I guess it's hard to feel in any other way when recent migration policies have translated into a sharp decline of our own security in our own developed countries.
The Paris attackers were French and Belgian, not immigrants. This has been the case with almost all attacks in Europe, where the perpetrators have almost always been local.
That's rather disingenuous. They are second generation immigrants of a particular religion that seems to be coincidentally associated time after time in these incidents.
Second generation immigrants don't mean this a problem with immigration. Lots of people like to link this to the current Syrian refugee crisis, but none of them are refugees. If you want to make it about immigration, make it about immigration from France's former colonies in the 1960s and 70s.
> Second generation immigrants don't mean this a problem with immigration
And that they're not first generation immigrants doesn't prove it isn't a problem with immigration either. We are still left with this recurring coincidence aren't we.
I don't claim to know the absolute truth here, I'm just suggesting we honestly acknowledge reality during discussions.
It's not first generation immigrants or refugees doing this. It's not Syrians doing this. By what possible rationale could you say that recent immigration has anything to do with this, other than that they're Muslim?
> By what possible rationale could you say that recent immigration has anything to do with this
I didn't say it was recent immigration that caused this incident, we both know that (if they are 2nd generation, it couldn't be recent).
> other than that they're Muslim
You think that their religion has absolutely nothing to do with this? I mean, even unjust prejudice within their host country because of their religion could easily cause social isolation and economic disadvantage leading to anger - that seems like a perfectly reasonable explanation to me and largely places the ultimate blame on the host country.
The original comment specified recent immigration. What gave you the impression I thought religion had nothing to do with this? Of course it does. I was talking about immigration though, and the fact they're both Muslim doesn't mean that these incidents have any connection to recent refugees from Syria, aside from the fact that the Syrians are running from these kind of people.
Actually, two of the nine Paris attackers were (probably) from Syria and had come as refugees, as they were registered with fingerprints in Greece.
A few of the others were French and were known to be in Syria, but how they came back to EU is apparently not known (could be with help from people smugglers, avoiding any registration at borders, because some of them were on wanted lists).
So three of them probably came as refugees. One of those has been identified and it turns out he was actually French, but you still assume the two unidentified ones were "real" refugees, rather than other French terrorists who had fought with IS and were trying the same trick?
I can't really say whether they are "real" refugees or not.
The point is more that border checks have ceased to exist.
Schengen area doesn't actually even try to verify who comes in, and that enables also movement of jihadists - even if they are only a few among thousands and thousands, but the few can avoid border controls.
Even if they hate the society they live in, even if they do not accept the laws, even if they do not contribute anything but demand a lot, even if they do not speak the language, even if they raise their kids to become the same religious fags, even if they support people attacking the country where they are "locals"?
They don't fail to integrate, they don't want to. Big difference. I believe there will be a time in Europe, when people will have enough and will demand deportation of every muslim. So 99 good muslims will be deported for every 1 bad muslim. I'm not saying I want this time to come, but what else can happen ? Drastic times == drastic measures.
More people die in the average week from car accidents in Europe than from terrorism in the whole of last year (which was mostly the Paris attacks). I'm not saying we should ban driving, but drastic times etc. Most of the terrorists speak French. I'm not saying we should deport all Francophones, but drastic times..
Integration is a two-way street. It's a 50/50 responsibility shared between host governments and migrants. From what I see, the Arabs/Muslims in Belgium (btw I'm from the same region so spare me your lectures about tolerance and openness for now) are not doing enough to integrate with the wider community but the Belgian authorities and political elites are not doing enough either to integrate these people and combat marginalization and discrimination that they may experience.
Also, Belgium political system is also not helping given its fractured nature thus limiting its options to effectively tackle those challenges and if we take into account the weak economic reality of Brussels add to that its ineffective fight of organized crime (Funding terrorist attacks and armaments) creating a perfect storm for this type of events to flourish whether in Belgium or spilling into other parts of Europe like what happened in Paris last November.
>The Paris attackers were French and Belgian, not immigrants.
Two of the nine were not - they were actual, recent immigrants through asylum-seeking process.
"Ahmad al-Mohammad" who came as a refugee through Turkey to Leroa in Greece, and together with him were registered the fingerprints of another immigrant known as "M. al-Mahmodin".
The rest were second-generation immigrants:
Bilal Hadfi was French but he spent time in Syria and came back, not through controlled border crossings, so he might have come with the asylees/immigrants. Others included French citizens Samy Amimour, who fought in Yemen, and Omar Ismail Mostefai and Foued Mohamed-Aggad who fought in Syria, and they were on wanted lists but were not spotted on border, so they appear to have come through people smugglers as well.
The fact that Hadfi probably returned with refugees doesn't mean much, when he could have easily jumped on the Easyjet from Istanbul and strolled through the blue channel. Yes, two more of them also probably came that way, one of whom was on a false passport. So yes, maybe they were Syrian refugees, but all that says is that they haven't been identified. The fact that the only one of them who travelled that way who was positively identified turned out to be French means this is by no means a foregone conclusion.
If it turns out that they were in fact refugees, that still doesn't make it a migration problem when most of the attackers were French or Belgian.
>The fact that Hadfi probably returned with refugees doesn't mean much, when he could have easily jumped on the Easyjet from Istanbul
If he'd jumped on Easyjet from Istanbul, he'd have had to provide a passport and visa and risk being arrested at border check in case the authorities were too interested in his involvement with extremists.
I don't get your point about blue channel; flights from Istanbul are not EU/Schengen internal.
Again, that's not something that totally prevents acts of terror, but would work as a bit of deterrent. I believe I should have a voice about this, because I live in the same Schengen area.
A throwaway account called “odinduty” is espousing anti-immigration sentiments?
Will wonders never cease. But let’s stick to what HN does best, discuss the wonders of technology. In this case, I’d liek to administer a Turing Test:
The hypothesis is that ”odinduty" is a reasonably sophisticated bot, trained to emulate the kind of comments you find on /r/Europeans. Can we find it making a statement inconsistent with this hypothesis?
What didn't you expect? Hug-protest and tolerance march? People in Benelux are scared since November, after Paris attacks underground was blocked for a few days and military with full armament was on every corner.
My colleague from Luxembourg passed me some news after Paris attacks they had roads blocked and some border controls, so i don't think it's only Belgium.
There are many of us Westerners that have some anti-west tendencies - like anti-surveillance, anti-government-sticking-its-nose-in-where-it-shouldn't-be, anti-corruption-caused-by-lobbyists-and-big-business-running-our-government, etc. etc.
But we're not completely anti-west, we enjoy the freedoms and religious autonomy we're granted and we enjoy the cultural mix that "the West" affords us.
It also doesn't mean we wish to maim and murder the innocent (on either side of the argument!) in order to make our point. I think 99% of us can agree that groups (like ISIS) who think it's acceptable and act to torture and kill the innocent to make their political point need to die in a hell-fire and be damned to all eternity. Or maybe that's just me.
> I think 99% of us can agree that groups (like ISIS) who think it's acceptable and act to torture and kill the innocent to make their political point need to die in a hell-fire and be damned to all eternity.
Oh, completely agree with that.
The only problem is that this description fits not only ISIS, and its opposing government by Assad, it also fits the US friendly Iraq, and Saudi Arabia, and the US government itself, and anybody else that has the intention of doing anything there.
But we, the United States, are more concerned about getting rid of Assad than we are about fighting ISIS, which is why we even train and arm some of the less ISIS-ish ISIS groups that fight Assad.
Assad was one of the few that survived the Arab Spring. The Saudi's was another, and a US ally. It is interesting to note that one of the most regressive regimes in the world, Saudi Arabia is one of America's strongest allies in the middle east. But that's none of my business.
Many believe that getting rid of Assad will end the Syrian refugee crisis. Others observe that when the Saddam and Gaddafi heads were cut off the snake grew ISIS.
There's simply no way that even if we wanted to, restoring Assad in Syria will ever work again. Too many (basically, everyone whose not an Alawite or Christian) people will never acquiesce to living under his rule.
The only difference between Assad and the other remaining dictators in the region is that the US was heavily invested in getting rid of Assad -- and then Russia came and basically ruined their plans indefinitely.
If there's one Muslim country whose government is in dire need of being overthrown it's Turkey -- but sadly Erdogan has learned from his country's past and made sure the military won't turn against him anytime soon.
Assad's regime (and his father's) helped radicalize the population for years, prior to any sort of silly Arab Spring or anything like that. Any post war settlement will by necessity not have to include his family.
