As soon as I heard about last week’s terrorist plot and the ensuing travel restrictions, I looked forward to reading Bruce Schneier’s take on things. Like the Cape’s best blogger, I consider myself a fan of his work – you may have seen his piece come through my del.icio.us links. While I think he’s been overly critical at times, he’s also one of the rare pragmatists of the security space. The kind of expert that understands that absurdly complex password rules can actually be more insecure, because they force users into bad habits. More than any of the other ‘experts’ I heard fanning the flames on CNN and other MSM outlets, Schneier implicitly grasps what I consider to be the most fundamentally important truth in the discussion of safety and security in an age of terrorism: realistically, both are impossible.
There are too many targets — stadiums, schools, theaters, churches, the long line of densely packed people before airport security — and too many ways to kill people.
As troubling as that might be for some of us, it’s important that every one of us comes to terms with it, because that’s reality. Even with governments confusing us with all sorts of weird color alerts, you me or anybody else could be hurt or killed due to the actions of an individual who dismisses any doubt with a terrifying sense of surety. As James writes, the math just is not in our favor. These are the facts, and they are not in dispute.
But before that weighs us down like the bleakness of existentialism, it’s important to put that knowledge into some sort of context. And the context, in this case, belies the notion that we are hugely at risk. Just like swimmers and divers need to balance the admittedly horrifying prospect of being attacked by a shark against the knowledge that they are far more likely to be hurt by a car crash or even lightning strike, so too is it necessary for all of us to consider that individually our likelihood of being affected by terrorists is low. As Cory tells us, even in Israel you’re more likely to die in a car crash than from a terrorist strike.
The difficulty is, and this is why I think voices like Schneier’s are so important, that having a scared populace serves not only the terrorists but in some important respects the very governments fighting them. A scared populace, after all, is one that doesn’t ask too many questions. One that looks the other way when the PATRIOT Act is rammed through Congress. One that barely raises an eyebrow at the knowledge that long-standing provisions prohibiting the US Government from spying on its own citizens have in all likelihood been cast aside. And worst of all, a scared populace is one that doesn’t always behave rationally, and consider that by voluntarily surrendering their personal freedoms in the name of an impossible to achieve secure state, one important battle has already been lost. As Cory put it:
The point of terrorism is to create terror, and by cynically convincing us that our very countries are at risk from terrorism, our politicians have delivered utter victory to the terrorists: we are terrified.
As someone who flies a lot – and flew every week before and after 9/11 – I assume a degree of risk that someone who does not fly will not. But life is full of risks, and those risks are as acceptable to me now as they were then. Forget the terrorists for just a moment: every time you step on a plane you’re entrusting yourself to a device with hundreds of thousands of moving parts carrying around tens of thousands of pounds of highly flammable liquid at several hundred miles an hour tens of thousands of feet above the surface of the planet. If you don’t think there’s risk inherent in that decision, you’re fooling yourself. As the great John D once observed of air travel, it’s all ok because while they may kill you, they’re not likely to hurt you.
What makes the decision to fly acceptable for most of us, of course, is the record behind air travel. It is exceedingly unlikely, statistically speaking, that anything dire will happen to you while travelling by air (provided that you don’t consider being stranded overnight in O’Hare six times in one year ‘dire’). But guess what? The numbers say the same thing about terrorism. None of this is to say that we should not do what we can reasonably do to make ourselves safer, but let’s stop trying to pretend that we’ll ever be truly safe. Let’s skip the window dressing security. We’re not safe now, and truth be known we never were. Given that fact, it’s important for all of us to think carefully – very carefully – about what we’re willing to give up in return for a (false) sense of security. Because powers granted are difficult to rescind, and you know what they say about absolute power.
