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Even assuming it's true and these leaks made it harder to catch terrorists (I would be surprised if it made a huge difference), I have to say I really don't car

by x1798DE 12y ago

Even assuming it's true and these leaks made it harder to catch terrorists (I would be surprised if it made a huge difference), I have to say I really don't care. Terrorism is not a very significant real risk to people living in the first world (compared to the risk of fatal lightning strike or drowning in a bathtub, for example), but pervasive mass surveillance is. In general, it's kinda absurd to imagine that anything that helps terrorists is something we don't want to do. Terrorist operations are probably helped by lots of things like cheap availability of computer and communications equipment, low travel costs, access to clean drinking water and food, etc.

collyw 12y ago
I took a flight back to Scotland last year. There was an anti-terrorism poster, asking to be on the look out for any of these suspicious thing: A van, a laptop, a mobile phone... It was just ridiculous every day stuff that the average person would use.
localhost3000 12y ago
"Terrorism is not a very significant real risk..." ...I get what you're saying but tell that to anyone who was living in or near NYC in 2001. Or anyone in or near Copley square last year. (I qualify for both...) the "More people die from [insert ridiculous thing like bee stings]!" argument doesn't work for me because there's not much you can do about bees/lightning/the existence of bathtubs but there's plenty to be done about bombs/guns/jihadists/etc. Not advocating NSA-esque tactics just reacting to the oft-used "this isn't a significant risk so why bother" argument, which I think is BS.
- jjoonathan 12y ago
  For every person that died in NYC, ~10 died in Afghanistan and ~30 died in Iraq. I suspect their families and the people around them feel much the same way. It's fortunate for both of us that they can't effectively fight back.
- x1798DE 12y ago
  There's something you can do for all of those things. You can avoid beestings by always wearing a beekeeper's outfit. You can avoid lightning strikes by always keeping yourself grounded. You can avoid dying in a bathtub by never taking a bath. These are actually way easier deaths to prevent than stopping terrorism, where you have an active adversary who, without your intervention, will work to attack you. There's always a cost-benefit tradeoff with every risk you take. Terrorism is an insanely small risk - in 2012 33,000 people died in motor vehicle accidents, which is about 2750 people each month. Compare to 9/11, which was the worst terrorist attack in history, where 3000 people died. Basically, there is accidental death on the scale of 9/11 happening every single month on US roads. And I'm not even saying we need to do something about that - everyone's pretty comfortable with the level of risk they take when driving. It's just not a big flashy risk like the kind that shows up on the news. Terrorism probably feels riskier because it happens in big clumps. If you were anywhere except a very specific building in New York or a very specific building in Washington, DC on 9/11, you were at pretty much zero risk of dying of terrorism, but a huge fraction of the people in those two places were at extremely high risk for death by terrorism. By that logic, we should be spending a whole lot more on near-earth asteroid defenses and research into how to stop the Yellowstone caldera from exploding, because even though neither of those things is particularly likely to be the thing that kills any of us, if they do go off they'll kill a remarkably large number of people.
walshemj 12y ago
I used to work for a organisation that was considered "crown servants" and hence a target for the PIRA I know maybe 7 or so people from NI and two of them are going through the truth and reconciliation process as they had close family members killed - that's a brutal%

by x1798DE 12y ago

collyw 12y ago

I took a flight back to Scotland last year. There was an anti-terrorism poster, asking to be on the look out for any of these suspicious thing: A van, a laptop, a mobile phone... It was just ridiculous every day stuff that the average person would use.

localhost3000 12y ago

"Terrorism is not a very significant real risk..." ...I get what you're saying but tell that to anyone who was living in or near NYC in 2001. Or anyone in or near Copley square last year. (I qualify for both...) the "More people die from [insert ridiculous thing like bee stings]!" argument doesn't work for me because there's not much you can do about bees/lightning/the existence of bathtubs but there's plenty to be done about bombs/guns/jihadists/etc. Not advocating NSA-esque tactics just reacting to the oft-used "this isn't a significant risk so why bother" argument, which I think is BS.

jjoonathan 12y ago
For every person that died in NYC, ~10 died in Afghanistan and ~30 died in Iraq. I suspect their families and the people around them feel much the same way. It's fortunate for both of us that they can't effectively fight back.
x1798DE 12y ago
There's something you can do for all of those things. You can avoid beestings by always wearing a beekeeper's outfit. You can avoid lightning strikes by always keeping yourself grounded. You can avoid dying in a bathtub by never taking a bath. These are actually way easier deaths to prevent than stopping terrorism, where you have an active adversary who, without your intervention, will work to attack you. There's always a cost-benefit tradeoff with every risk you take. Terrorism is an insanely small risk - in 2012 33,000 people died in motor vehicle accidents, which is about 2750 people each month. Compare to 9/11, which was the worst terrorist attack in history, where 3000 people died. Basically, there is accidental death on the scale of 9/11 happening every single month on US roads. And I'm not even saying we need to do something about that - everyone's pretty comfortable with the level of risk they take when driving. It's just not a big flashy risk like the kind that shows up on the news. Terrorism probably feels riskier because it happens in big clumps. If you were anywhere except a very specific building in New York or a very specific building in Washington, DC on 9/11, you were at pretty much zero risk of dying of terrorism, but a huge fraction of the people in those two places were at extremely high risk for death by terrorism. By that logic, we should be spending a whole lot more on near-earth asteroid defenses and research into how to stop the Yellowstone caldera from exploding, because even though neither of those things is particularly likely to be the thing that kills any of us, if they do go off they'll kill a remarkably large number of people.

walshemj 12y ago

I used to work for a organisation that was considered "crown servants" and hence a target for the PIRA I know maybe 7 or so people from NI and two of them are going through the truth and reconciliation process as they had close family members killed - that's a brutal%