Around 2010 I was speaking with a Turkish friend. I expressed my admiration towards the fact that the Turkish military has multiple times intervened to stop the country from becoming religiously-governed. She (while not being religious) did not fully agree, as she thought democracy was more important.
Fast forward a few years and she has completely turned around and regrets her former opinions.
This doesn't really prove what is the correct approach, but I think speaks about the fact that we often make decisions based on some vague ideals as opposed to practical and realistic outcomes - and we are sometimes wrong.
Indeed. We have disapproved the military coups in Turkey over the past decades, but now that there hasn't been one in recent times, we see a religious leadership do purges in the military, the judiciary, and the executive, and then the press, and there's going to be authoritarian rule.
I believe "see it coming" is mean in the way that the security services would be able to predict the attack precisely (when, where, who), given the amount of survelience, data gathering and spying they do.
Alas, the spying is apparently targeting mainly the innocent civilians and is mostly ineffective against criminals.
If the NSA revelations are anything to go by, the only difference between "not enough data" and "too much data" is that the after-the-fact investigations are now a bit easier.
There doesn't seem to be a "Goldilocks" amount of data. Or if there is, intelligence services seem to have no interest in finding it if it means restraining themselves.
Sadly, there were really no answers, just the usual meta discussion.
For any city, I could give the advice: avoid the airport, trains stations, the metro, and famous tourist attractions.
On the other hand, these are typically the places that you need and want to go if you visit a city, so it's anyway better just not care. The risk is very, very, very small.
I think investing in explosives detection is a better approach. It is an irony that there were explosions at the airport while they are screening you completely before boarding a flight.
This is a clear weakness of airports: where people regroup even before reaching the terminal, with no surveillance or security checks whatsoever. And that's not just in Brussels.
Yeah I don't think this is easily mitigated short of increasing throughput through check in / security so that you never have large groups of people standing around.
And of course not just in airports. Train stations, buses, markets, theatres, concerts (Balaclan), anything you have in city life where people gather together.
Metros and mass transit are generally the most lucrative target, as we see here, and as we saw in London 10 years ago.
But why should checkin areas be more protected than any bakery, bus stop or supermarket, any place where people gather. One can't (and shouldn't) put policemen at every corner of every street.
Only place I've seen some security checks was at Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv, where there was a mild security check when entering the airport.
This consisted of a small interview on what I've been doing in Israel, where I am going to, with whom and who packed my stuff. This all was before even entering the actual terminal building.
I see Europe in the future adopting many of the (some call paranoid) security measure of Israel. For example security checks before entering all malls.
I traveled through Baku airport in Azerbaijan last summer which had body and luggage scanners at the entrance to the terminal. I wonder how long before this becomes the norm?
This really won't help the issue. You still create choke points where many people are waiting to pass through the security check.
People interested in killing others will just go for the easiest place, so they will just bomb the line at the scanners entering the terminal.
I talk to a lot of frequent fliers, and almost every one of them has said that there is no point to a terrorist trying to bomb a plane any more. The easiest target for terrorism is simply the insecure portion of an airport. We saw this today in Brussels.
Get dogs trained to detect explosives patrolling all areas of the airport and I'm not sure what they're called, but they have these sniffer devices at the CN tower where they basically make you walk through a large hairdryer and it sniffs the residue blown off you for chemical signatures. It's not perfect, but a combination of those two things any place where you have large volumes of people congregating would surely yield an above average result. The dogs alone I would wager would be an efficient response - they're portable, don't take up much room and can clamber over all kinds of obstacles.
Indeed, you cannot protect any place when more than a few people gather.
You have to stop the issues at their source: why did people who were born and raised in Europe radicalize in just one or two years? And why did the community they lived in not see or report that this was happening?
The trouble is, temporary compensating controls have a history of becoming permanent once in place, so you need to be absolutely sure you want those controls forever.
A malicious person will always be able to find a public space with lots of people. A public square, schoolyard, mall, busy street, library or whatever.
Besides, to defend against suicide bombings, the dogs would have to encounter everyone before they enter the airport checkin area, otherwise the bomber could just detonate once the dog start barking (or whatever they do to mark that they've found something).
Indeed, the explosions were in the checkin area. I was there last week and there's a couple of armed soldiers in the area, but you can walk right in without any security screening.
Many commonplace chemicals, such as hand sanitizer, confound the explosives detectors used at airports. Dogs can only work a very limited time before their sense of smell gets fatigued.
Moreover, the bomb was set off outside the secure area. It is VERY likely that existing security measures got more people killed because there are dense crowds waiting to clear security. This exact type of attack, outside the secure area, was predicted long ago. And there you have it.
Without better information on the whereabouts of the explosion, it's hard to draw any conclusions. But from the photos I've seen, any crowds targeted by the bomber(s) would not have been due to security lines, but rather the densely packed lines at the various airline checkin desks. Unlike most American airports, where broad desks face the outer wall, at Zaventem they're arranged in facing rows like booths at a convention.
Any security lines are actually past passport control, and I've never seen them particularly packed.
TATP (acetone peroxide), the type of improvised explosive favored by terrorists because of the easy access to ingredients, is uniquely difficult to detect but there have been some recent advances in this area [0]
Most of these attackers use vests that carry 2-10kg of TATP, or backpacks with 10+ kilograms. They are required to load these devices up and travel to their designated target, the hope is that with explosive detection you could pick these guys up or minimize casualties in the same way you could identify a gunman on CCTV.
It wouldn't be a panacea - but it could form part of a broader set of new tech to assist with these cases
They don't scan for explosives until you're going through security. If they had the security checkpoint at the entrance to the airport:
a) People would bitch more because it would take forever to get into an airport. And,
b) It isn't practical. What's next, stopping you at your car or bus before you park?
People demand security but don't want inconvenience. And if security fails, they point and say "it's ineffective." Even if it stops 80% of attacks, unless it's 100% people will bitch. AND if there aren't any attacks, can they really claim that they stopped one unless they publicly acknowledge every attempted attack?
It gets worse, since in this case it's not even a trade-off between convenience and security. In Sri Lanka they had (and perhaps still have) security scanning at the entrance to the terminal.
As a result people have to bunch up outside the terminal, making them even more vulnerable than they otherwise would be.
Any true improvements would have to come from streamlined pre-screening, e.g. chemical detectors (or dogs?) in the concourse sniffing things out without making people stop or bunch up. Hard to do.
> - we need more surveillance rights and money for the secret services
Looks like it's not working too well. Surveillance services have gained mass resources since 2015 in France and that did not stop the December attacks at all.
Indeed. It seems to be the prevalent opinion among European counter-terrorism experts that the most effective policies are:
- Bringing more eyes and ears in the form of social workers and community policemen in problematic neighborhoods.
- Provide better education/work opportunities for immigrants.
- Better cooperation between municipalities and Muslim organisations/mosques.
- Deradicalization programs.
Of course, implementing such policies takes time and it's much more popular to present the 'easy solutions' (more surveillance, closing borders, etc.).
France has been doing pretty much the opposite, investing money in surveillance and special forces instead. Belgium has kind of ignored problems.
What are 'deradicalization programs'? I'd say if some people (i.e. some imams) are semi-openly calling for destruction of France, they should just be banished from the country.
Some of them are French citizens with no other nationality - you cannot "banish" them, the only thing you could maybe do is put them in prison, but putting people in prison for speech you don't like is a dangerous avenue.
Wondering why did I get a downvote? Isn't what I said just a valid opinion, on a matter of philosophical (i.e. irresolvable) differences?
Edit: getting more downvotes, without any of the downvoters caring to justify them so far, so I can only speculate as for the reasons behind them.
I'm wondering if the downvoters (I'm guessing from the USA) are aware that my views are already a law in many of the liberal democracies of Europe? There are laws which put you in jail for saying certain things, and they are enforced (there are people who are doing time just for saying things).
>"Of course, implementing such policies takes time and it's much more popular to present the 'easy solutions' (more surveillance, closing borders, etc.)."
Meanwhile, people are dying. That is exactly how some people see it, and exactly how I see it. I'm not emotional, I'm logical, and I expect government to protect us from evil individuals/groups. Arguably, it's not there to foster some sort of "long-term" sustainable co-existence between different cultures.
First, you establish security and root out potential problem groups. And once that's happened, and you have almost non-existent danger to the local populace, then you can start worrying about integration and grey-goals such as "peaceful coexistence" and "de-radicalization". And I don't say that as a means to single-out immigrants, or foreign groups. This reasoning should apply just as much to dangerous elements that are within, and part of society currently.
Nothing? I don't say that the surveillance is a total solution to anything, but certainly the surveillance has helped police to prevent attacks.
