The "news" is still bathing in the excitement of the last terror attack. Especially with new information that seems to come out every couple of days. A good summary of how this is working is on the link below:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34592031/ns/us_news-crime_and_courts/
What's amusing about all this coverage is I have not found a single mainstream news source that does any kind of analysis on how dangerous terrorism is or evaluates how the "threat of terror" has changed over time. They simply discuss broad generalizations about how "security has failed" which has now prompted new legislation to "improve security."
This is another example of legislation being driven by public opinion (which is itself driven by fear and over-estimation of risk in this case) with little regard for any kind of analysis or serious debate.
So let's think about this for a second. The "database of people with suspected terrorist ties" is now over 500,000 people. Abdulmutallab (the suspect) was, in fact, on the list. His father had even pro-actively gone to the embassy claiming that his son was a threat. Since he was not detected by the various security mechanisms, the mainstream thought has concluded that the list and detection mechanisms do not work. The "solution" of course is to make and invasive and broad system even more invasive and broad. The database will grow larger and the invasiveness will become deeper. What evidence do we have that this works? Very little.
The problem, in essence, is that the threat of terror is simply not very large. It's just not that dangerous and terrorists are simply not that common. Blasphemy! Even if there was a full-on 9-11 style attack every year, it would not be on the top 10 list of life-threatening fears. Why spend so much time on it? Sure, every few years some lunatic will blow up a building, planes or what have you and kill a few thousand people. Should we really adjust our lives around these events? We care because of the intensity of the coverage, the unusualness of the event and the loss of control; NOT because of the empirical dangers of terror.
Lets compare terror attacks to car accidents. Imagine if there was only one car accident every 10 years but it killed 10 million people. Do you think that would get much coverage? Do you think that it would create massive legislation slowing speeds to 20 MPH in order to "prevent such events of massive horror in the future." Now imagine there was ALMOST another accident that ALMOST killed 5 million people. Oh no! The speed limit legislation didn't work! The police checkpoints are not effective. Let's slow speeds down MORE, lets add more checkpoints! We have to stop these car accidents from happening before our whole way of life is threatened! I suspect that if someone suggested legislation of that kind, they would be ridiculed.
From a purely numerical analysis, we should treat "death by terrorism" as simply a cost of existing in a free democracy. We know that we might get killed by a drunk driver - a horrible, unexpected event beyond our control. Do we therefore think we should ban drinking? Should we put checkpoints every mile to make sure "no one is ever killed in this horrible way ever again?" No, it's simply an accepted danger of living in an unpredictable world.
This would normally be just another silly example of people over-reacting to a rare event, stirred into a frenzy by a commercially driven media and a government that has to reflect those social facts. The problem is that there is a general problem where we pay massive costs for having large sections of legislation around singular rare events which we can not prevent anyway. This comes at the cost of preventable, much more dangerous but less singular threats. For example, consider the strides that could be made in cancer, childhood diabetes, heart disease, obesity and a host of other fatal conditions that get far less attention. Imagine if the funds that go against fighting "terror" went to fighting "diabetes." I suspect we would have a much safer world.
Of course, there is the argument that if we didn't spend on the "war on terror" that terrorists would be running around the country bombing at will... killing millions of innocent people, imposing sharia law and converting all of our Christian values into some kind of pro-terror Islamic fundamentalism. Since it's not possible to prove a negative, I can't really dispute that claim. It's possible that because of McCarthyism, the evil communists didn't overrun the country and it's possible that because of the Spanish Inquisition, witches didn't take over the world. To those arguments I simply enact my logical mind and determine that such cases seem very unlikely and if I am faced with the fact that x millions of people will certainly die because of cancer and heart disease, vs. a few thousand who MAY die because of terrorism, and the associated costs on my freedom, I'm going to advocate that the legislation and money could be far better spent. In this line of thinking, if terrorism actually became a substantial killer we would then reply with matching defense mechanisms.
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