Look at the NSA guy that lied on live television under oath, and got caught on it two weeks later. where's the purjery? I fear MY government... that's messed up
wippler 13y ago
It's not about the number of lives but it is about the state of fear that grips the state afterwards. That anything can happen and government has no power to stop that.
- Spearchucker 13y ago
  I spent a decade in South Africa where the ANC bombed the shit out of it, and there was concern, not terror. No one I encountered was afraid, let alone terrified. Each death was a tragedy, but like the IRA terror bombings in London, people just carry on with their lives. Are you terrified?
  - flyinRyan 13y ago
    This is the funniest thing about the US. Some places experience actual terrorism and they don't let it control their lives. The US has one successful attack of 3k people (to be fair, that's pretty big for a terrorist attack) one time and go literally insane.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
Tangaroa 13y ago
I don't know about the past decade, but here is a list of recent terrorist attacks: http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/index.html#Attacks http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/index.html#Attacks I count 339 dead in the past ten days. This only counts attacks by Islamic terrorists, not by any other type of terrorist.

by carlob 13y ago

hnriot 13y ago

You're missing the first rule of any bureaucracy like the NSA, it has nothing to do with catching terrorists, but far more to do with perpetuating the bureaucracy and increasing it's budget. Catching anyone is a distant second.

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

wicknicks 13y ago

I cringe at the idea of traveling nowadays because of all the drama at the security checkpoints. Taking off hoodie, shoes, keys, laptop.. Its painful enough to remember to put them on once, that I need to do it again at the airport with a long line behind me.

3am 13y ago

"Decade" is a very convenient window. How about 15 years (or even 12)? Also, smoking is an awful example because - due to the dishonesty of the cigarette industry and the real health risks - there was massive federal regulation of tobacco consumption and marketing starting in the 1970s, as well as the $200B+ Tobacco Master Settlement that came later. There was enormous public action at the state and federal level against the tobacco industry. EDIT: I dont' care about karma any more, but you downvoters suck. pg, mark my words that this Snowden/NSA crap will be the end of HN as a quality forum. It's unreadable lately. Every tin-foil hatter or teenage naif out there is using it as their personal forum in this pissing match of who can be more strident over something that any halfway intelligent person had assumed was happening already.