Just before Christmas last year:
French police have foiled an attack targeting police and army personnel in the central city of Orléans, Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said on Tuesday. Two men have been arrested.
...
Cazeneuve said 10 attacks had been prevented this year in France, which suffered its worst atrocity for decades last month when Islamist militants killed 130 people in Paris.
The thing often missed is we have absolutely no idea what has been stopped, you don't know if they stopped 50 attacks and just one succeeded. In some instances the 'bomber' may have been identified and stopped in some way, they may have infiltrated the supply chain of parts or countless other things. They can't publicise how they found their intelligence, if it is know how they operate it's makes it easier to evade.
We just don't know, and that is a double edged sword especially when being critical of their powers. I fully appreciate all the arguments about how they operate and what they should and should not be able to do but there needs to be a balance and level of trust.
If you were empowered with gathering intelligence what tools would you want? You are not fighting an army with a different uniform on the other side of the field here.
I also feel governments today are under much more scrutiny than they have ever been. Are we at a place were a new Bin Laden is going to get a new Bush to launch a war. Who knows? But people are much more aware of the costs than in 2001.
Still security responses aren't mature/sophisticated enough to prevent such tragic incidents, and must be given some leeway to evolve.
> - How come this happens again without anyone having seen it coming?
Knowing how Belgium handles their minorities in Brussels, it's not a big surprise.
The fact that this happens now is neither a surprise. Salah Abdeslam has been caught, and there were messages that he wanted to cooperate with the Belgium police. Whether it's true or not, if they were planning something, and he knew about it, waiting was not a real option.
Neighborhoods like Molenbeek are notorious, similar to banlieus in Paris and Lyon. They lost control over it, don't know what happens there. This is happening in all big cities, but it seems this is much worse here.
Belgium has big problems between the Flemish and French speaking parts, and particularly in Brussels it's politically very complicated. For some city wide measures, they need like 26 police commanders to agree. I don't know the numbers, but it's very complex to get all people in line. And I'm not talking about the people in the street, this is about city councils, police departments etc.
That's simply not true. A larger police force translates to more comprehensive law enforcement. If it doesn't, then there's a systemic failure in the way police are run (and we have plenty of examples of those too). Of course "more police" isn't the only way to increase the effectiveness of policing, but it does help.
The security theater was specifically about TSA and other untrained (or minimally trained) symbolic gestures. Actual policing is not theater.
More police can help with theft, possibly with solving murders. It will do almost nothing to prevent terrorist attacks. This airport attack is a prime example of the reason why. You can put large checkpoints everywhere, but there will always be, by definition, a line of people that haven't yet passed the checkpoint and this is where they will attack.
Belgium recently said that nearly every one of their available officers was running down ISIS / jihad leads, they've essentially stopped investigating other crimes and still don't have the manpower required. They're in desperate need of more well-trained police.
Police have a bad habit of harassing populations (several riots in France were a result of policing practices such as asking everyone for an ID). It helps to contribute to send a message of unwelcomeness to people who are likely already disillusioned in the system.
It's unlikely that more police could stop attacks. Maybe deal with the aftermath/manhunts better. But it sounds like more precision operations (including human intelligence) will go a lot further.
I'm sure people like you would like to continue and strengthen domestic and foreign policies that would just lead to further violence. Western governments and their right wing supporters in the populace love bashing heads, and when that leads to disenfranchised people with no future who feel utter hostility towards them, they blame everyone but their own actions and bash even harder.
Belgium certainly does. Its failures in counter terrorism have lead to the Paris attacks and now these attacks. At least that is the understanding I have gleaned from twitter conversations of CT experts
My advice: I do carefully select the experts I listen too
"One Belgian counterterrorism official told BuzzFeed News last week that due to the small size of the Belgian government and the huge numbers of open investigations — into Belgian citizens suspected of either joining ISIS, being part of radical groups in Belgium, and the ongoing investigations into last November’s attacks in Paris, which appeared to be at least partially planned in Brussels and saw the participation of several Belgian citizens and residents — virtually every police detective and military intelligence officer in the country was focused on international jihadi investigations.
“We just don’t have the people to watch anything else and, frankly, we don’t have the infrastructure to properly investigate or monitor hundreds of individuals suspected of terror links, as well as pursue the hundreds of open files and investigations we have,” the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media, said.
“It’s literally an impossible situation and, honestly, it’s very grave.”"
How come this happens again without anyone having seen it coming?
But they did see it coming. From what I gathered from the response of many Brussels residents and airport personnel, the question was "when", more than "if".
Not any capital city - Brussels specifically. There was a lockdown of nearly a week after the Paris attacks. People were really bracing for an attack, in a way that London, Berlin, Amsterdam, Vienna, etc. weren't.
My point was that it is really easy to say that any big city will have a terrorist attack. So it's never if, but always when. Yet with all the surveillance and lockdowns they have, they didn't see this coming, which was the point of the parent, that more surveillance is not going to solve anything.
For every attack that they "didn't see coming" there are, most likely, plenty of attacks that they "did see coming" and stopped. Even more likely is that we don't hear about these stopped attacks because they aren't sexy news. Or, when attacks ARE stopped, and it's published, people question whether it's just blustering by the government to justify their jobs.
It's not like you can say "yeah, we saw that coming and let it happen." Because THAT, sure as hell, will not fly with the people. And "yeah, we saw it coming and stopped it" is questioned as just posturing. When people say "scanning individuals in airports makes us no safer," what are they comparing it to?
Is it that they doubt the effectiveness because people are still getting killed by terrorists in planes? No. It's because there are no attacks, so they have no data to say "yeah... it's been effective."
> But the breakdown of extremist ideologies behind those attacks may come as a surprise. Since Sept. 11, 2001, nearly twice as many people have been killed by white supremacists, antigovernment fanatics and other non-Muslim extremists than by radical Muslims: 48 have been killed by extremists who are not Muslim, including the recent mass killing in Charleston, S.C., compared with 26 by self-proclaimed jihadists, according to a count by New America, a Washington research center.
> Non-Muslim extremists have carried out 19 such attacks since Sept. 11, according to the latest count, compiled by David Sterman, a New America program associate, and overseen by Peter Bergen, a terrorism expert. By comparison, seven lethal attacks by Islamic militants have taken place in the same period.
> The contentious question of biased perceptions of terrorist threats dates back at least two decades, to the truck bombing that tore apart the federal building in Oklahoma City in April 1995. Some early news media speculation about the attack assumed that it had been carried out by Muslim militants. The arrest of Timothy J. McVeigh, an antigovernment extremist, quickly put an end to such theories.
> A member of the White House review panel on NSA surveillance said he was “absolutely” surprised when he discovered the agency’s lack of evidence that the bulk collection of telephone call records had thwarted any terrorist attacks.
> And even before Snowden, the NSA wasn’t able to provide a single substantiated example of its surveillance dragnet preventing any domestic attack at all.
> A report released this week from Human Rights Watch highlights how, consistently, FBI sting operations are over aggressive and premised on the racist profiling of Muslim communities — that old building block of our contemporary national security state. Based on 215 interviews and focusing on 27 post-9/11 cases of alleged terror plot thwarting, HRW's findings call into question the very legitimacy of the FBI's counterterror work. The authors go as far as to call a number of stings "government-created" terror plots.
> But the issue is one that stretches far beyond Newburgh. Critics say the FBI is running a sting operation across America, targeting – to a large extent – the Muslim community by luring people into fake terror plots. FBI bureaux send informants to trawl through Muslim communities...
But surely it will trickle back into the conversation in NA. Here in Canada, the Liberal government has been unwilling to commit to scaling back programmes put in place by their Conservative predecessors. I think it's a legitimate concern that an incident like this gives them resolve in continuing such programmes.
People are comparing it to the times when here was less screening.
Some people probably also assume that higher perceived level of threat that justifies tighter security is not a result of natural development, but of direct action by governments when carrying out their foreign policies.
The vicious circle of "we go and do good in the faraway, they blow us up, we tighten local security and do more good in the faraway,…" begs to determine causation in this correlation.
> For every attack that they "didn't see coming" there are, most likely, plenty of attacks that they "did see coming" and stopped. Even more likely is that we don't hear about these stopped attacks because they aren't sexy news. Or, when attacks ARE stopped, and it's published, people question whether it's just blustering by the government to justify their jobs.
The problem with this argument is that it can be used to justify any security measures, no matter how costly or stupid. Because maybe it's really very effective in practice but we can't tell you about it?
You're basically saying "trust us, we're the government." It's the recipe for total unaccountability.
So no, they have to justify that the costly and stupid security measures actually work. Or we'll have nothing but costly and stupid security measures that don't actually work.
>>So no, they have to justify that the costly and stupid security measures actually work. Or we'll have nothing but costly and stupid security measures that don't actually work.
How exactly do you want them to justify. Your demand is too vague to be even considered. How do you propose, they should advertise every thwarted terrorist attack, without alerting the other terrorists?
All security is plain unproductive overhead, which is compulsory in the presence of adversary.
>>You're basically saying "trust us, we're the government." It's the recipe for total unaccountability.
You're basically saying, "don't trust the govt" and that is the recipe for total anarchy, which is heaven for terrorists.
> How exactly do you want them to justify. Your demand is too vague to be even considered. How do you propose, they should advertise every thwarted terrorist attack, without alerting the other terrorists?
How about they stop doing it and if the level of terrorism remains in the "still kills fewer people than bathtubs" range, we realize we didn't need it.
> All security is plain unproductive overhead, which is compulsory in the presence of adversary.
All security is compulsory? Madness.
Security is risk management. All government activity is risk. You spend a dollar on surveillance technology instead of scientific research that would have led to safer products or life saving medicine and people die. You take a dollar from the taxpayer who now can't afford those products or medicine and people die. Government waste kills more people than terrorism. To say nothing of the people bad governments kill much more directly.
> You're basically saying, "don't trust the govt" and that is the recipe for total anarchy
>... if the level of terrorism remains in the "still kills fewer people than bathtubs" range, we realize we didn't need it.
Comparing terrorism to bathtub is foolish at its best and outright dangerously misleading at its worst. Tomorrow you can say `if the level of terrorism remains in the "still kills fewer people than old age" range, we realize we didn't need it.`
Statistics can be (mis)used to justify any claim.
One reason why people find terrorism more dangerous than heart disease, cancer, etc is this - bathtub and cars are NOT human beings and thus do NOT actively not tolerate difference of opinions amongst other groups of people and do NOT engage in acts of "killing other people for difference of opinions" while human terrorists do engage in such killings and do constantly search for opportunities to kill people with different opinions.
> Statistics can be (mis)used to justify any claim.
Do you want to compare it to numbers instead of things? How about we not worry this much about it as long as the chance of the average person being killed by it is less than 0.1%. Or here's a good one: how about we limit the amount of money being spent on it in proportion to how many people it kills. Spend a trillion dollars fighting heart disease and a billion fighting terrorism instead of the other way around.
> One reason why people find terrorism more dangerous than heart disease, cancer, etc is this - bathtub and cars are NOT human beings and thus do NOT actively not tolerate difference of opinions amongst other groups of people and do NOT engage in acts of "killing other people for difference of opinions" while human terrorists do engage in such killings and do constantly search for opportunities to kill people with different opinions.
And what of it? A lion has a difference of opinion with you about whether you're its dinner. Do we need to spend a trillion dollars and have a war on lions? What about Streptococcus? It's alive, it adapts, it wants to kill you, another trillion dollars?
> Define "it".
Mass surveillance. And pretty much the entire TSA.
>And what of it? A lion has a difference of opinion with you about whether you're its dinner. Do we need to spend a trillion dollars and have a war on lions? What about Streptococcus? It's alive, it adapts, it wants to kill you, another trillion dollars?
The point about lion is good and that's why our ancestors had spent a huge amount of resources (money, time, hunters etc) to "eradicate" lions. Due to our ancestors' efforts and the consequential huge spendings towards this eradication, today we don't have to worry too much about the opinions of lions. Today the lions are rendered as what we proverbially call "toothless tigers/snakes".
A similar argument can be made about Streptococcus or (any such bacteria/virus or even any other such animal) and humans want to be in charge of things so much so that their opinions and thence their consequential actions do not become a significant danger/hazard to the humans.
Many fanatical animal lovers do hate this idea (of humans wanting to be in charge/control of other animals) too. But that is a different story.
Now with terrorists, the things become different in a very important manner. Lions and other animals are different species and thus their eradication problem doesn't first pose a very difficult "identification" problem. To deal with human terrorists, first we have to "identify" them and their sympathizers who can/do provide safe harbour to them and thus help the terrorists in their intended terrorist actions.
This "identification" problem is what requires mass surveillance.
This brings "cancer" to my mind, as in case of "cancer" also we face a very "identification" problem: problem of identification of dangerous cells.
> This "identification" problem is what requires mass surveillance.
But the identification problem isn't unique. It's true of every crime there is. Criminals don't come with tags labeling them as a terrorist or a murderer or a pedophile. And there is nothing you can ever do to eliminate 100% of all crime. It's about the most cost effective way to provide enough deterrence to keep the crime rate low. And mass surveillance has a huge cost in privacy and in money and in security itself. It's a terrible trade off.
> This brings "cancer" to my mind, as in case of "cancer" also we face a very "identification" problem: problem of identification of dangerous cells.
You're kind of making my point. Cancer kills way, way more people than terrorism. Why are we spending more resources fighting terrorism than cancer?
>>But the identification problem isn't unique. It's true of every crime there is. Criminals don't come with tags labeling them as a terrorist or a murderer or a pedophile.
Correct. But terrorism (inspired by hate ideology or religion) is significantly different in a very important respect from other crimes you mentioned; that is, the terrorist(s) generally find support and shelter amongst large number of otherwise normal citizens inspired/driven by the hate ideology or religion whereas a murderer or a pedophile generally doesn't find such shelter.
That's why
>>You're kind of making my point. Cancer kills way, way more people than terrorism. Why are we spending more resources fighting terrorism than cancer?
No, I am NOT making your point. I gave the cancer example to point out the problem of identification. But I am not entirely against you here. You may say that we must spend some more resources to fight cancer but if you say we must curtail on mass surveillance and other anti-terrorism measures to do cancer fight then I don't agree.
>>And mass surveillance has a huge cost in privacy and in money and in security itself.
Privacy is important but NOT as important as survival itself.
> that is, the terrorist(s) generally find support and shelter amongst large number of otherwise normal citizens inspired/driven by the hate ideology or religion whereas a murderer or a pedophile generally doesn't find such shelter. That's why
That's why what?
> You may say that we must spend some more resources to fight cancer but if you say we must curtail on mass surveillance and other anti-terrorism measures to do cancer fight then I don't agree.
But why not? If spending a dollar fighting cancer saves more lives than spending the same dollar fighting terrorism and we don't have unlimited resources then why should we make the choice that causes more loss of life?
> Privacy is important but NOT as important as survival itself.
Privacy is security. The information they're collecting is inherently dangerous. It's much easier to use it to plan an attack than to defend from one. If you're looking for a needle in a haystack, more data is more hay. But if you're trying to burn everything down then it tells you who is vulnerable where and when. The only way to prevent terrorists from breaking in and accessing the data is to not collect it to begin with.
And terrorists aren't even the main threat. Surveillance of innocent people makes them vulnerable to anyone who has the data. Cartel hitmen, sexual predators, Richard Nixon, take your pick.
>And terrorists aren't even the main threat. Surveillance of innocent people makes them vulnerable to anyone who has the data. Cartel hitmen, sexual predators, Richard Nixon, take your pick.
I will not agree with your dumping of Richard Nixon with crime cartels and sexual predators. In general, the US democratic government system has proven to be much more successful and benevolent than any other system in the world, including the much touted communism (USSR, China, N. Korea). What I mean to say is Richard Nixon is hardly a threat as compared to Mao or Stalin.
Granted, there is a small non-zero chance of an innocent getting hurt in some way due to privacy issues, but that doesn't and shouldn't mean we should abandon surveillance and deprive ourselves of important and timely information and put many more innocents to risk.
>That's why what?
(Oho sorry, but I guess, the rest of the words got deleted.) That's why surveillance of such hate groups (e.g. Wahabi mosques or extreme left/right groups) is also mandatory.
"Without seeing it coming" might be a stretch here. When I was at BRU some month ago, the whole airport was patrolled by heavily armed military guards. AFAIK this has been the case since the Paris attacks.
People always freak out when this happens. As long as there have been people with enough hate (or often political motives) there has always been terrorist attacks. Even the Romans suffered as much.
I don't think there is any solution which makes everyone perfectly safe. Politicians always want to guarantee perfect safety but it's not possible. Some things you can prevent, some things you can stop, but some horrible thing will inevitably happen.
You and many others seem to post that there is a mental cancer infecting 1.5 billion people on this planet, and at any time it could transform its host into a bloodthirsty murderer seemingly at random.