mikeash 13y ago
You can include 9/11 in the window, it doesn't make any quantitative difference. Terrorism is a negligible threat no matter how you slice it. 9/11 was less than a month's worth of American traffic fatalities. Why don't reckless drivers get even 1/100th of the attention?
- 3am 13y ago
  Are you joking? Do you know the cumulative cost of policing US roads, prosecuting offenders, and jailing the felonious vehicular offenders? I bet it's a lot more that 1% of the NSA budget. Also, I'm going out on a limb and assuming you know no more than me about the probability of future terrorist threats, and the value of your opinion is equally negligible.
  - mikeash 13y ago
    Almost none of the policing you mention is directed at reckless driving. The vast majority of highway policing is for excessive (but generally safe) speed, and much of the rest is enforcing bureaucratic nonsense (expired tags!). They get close with DUI enforcement, but non-drunken reckless driving goes basically ignored. None of us can predict the future, but why would you assume terrorism wouldn't continue to be a negligible threat? Sure, it could suddenly become a leading cause of deaths in the USA, but so could kittens, in theory. If you want the government to continue to pour billions (arguably trillions if you count certain military actions on the ledger) into defending against terrorism, you'd better have an argument that goes beyond "nobody knows, but it could get bad!"
    - lupatus 13y ago
      I think your metrics for concern about potential threats is a little skewed. You seem to be looking at "concern about a potential threat" has having a 1-dimensional score. Yes, there are more instances of death by hammer in the USA in a given year than there are terrorist attacks. But, the terrorist attacks have the potential for much larger impact (see links, below). Consider a 2-dimensional score for threat scenarios where we multiply likelihood of occurrence by potential impact for the following scenarios: Scenario A: Bludgeoned to death by a hammer. Scenario B: Terrorists recover a missing Cold-war era nuke, and detonate it over Iowa, during the winter. Effects are: nuclear explosion, EMP pulse disrupting power grid and electronics, disruption in home heating and food/medical supplies, downwind radioactive fallout over Chicago, Ohio, Pittsburgh, Philly, Boston, New York, Baltimore, DC, etc.. Scoring (pulling these numbers out of my arse for illustration purposes): Scenario A: 6000 occurrences per year * 1.2 deaths per occurrence = 12000 Scenario B: 0.2 terrorist occurrences per year * (10 million fatalities + ((0.5 fatality / endangered) * 150 million endangered) = 17 million As you can see, the terrorism is a lot more serious than hammers (or kittens). And, something like the NSA program could catch these potential large-impact events, because there are a lot of realistic and very scary scenarios: (A short list from some quick duckduckgo-ing) http://www.natureworldnews.com/articles/1002/20130325/deadly-virus-sample-goes-missing-texas-lab.htm http://www.natureworldnews.com/articles/1002/20130325/deadly... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ksYDuIuuAE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ksYDuIuuAE http://www.cfr.org/weapons-of-terrorism/loose-nukes/p9549 http://www.cfr.org/weapons-of-terrorism/loose-nukes/p9549 http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Los-Alamos-can-t-find-two-vials-of-plutonium-2608951.php http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Los-Alamos-can-t-find-two... http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2011/09/usa-lost-tons-nuclear-weapon-uranium http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2011/09/usa-lost-tons-nuclea... http://www.mentalfloss.com/article/17483/8-nuclear-weapons-us-has-lost http://www.mentalfloss.com/article/17483/8-nuclear-weapons-u... http://rense.com/general33/mss.htm http://rense.com/general33/mss.htm http://www.nbcnews.com/id/9355413/ns/health-infectious_diseases/t/plague-infected-lab-mice-missing-new-jersey/#.Ucnk7_nOnbM http://www.nbcnews.com/id/9355413/ns/health-infectious_disea... P.S. Hello, NSA! I'm guessing this comment has gotten caught in some of your filters. I just want to say, keep up the good work. My brother-in-law works at Fort Mead, too. -Updated for grammar.

walshemj 13y ago

Directly in the USA or world wide several hundred thousand I would imagine. or don't people like the young woman who wanted an education and was shot in the head for her pains? or the poor civilians caught up in the brutal and horrific wars in Africa where warlords use terror as a tool to control the population.

yeezusnice 13y ago

I'm not sure I'm hearing you right. Say you're President. How many lives would an act of pre-meditated terror have take to be worth your while? 10000? what if it were 100 a day for 100 days? Still less than car fatalities in a year. 9/11 happened.. ho hum.. call me when it's over

mikeash 13y ago
"9/11 happened.. ho hum.. call me when it's over" Imagine what the world would be like today if the US government had somehow managed to take this approach in 2001. (I say "somehow" because even if Bush and everyone around him wanted to do it this way, people were calling for blood.) Here's what I see: 1. Al Qaeda remains a global nuisance but ignorable. 2. The governments of Iraq and Afghanistan remain more or less like they were. The population of those countries is probably differently off than they are in reality, but not necessarily better or worse. 3. The US federal debt is several trillion dollars lower. 4. The US economy is doing better. 5. No PATRIOT act, nobody rotting away in Guantanamo, somewhat less ubiquitous surveillance. All in all, sounds like a big win. Do you disagree?
- lnanek2 13y ago
  Don't wars help the economy?
  - mikeash 13y ago
    Eisenhower certainly didn't think so, and he lived through the main example people bring up to support it: "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed."
    - mpyne 13y ago
      That implies that the people who push and pay for guns and rockets would ever allocate that money to food or clothes, if it wasn't spent for the former. As far as resourcing goes food and clothing is as easy a problem to solve as the U.S. will ever encounter; it is the will to solve it that is necessary.