That's not exactly true; e.g. in the UK, there was a lot of terrorism in the past by IRA - although Ireland and the UK have different religions, I don't think that was the main issue. The main issue was divisions between two groups of people and the resulting inter-group hate.
On the other hand, religion is probably the most important, yet arbitrary and completely illogical, divisive influence in the world. So, religion most definitely is to blame.
The parent's point is valid – although religion is the most obvious expression of social division, the roots are deeper. People don't erupt in open warfare due to differences in religion unless there are other issues – such as social injustice, or economic differentials, or so on.
Not religion in the sense of theological belief, but religion in the sense of loyalty and belonging.
Christianity fractured in 1517 over the question of the extent of Papal authority and corruption. This led to centuries of power struggle as to who was superior: papal authority or civil authority? The UK eventually decided for civil authority in 1688 by installing a Parliament-respecting Protestant monarch rather than a Pope-respecting absolutist Catholic monarch. The ensuing fighting was ended at the Boyne in 1690. But it's still a battle the commemoration of which leads to fighting in the street in NI.
This led to a position of Catholic oppression by Protestants for centuries. Is this really a religious issue, or a self-perpetuating cycle of violence?
How about reading the exact sources in order to avoid even being in position of having to "buy" anything? For example the core texts? Just get one and read it. Don't let anybody tell you anything, especially don't trust any claimed "interpretations," read it yourself, in your language, undiluted, not just one sentence, but at least the whole chapter where it appears, take notes, then discuss.
And then if you question the translation you read, there are enough online sources which display the different translations which can be then compared. You can even search where any word is used through all the texts. Just don't believe anybody who says that you can't do that.
Just like I don't have to know ancient Greek to understand what's written in the Odyssey.
Then investigate if there are any known interpretations by the influential scholars that are equivalent to western approach to other religions "that it shouldn't be taken literally." Investigate the practices and how the ideas are actually applied in real life. Study history to know how they were historically applied and which effect they had. Know the context.
(I'm not going to discuss this further here, this is my only post, but I stand to my claim that everybody can read and understand the sources and research how they are viewed by the influential scholars, and that these facts can be calmly discussed, and that the discussion should not depend on the groupthink or faith but the actual knowledge of the topic discussed. Don't write "I don't buy" this or that, discuss the facts you actually know, then somebody can contribute to your knowledge by stating the facts he knows etc).
Moreover I haven't seen anybody else who wrote what I see only you write: "You and many others seem to post that there is a mental cancer infecting 1.5 billion people on this planet, and at any time it could transform its host into a bloodthirsty murderer seemingly at random."
Careful readers are advised to read what others really wrote (e.g the post to which you respond wrote just "I would argue that religion is the variable that plays the dominant role in this war of ideas"), not what you claim (or somebody else claims) it is supposed to mean.
Analyzing your post in this light, it appears to be strikingly manipulative and dishonest, distorting what others actually wrote and promoting non-thinking and blindly believing (your attempt to discredit somebody with something he hasn't even written).
Religion is the way the leaders of these groups convince their followers to blow themselves up. Without religion it would be completely against their self interest to do so.
How do you explain that a person without any social or political grievances decide to abandon their computer science degree to fight for an Islamic state? [1]
Islam, and radical Islam specifically, are not the sole ingredient transforming random people into murderers or suicide murderers.
It is an ingredient. Eric Hoffer's _The True Believer_ is a good sketch of the phenomenon. Among the disaffected, some will latch onto any available dogmatic belief system. As long as radical Islam is in the news, and is accessible, some among the disaffected will choose that path.
Not all dogmas result in blowing yourself up in crowds, or setting off bombs or gunning down people in theaters. Doesn't it make sense to preferentially attack those dogmas that bring out, at present, the worst characteristics in their adherents?
It would be great if our foreign policy in the past 1.5 (or 3, or 5, or 7) decades hadn't been a disaster and promoted unrest in the region, because that undoubtedly increased the seriousness of our current situation. We (by that I mean our leaders who make foreign policy and military decisions) should try to learn from history and not repeat the same mistakes, although they all (no matter their politics) seem to do a very poor job of that. But the question of why radical Islam is such a problem now is irrelevant to the question of whether we should fight radical Islam. It's not a very reasonable thing to conclude that because we're partly responsible for the rise of radical Islam, we should do nothing and let it conquer the world if it wants.
> Just read the holy text and go figure. Or is that hate speech?
It's certainly religious flamewar, which has no place on Hacker News.
It's also intellectually puerile, as if there's such a thing as "just reading" any text and "going figure", let alone an ancient text with countless interpretive traditions.
Crazy people can be found from all walks of life. Unfortunately many of those people do not receive the mental health services they need. It's not the religion that makes people crazy, it's the lack of other social support services available to the very few that really need it. Instead of the support they need, these people get a radicalised church offering meaning and the promise of a better life.
Your comment invites an extended response (from me, anyway) but we all know that HN is not the place for it. Out of interest, can anyone suggest an HN-style aggregator where cool argument, free speech and pertinent observations on topics of this kind can be put forward for discussion in a civilized manner? Reddit does not appeal but I haven't visited it for some time.
This is a mess larger than I can comprehend, with scores of innocent dead. The spectrum of political issues this crosses is vast. We're talking nationalism, immigration, religion, extremism, surveillance, privacy, and war to name a few.
The nuance required to understand and attack the big picture is almost nowhere to be found.
I saw the French PM said something like "we're at war" - I'm not sure who they're at war with but onward with the endless war.
I've seen plenty of comments about ISIS. It's like a 99.999% chance it's not ISIS - maybe Al Qaeda, maybe a different extremist group. (For why it's probably not ISIS and one of the most fantastic explanations of the what's and whys of ISIS, see [0].) But it shows just how vastly uneducated most people are about the issues that lead to attacks like this.
This breeds calls for extremism in response, like expelling all Muslims (and can only help Trump's campaign) or comments like the one from the French PM above.
I can't imagine being in charge of trying to address all of the underlying issues that feed into attacks like this. And I don't know that those in charge are up to the task.
Edit: ISIS inspired maybe, but not ISIS planned and backed. "During his visit to Mosul in December, Jürgen Todenhöfer interviewed a portly German jihadist and asked whether any of his comrades had returned to Europe to carry out attacks. The jihadist seemed to regard returnees not as soldiers but as dropouts. “The fact is that the returnees from the Islamic State should repent from their return,” he said. “I hope they review their religion.”"
Honest question that always crosses my mind. Why do we always assume a terrorist group is behind such attacks? Couldn't it be a couple of deranged persons acting on their own?
Considering it comes 4 days after the arrest of the man who planned the Paris attacks, it's possible that this is just a couple of deranged people but it's unlikely. In this context, even with no detailed information about the attackers, it's quite likely that this is a terrorist attack somehow connected to fundamentalism/etc.
Look up the concept of "never let a crisis go to waste", and its a two parter, the stated first part is "ISIS musta dunnit" and the second unstated or quietly stated part is "and thats why we have to expel all muslims" or "thats why we need to give a campaign donor of mine a trillion dollars to increase security" or "there's a lot of countries we haven't made safe for democracy yet and I was thinking ..."
You should see the wind go out of politicans sails when they learn an event like this is a random nutcase. They look like their dog died.
> This is a mess larger than I can comprehend, with scores of innocent dead.
What's most sad about it, is that the current situation is the result of doing nothing, despite having crystal clear data on the situation, and in which (wrong) direction things has been changing.
It's been clear that something needs to be done for years, even decades, but actually doing something about the situation would mean publicly acknowledging these facts. And nobody has been willing to do just that.
In fact actually using these known indisputable facts has been systematically avoided for fear of being seen as "racist" or whatever.
Putting the specific issue of immigration aside, I think that it's a very bad sign for the future of enlightened democracy when actually running a fact-based policy is deemed as "risky" and even unacceptable from a public relations point of view.
If we let this attitude persist, we can do lots of wrongs in other areas as well: Think about environmental changes, etc etc.
We need to heighten the status of cold data, of facts as a matter of indisputability. But that's not a left/right issue and I don't think you will find any party fronting such a position.
> that the current situation is the result of doing nothing
I think the current situation is the result of doing way too much the the past decade (or two). If the US and EU stayed out of the Middle East (Iraq, Libya, Syria), the EU+ME part of the world would be a much more peaceful place.
Fair enough and absolutely a valid counterargument.
Allow me to amend my comment slightly, and emphasise that I'm speaking of domestic policies.
Across Europe we've seen increased ghettofication, social segregation and religious extremism.
But because this has mostly been within demographic segments considered "weak" or "minorities", the explicit policy has consistently been sweeping things under the rug and proceeding as if nothing has been wrong.
And that has landed Europe where it is today.
Anyway. This is HN and I don't want to get more political than I need to. What bothers me the most is honestly the low status facts have in the politics of nations today, something I think should be a fairly incontroversial position.
> But because this has mostly been within demographic segments considered "weak" or "minorities", the explicit policy has consistently been sweeping things under the rug and proceeding as if nothing has been wrong.
perhaps the fact that they are "weak" or "minorities" is the cause and not the consequence of the attacks... I mean, in a complex society causality goes in any direction.
> What bothers me the most is honestly the low status facts have in the politics of nations today
100% agree....when you can sit and watch a debate or discussion on TV, and one side or the other, or both, are using arguments that are known to be factually incorrect, it's bound to not turn out well.
I think if we are going to accept immigration from anywhere, we should first figure out how to assimilate all cultures to prevent as you correctly note ghettofication, social segregation and religious extremism. The things we're seeing today might be small potatoes compared to what could happen if there's a mass uprising.
>If the US and EU stayed out of the Middle East (Iraq, Libya, Syria), the EU+ME part of the world would be a much more peaceful place.
I very much doubt that. Of course, there is no alternative reality where you could observe how things went when things were done differently, but there's no lack of violence in parts of the world where US and EU have not been doing things.
And of course you are neglecting that especially after WWII, Soviet Union did not exactly stay out of places, either. For instance, Afghanistan and Somalia, the two most notorious failed states in the world, were actually run under Soviet influence for a considerable time. Syria is still very much in the Russian sphere of influence. Etc.
Include in the doubts, that some of those places were doing really abhorrent things (gassing whole villages and burying them in enormous berms with bulldozers). To stick your head in the sand, because some mad bombers, is a moral issue all it itself.
> Putting the specific issue of immigration aside, I think that it's a very bad sign for the future of enlightened democracy when actually running a fact-based policy is deemed as "risky" and even unacceptable from a public relations point of view.
A "fact-based policy" is utopia. What for you is a fact, for me it's not. You can not have policy without politics.
> It's been clear that something needs to be done for years
And what? That "something" needs to be done was clear since the 80s, but so far constructive solutions have been rather sparse. Integration is too expensive to the austerity and privatization loving right wing, and expulsion doesn't work because our economies depend on cheap immigrant labour. So far I've not seen anyone seen pushing for a different solution.
How about letting people be who they are without whining about people's behaviors not being "French enough" or whatever?
Say what you will about America's institutional racism, but I have rarely heard an American whine about people not acting American enough (maybe I'm hanging in the wrong circles)
Meanwhile I would hear a lot of complaining about riff raff accumulating around ethnic grocers and the like messing up the "culture " of downtown Nantes.
The integration fallacy is one that is doomed to fail from the outset. The people define an area, not the other way around. Let people do what they want, the free flow of ideas will do the rest.
In fact even the Paris attacks wasn't really ISIS. It was the work of French and Belgium nationals, attacking their own country. They may have received some support in Syria but the gvt is trying to make it look like foreign attacks because it avoids to put the focus on difficult questions (the radicalisation of their muslim minorities, and the growing anti-western sentiment in their 1st and 2nd generation immigration).
European communist terrorists in the 70s were getting trained in Palestinian terrorists camps. They would even get weapons there. They are still European movements.
Pretending that it was a foreign aggression is a lie.
I don't see how that example applies. You're trying to compare ISIS (a group brought together by a common ideology) to Palestinians (a nationality/ethnicity).
You're drawing a foreign/domestic distinction when none exists. There is no reason someone cannot be Belgian, and also a member of ISIS. What is your criteria for inclusion in "ISIS" if it's not someone saying "I'm with ISIS"?
I haven't read the entire Atlantic piece, but given the fact that we know there is an ISIS affiliated group operating Belgium, I don't see how you can possibly be so certain it wasn't ISIS.
I think it's far more likely that these attacks were triggered by the recent arrest of Salah Abdeslam and the killing of Mohamed Belkaid (in two different raids). There were multiple other suspects who were not captured/killed, and it seem plausible that they carried out these attacks now as they felt the police were closing in.
I'm not claiming that all terror attacks are always ISIS, and I'm not saying I'm sure this was ISIS, but given recent events in Belgium, the likelihood of ISIS involvement is a _lot_ higher than 0.001%.
I think there is a marked difference between ISIS affiliated and ISIS supported. Any group can claim affiliation/solidarity with ISIS. But I really do recommend reading the Atlantic piece, it's the only deep dive I've ever seen written that explains some seemingly inexplicable behavior.
That said, I agree this is likely retaliation, I'm just not sure how big the "enemy" we're fighting in Belgium is. Today's attack took a minimum of what, 3 people?
> I saw the French PM said something like "we're at war" - I'm not sure who they're at war with but onward with the endless war.
They have been saying that since the terrorists attacks of 2015 in France. Nothing new. And France is actually at war against ISIS, that's not a secret for anyone.
> This is a mess larger than I can comprehend, with scores of innocent dead. The spectrum of political issues this crosses is vast. We're talking nationalism, immigration, religion, extremism, surveillance, privacy, and war to name a few.
The nuance required to understand and attack the big picture is almost nowhere to be found.
The problem is very simple: cultural incompatibility.
Alas, this wasn't an analysis. If you would give substantial arguments, as to why you think that cultural differences, incompatibility how you'd like to call it, are the main reason for terrorism, you could call it an analysis... But not like this.
> And I don't know that those in charge are up to the task.
They created the mess in the first place with regressive colonial era imperialist policies. Just take a look at this photo from Afghanistan [0] before the US decided to arm the Taliban in a proxy war against the Russians.
Well, just remember that the time of these pictures is also from before USSR started to meddle extensively in the country. Afghanistan was a kingdom until 1973, then after a coup a "republic" with closer ties to USSR, and was later declared an "Islamic republic" by Soviet ally Najibullah.
The media certainly doesn't want to discuss the real issues in regards to terrorist attacks and why they may exist. I don't think it's as simple as "they hate our way our life" as the governments around the world try to portray it and the media seems to go along with it without questions that logic.
Of course it's not "they hate our way of life". Unless "our way of life" is letting our governments run amok destroying their homelands, installing brutal dictators and kleptocracies, and selling all their resources to multinational corporations; then when they flee their countries, "we" separate them off into banlieues and exclude them from social and economic participation.
Everyone loves the material wealth neoliberalism gives them, but acts completely oblivious when confronted with the pure violence of its operation outside of the western bubble.
That's just one strain of terrorism i.e. religious terrorism or more specifically Islamic terrorism as I may speculate that's what you intended.
There are many other strains of terrorism like the last terrorist attack in Ankara last week where a female Kurdish ultra-nationalist militant blew herself in a bus killing about 40 civilians in the process. This was just an instance of a political/nationalist violence/terrorism that has nothing to do with religion or Islam for that matter.
A civil war is when two or more parties are actively fighting each other within one country. Current examples in the Middle East: Yemen, Libya, and Syria.
My country Tunisia is quite peaceful and is a young and successful democracy. Turkey is a stable country but is unfortunately sharing its border with Syria and has some trouble with extremist Kurd separatists.
You are 100% right, Facebook Safety Check was in fact deployed during both Ankara explosions this year, and for an attack in Nigeria late 2015. I take back my (unnecessarily snarky) comment.
Belgium hasn't had stable governments for many years, with many observers, especially in the aftermath of the Paris attacks, calling it a 'failed state'. I read an article about that a while ago, couldn't find it directly, but I found this one: http://www.politico.eu/article/belgium-failed-state-security...
Let's not exaggerate. This is not a third world country. A lot things work really well. You're right that immigration was not handled well but except that Belgium is pretty well managed.
Hopefully this doesn't end up as another call to "be united". I've seen how the governments in question abuse that. If they get all the support they need, then they start doing awful things, even illegal things against European laws and whatnot. But because the countries are "united", nobody says anything anymore.
What we need is to think this through, which also means challenging conventional wisdom, not just be "be united in following whatever said government wants to do".
We havent seen a group of 50 militants take over a city and reck havoc because our surveillance systems can detect such levels of organization. As horrible as this sounds, anyone with an IQ above 60 can plot and kill 30 people because there's not enough signal in the vast noise our communication networks generate to pick up on it. If we can prevent terrorist attacks that kill thousands of individuals we've won.
If entering a major airport strapped with explosives undetected and blowing up twice killing tens of people isn't a spectacular security failure, I don't know what is. I agree that it's nearly impossible to detect/prevent random shootings/stabbings (like in Paris attacks), but this is not such case.