Fice 13y ago

Yes, and about 40,000 people die every year in car accidents in the US. Terrorism is nothing compared to that.

jsz0 13y ago
The comparison to automobiles is interesting because this is another example where we do sacrifice freedoms to enhance safety. At the state level we have licenses, registrations, speed limits, mandatory seat belt laws, insurance mandates, etc. At the federal level we have safety standards. Not sure it's terribly relevant just an interesting parallel.
- mikeash 13y ago
  It's especially interesting because a lot of automobile safety revolves around mitigating damage once an incident occurs, and there's a fairly concrete number (IIRC around $3 million) for how much money it's worth spending to save one additional life. Neither one would be considered even remotely acceptable in counterterrorism.
  - malandrew 13y ago
    Some discussion here on that: http://www.nytimes.com/1995/01/29/business/how-much-for-a-life-try-3-million-to-5-million.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm http://www.nytimes.com/1995/01/29/business/how-much-for-a-li...
Tangaroa 13y ago
Cars do not deliberately kill people for thinking the wrong kind of thought. The victims of random car accidents were not killed for their political viewpoint, for speaking out against the wrong candidate, for being of the wrong religion, or for the colour of their skin. Terrorism threatens the entire society by discouraging people from exercising their rights and freedoms, and replacing that society's law with the whims of whoever can muster the most violent force.

jsz0 13y ago

Just how many lives has terrorism claimed in the past decade? It's easy to answer that question now. No one knew the answer to that a decade ago. No one knows how many lives terrorism will claim in the next decade. The government does have to plan for the worst case scenario.

dragonwriter 13y ago
> The government does have to plan for the worst case scenario. No more so than the government needs to consider all other scenarios, and the costs of any policy choice in those scenarios, and use the likelihood along with the potential costs and benefits of each scenario in assessing the desirability of the policy. Otherwise, planning for the worst case scenario just becomes a convenient excuse for policies that make life considerably worse for everyone in the most likely scenario.
Spearchucker 13y ago
That doesn't make much sense. What's the objective? If it IS saving lives, then a lot less money than the NSA burns up can be spent saving a lot more drug addicts, cancer sufferers, typhoid, HIV, and so on - there are millions more deaths than those caused by terrorism - no matter how unquantifiable those are.
mikeash 13y ago
Replace "terrorism" with "killer robots" or "sharks" or "bedbugs". Your statement remains as valid as ever, but somehow the government is only spending billions (or trillions) on one of them. Why?
- malandrew 13y ago
  Don't know about the latter two, but they aren't worrying about the former because they own almost all of the killer robots.
- jsz0 13y ago
  The NSA does a lot more than just fight terrorism and of course the US invests a huge amount of money in mitigating the impact of other risks like natural disasters. They have to look at all these different threats and divvy up the money accordingly.

mrt0mat0 13y ago

I actually agree with this argument. I do believe terrorism shouldn't be ignored, but terrorism isn't about killing. it's about terror. we are terrified of terrorists and anything that resembles them. therefore: the terrorists have already won. when we give up our basic civil rights to protect ourselves from them, that's terror. I'm honestly more threatened by my government than terrorists. Terrorists have one thing they can do, kill. They know it will probably cause their death and the death of their citizens. The government can torture you, ruin your life in many ways, and still kill you, and there seems to be no repercussions. Look at the NSA guy that lied on live television under oath, and got caught on it two weeks later. where's the purjery? I fear MY government... that's messed up

wippler 13y ago

It's not about the number of lives but it is about the state of fear that grips the state afterwards. That anything can happen and government has no power to stop that.

Spearchucker 13y ago
I spent a decade in South Africa where the ANC bombed the shit out of it, and there was concern, not terror. No one I encountered was afraid, let alone terrified. Each death was a tragedy, but like the IRA terror bombings in London, people just carry on with their lives. Are you terrified?
- flyinRyan 13y ago
  This is the funniest thing about the US. Some places experience actual terrorism and they don't let it control their lives. The US has one successful attack of 3k people (to be fair, that's pretty big for a terrorist attack) one time and go literally insane.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

Tangaroa 13y ago

I don't know about the past decade, but here is a list of recent terrorist attacks: http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/index.html#Attacks http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/index.html#Attacks I count 339 dead in the past ten days. This only counts attacks by Islamic terrorists, not by any other type of terrorist.