In a free society people can move where they please. The explosions happened before the security checkpoints at a very busy airport, so I don't see how this was some security failure. Intelligence failure yes, but airport security? I'm not so sure. Are you suggesting that a perimeter be setup around the entire airport and people are checked before entering the grounds?
What I find reassuring in the midst of this tragic mayhem however, is how little actual damage the terrorists could do.
They had explosives, weapons, the resolve to sacrifice themselves and tried their best to do as much damage as possible. And they managed to to kill less than 30 people (provisional count).
Of course every death that brought on by this fanatic mob is too much, but we should keep our perspective.
A bus accident in Spain last week left 11 exchange students dead, in the US alone every day more than 50 people die in road accidents.
Of course we should root out the people that try to bomb our freedom away. But don't let us be terrorized by something that doesn't make a statistically recognizable dent in our probability for survival.
A million people worldwide die every year in collisions with cars, half of them pedestrians and cyclists. Millions more are injured.
Compared with traffic regulation and enforcement, the response to terrorist events like this are vastly out of proportion, and well into the range of irrational response that the terrorists know is the only way to really damage a large powerful nation - by making it turn on its own people and put them in a security-state panopticon.
This is what I wrote in the aftermath of the Paris attacks with regard to the comparison of "road fatalities vs terrorism casualties" every time this topic is brought up after these tragic incidents.
Not really. The point is that people are irrationally afraid of incredibly improbable / statistically insignificant events and the result is bad policy decisions / suboptimal use of resources by reactive governments.
People should be much more afraid of dying in a car accident than dying at the hands of terrorists, yet few people are urgently pushing the government to enforce stronger safety standards in cars / on roads. Instead people demand better security to protect them against things they are unlikely to be involved in to begin with.
Good point. If the United States, for instance, used the money for the "War on Terror" on things that were more likely to save American lives (anti-smoking, healthcare, traffic safety, etc.), we probably could have saved hundreds of thousands of American lives (or more, the CDC says that 480,000 Americans die each year from smoking).
On the other hand, a bus accident doesn't result in an international airport or a city's entire metro system shutting down for an extended period of time, nor frightfully disrupt the lives of hundreds of thousands of people.
I appreciate your point, and it is somewhat reassuring, but terrorists can cause damage beyond the raw numbers because their damage can be focused.
Why do we let one incident shut down an entire metro system? Would we do the same if a bus overturned?
I have no intention of belittling the incident, but I fail to see how shutting everything down is a proper response to any incident of less than catastrophic scale.
I take that back, I can see a reason: CYA. Nobody would want to be the one who makes the decision to keep the metro system running and have a second attack occur. I'm still not convinced that CYA is a sufficient reason, however.
Why do we let one incident shut down an entire metro system?
If you don't shut down and an second and/or third incident then happens in a coordinated attack, it's very easy to say "Why didn't you shut down? Couldn't you see that we were under attack?"
Well, you could ask the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Central Intelligence Agency, or even consult with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Perhaps you can send them JavaScript Object Notation using the Asynchronous Javscript and Extensible Markup Language standard over HyperText Transfer Protocol?
</s>
I use acronyms to reduce the cognitive overhead of reading, and (relevant to this discussion) make otherwise offensive terms acceptable in a broad range of environments (snafu, CYA, OMFG, WTF, etc). I'm sorry you haven't run across CYA before (though that might be a good thing), but it's not a terribly uncommon acronym either.
>On the other hand, a bus accident doesn't result in an international airport or a city's entire metro system shutting down for an extended period of time, nor frightfully disrupt the lives of hundreds of thousands of people.
Regular old inclement weather does this all the time and people don't cry panic that society is going to implode.
Shutting down transportation for a day is a silly thing to be terrorized about.
>As for us, we behave like a herd of deer. When they flee from the huntsman's feathers in affright, which way do they turn? What haven of safety do they make for? Why, they rush upon the nets! And thus they perish by confounding what they should fear with that wherein no danger lies. . . . Not death or pain is to be feared, but the fear of death or pain. Well said the poet therefore:—Death has no terror; only a Death of shame!
A major airport and the entire rail system of the city was shut down. A lot of damage was done. And, of course, a bunch of people died from something not many signed up for.
Driving a car at least gives you the opportunity to reject taking on the risk.
The fabric of society is based around us not shooting each other/ blowing up trains. Every event like this (or, say, some countries bombing out neighborhoods in other countries) makes it harder to rely on the idea that this sort of thing doesn't happen.
Acknowledging that this happens because of conscious policy decisions by many people is also good.
There's absolutely nothing inevitable about these kinds of attacks. We could bring this sort of event down to a number real close to 0.
Not to mention that it's possible to worry about car crashes and terrorism at the same time
I don't drive a car, I cycle. I reject the risk of driving, but drivers put that risk on me anyway. Even more so than they do to themselves, because I'm more vulnerable than a person sitting in a moving steel cage, and because many drivers seem eager to put risk on me.
In my life time, I'm much more likely to be murdered by a driver than a terrorist.
wait. you cycle because driving is too risky? are you statistically less likely to get injured while cycling, or is it mainly about caring for not injuring others?
I read it as they don't drive, and thus don't consent to the risk of being in a car accident. Not that they cycle because of the risk; they didn't list why they cycle.
I made the same calculation from the statistics in my country (Finland). Risk of death in a car is in the order of 1 per 300 million km, risk of death on bike is ten times higher.
Most bike deaths are single-vehicle accidents (they do not involve another party).
I might be a bit overzealous in saying we can get the results down to 0 but there are many major countries that have not been attacked by ISIS.
The narrative after 9/11, and after both Paris attacks were "this is a war of civilization, of culture. They attack us because we are free". I think a lot of us realise on a conscious level that this narrative simply isn't true, but the narrative still stands.
Foreign intervention make us targets for "retaliation" (I'm trying hard to not apologise for monsters murdering a bunch of civilians pretty indiscriminately). There are many major countries and populations that are easier targets for Daesch that don't seem to get attacked. If this was about maximum carnage so many worse things could be happening right now.
The whole "having a population not super happy about the current government" thing doesn't seem to help (in terms of building a support network). Though even that requires a pound of salt: a journalist on twitter pointed out that in the case of the Paris attacks, there were support networks... but they were mainly for "normal" criminals (drug dealers and the like). We're not talking about a huge set of jihadists, but a bunch of opportunists [0].
I think most people would recognise that the IRA bombings and the Troubles was a result of policy, not culture. Daesch is, I think, pretty similar. It's not like a bunch of people got up and were like "We hate the West!". There's a lot of stuff involved. Not that it justifies their actions, but it's at least good to be lucid when thinking about the why.
> It's not like a bunch of people got up and were like "We hate the West!". There's a lot of stuff involved. Not that it justifies their actions, but it's at least good to be lucid when thinking about the why.
I agree with you on that; it's unfortunate, though, that a lot of political bad actors have spot-welded "we need to understand why they're doing this" -- which is obviously true, it's much harder to defeat an enemy you don't understand -- to "it's racist to think that we have an enemy at all, never mind actually fight them effectively."
> There's absolutely nothing inevitable about these kinds of attacks. We could bring this sort of event down to a number real close to 0.
I don't think so.
Even if you exclude international politics completely the number still isn't zero. Take the 2011 Norway attacks where 77 people died. That was one guy, a Christian fundamentalist, likely paranoid schizophrenic who wanted to rid the world of Marxism/feminism/islam/something. Then you have the unabomber, most school shootings, and so on which you can point to.
My point is: This stuff is NEVER going away. All you can do is minimise it. Zero is certainly a laudable goal but likely an unachievable one.
Labeling Breivik as a Christian fundamentalist serves a political need, but if we really have to attribute to a religion what he did, he was more like a pagan fundamentalist ("Odinist") who expressed his belief that Jesus was "pathetic".
Edit: However I agree with the part that this is never going to go away (completely). You cannot totally prevent terror, and living in a society that could would be terror itself.
They seek "the ends of times". Daesh is a death cult. Victims certainly is the goal here, to kill as many people as possible. There is no political goal, they made no political demands, they didn't make any in Paris either. The goal is to kill civilians.
Accidents, which everybody strives to avoid, and intelligent agents actively seeking to kill you are two different classes of danger and people react differently.
With accidents, you can kinda hope they won't be happening too often because nobody benefits from them. Not so much with violent conflicts, though.
Terrorist attacks by definition aim for psychological effects over monetary/human cost. I think they have more than achieved their objective with this attack.
And the amount of damage done by legislators, governments, and other "opponents" of terrorism after the fact? Almost unlimited and pales in comparison with the violence itself.
> And they managed to to kill less than 30 people (provisional count).
It is almost trivial to be an effective terrorist if body count is what you're optimizing for. In Baghdad they blew a fuel tanker sky high, the blast rattled my windows so hard across the city that I thought we were the ones under attack.
I have wondered (ever since it was my job to think like a guerrilla fighter) why terrorists don't do similar things in the US or other countries. How many fuel tankers are there in the US? How hard would it be to GTA one of them and drive it into a dense gathering of people? How hard would it be to re-enact the CoD MW2 airport scene?
Perhaps it is symbolism not body counts they seek? After all the DC sniper effectively terrorized three states with a rifle.
In the infantry nothing is scarier than land mines and snipers.
All I know is surveillance can't stop every tanker or lone gunman. It's just too easy to do these kinds of things without the use of anything with a significant RF signature.
>No terrorist group has achieved a kill rate anywhere near a conventional military; and are vastly less than those death tolls for guerrilla organizations or dictators. Stalin or Mao could, in a bad day, exceed the deaths caused by all international terrorism over the last 2 centuries. 9/11, the crowning incident of terrorism in those centuries, was equaled by just 29 days of car accidents in the USA - and 9/11 was only accidentally that successful! 9/11 is also a sterling example of the availability bias: besides it, how many attacks could the best informed Western citizen name? Perhaps a score, on a good day, if they have a good memory; inasmuch as the MIPT database records >19,000 just 1968-2004, it’s clear that terrifyingly exceptional terrorist attacks are just that. Remarkably, it seems that it is unusual for terrorist attacks to injure even a single person; the MIPT database puts the number of such attacks at 35% of all attacks. Certainly the post-9/11 record would seem to indicate it was a fluke... Many terrorist organizations keep very detailed financial records (consider the troves of data seized from Al-Qaeda-in-Iraq, from Bin Laden’s safehouse, or Al Qaeda’s insistence on receipts), with little trust of underlings, suggesting far less ideological devotion than commonly believed & serious principal-agent problems. Stories about terrorist incompetence are legion and the topic is now played for laughs (eg. the 2010 movie Four Lions), prompting columnists to tell us to ignore all the incompetence and continue to be afraid.
How can technology help prevent such attacks without infringing on the basic right to privacy?
Perhaps some sort of real time image recognition of video streams from major public areas (like airports), which can detect things like guns and unattended packages and alert authorities automatically? Of course, that doesn't help detect the suicide bomber scenario.
Automatic facial recognition of known criminals? That would be hugely open to abuse.
My first visceral reaction was "Fuck it, just kill them all and bomb them back to stone age". I know I'm not alone on this -- the recent rise of nationalism, isolationism, Euro-scepticism and hostility towards refugees all over Europe is painful evidence for this sentiment.
But it's important to understand that these feelings are what such attacks are intended to invoke. They're intended to harden the gap between "us" and "them", to make Westerners despise anyone who looks conveniently foreign enough to be suspicious of belonging to "them" and to use them as scapegoats for the perpetrators who have often already escaped justice through death.
These atrocities weren't committed by "Muslims" just like the atrocities in the UK during the Troubles were not committed by "Christians". The perpetrators were individuals -- even if they belonged to a group that group wasn't "Muslims", it most likely wasn't even "ISIS"; just a small group of like-minded dangerous individuals who were convinced they would aid mankind by committing atrocities like these.
In so far as certain ideologies led to these convictions it is important to understand that you can't kill ideas with weapons. Yes, where there are armies fighting for dangerous ideologies they need to be stopped, but where you can't even clearly distinguish the soldiers from the civilians you need to destroy the ideology, not the people.
But unlike people, ideologies are very difficult to destroy and take a long time to fully extinguish. And in times like these it's far too easy to fall prey to politicians promising fast satisfaction rather than a long-term strategy towards a shift in ideologies.
We need to embrace our humanity and liberties. We have already had our period of enlightenment and we have overcome totalitarianism and theocracy. We must not allow ourselves to regress to the dark age, no matter how appealing it may seem in times like these -- neither here in Europe, nor oversees in the US.
Presented without comment: "This is a solid Moment to get up to speed on the Brussels situation. Click the follow button to stay in the loop." - @sacca
I know @sacca is a huge promoter of twitter (and investor in..), but I was in bed this morning putting off getting ready to go to work and I saw his tweet about the Moment. It was actually really useful, much easier than trying to aggregate wtf was happening from 20 disparate tweets and feeds.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 194 ms ] thread2nd generation immigrants
I'm not against immigration per se, but there's a lot of problems coming from people who fail (because it's mostly their responsibility) to integrate
Truth is, you can be so enclosed in a foreign culture that you will actually stay a foreigner trough all your life.
P.S.: I'm not saying that was the case here, I'm just answering your broader remark.
And that they're not first generation immigrants doesn't prove it isn't a problem with immigration either. We are still left with this recurring coincidence aren't we.
I don't claim to know the absolute truth here, I'm just suggesting we honestly acknowledge reality during discussions.
I didn't say it was recent immigration that caused this incident, we both know that (if they are 2nd generation, it couldn't be recent).
> other than that they're Muslim
You think that their religion has absolutely nothing to do with this? I mean, even unjust prejudice within their host country because of their religion could easily cause social isolation and economic disadvantage leading to anger - that seems like a perfectly reasonable explanation to me and largely places the ultimate blame on the host country.
A few of the others were French and were known to be in Syria, but how they came back to EU is apparently not known (could be with help from people smugglers, avoiding any registration at borders, because some of them were on wanted lists).
Schengen area doesn't actually even try to verify who comes in, and that enables also movement of jihadists - even if they are only a few among thousands and thousands, but the few can avoid border controls.
That has nothing to do with 'recent migration policies'.
A moderately successful terrorist attack on occasion does not Armageddon make.
Also, Belgium political system is also not helping given its fractured nature thus limiting its options to effectively tackle those challenges and if we take into account the weak economic reality of Brussels add to that its ineffective fight of organized crime (Funding terrorist attacks and armaments) creating a perfect storm for this type of events to flourish whether in Belgium or spilling into other parts of Europe like what happened in Paris last November.
Two of the nine were not - they were actual, recent immigrants through asylum-seeking process.
"Ahmad al-Mohammad" who came as a refugee through Turkey to Leroa in Greece, and together with him were registered the fingerprints of another immigrant known as "M. al-Mahmodin".
The rest were second-generation immigrants:
Bilal Hadfi was French but he spent time in Syria and came back, not through controlled border crossings, so he might have come with the asylees/immigrants. Others included French citizens Samy Amimour, who fought in Yemen, and Omar Ismail Mostefai and Foued Mohamed-Aggad who fought in Syria, and they were on wanted lists but were not spotted on border, so they appear to have come through people smugglers as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/November_2015_Paris_attacks#Id...
If it turns out that they were in fact refugees, that still doesn't make it a migration problem when most of the attackers were French or Belgian.
If he'd jumped on Easyjet from Istanbul, he'd have had to provide a passport and visa and risk being arrested at border check in case the authorities were too interested in his involvement with extremists.
I don't get your point about blue channel; flights from Istanbul are not EU/Schengen internal.
Again, that's not something that totally prevents acts of terror, but would work as a bit of deterrent. I believe I should have a voice about this, because I live in the same Schengen area.
So perhaps that "bald-faced lie" needs to be toned down a bit.
> Always good, on days like this, to remind everyone that the guys blowing up Brussels are THE PEOPLE THE REFUGEES ARE RUNNING AWAY FROM
Will wonders never cease. But let’s stick to what HN does best, discuss the wonders of technology. In this case, I’d liek to administer a Turing Test:
The hypothesis is that ”odinduty" is a reasonably sophisticated bot, trained to emulate the kind of comments you find on /r/Europeans. Can we find it making a statement inconsistent with this hypothesis?
Anything even remotely rational.
"Bombs at Brussels airport. I'm alive but I think there are casualties." - https://twitter.com/lrz/status/712173286281650176
Laurent Sansonetti MacRuby & RubyMotion's creator and lead developer was near the blast.
- we need more surveillance rights and money for the secret services
- we need more police and higher spending
- and possibly bomb some country (Syria is en vogue)
What won't be said is:
- How come this happens again without anyone having seen it coming?
- What does it say about the success of the Western anti-terror foreign policy adopted ~2001?
But we're not completely anti-west, we enjoy the freedoms and religious autonomy we're granted and we enjoy the cultural mix that "the West" affords us.
It also doesn't mean we wish to maim and murder the innocent (on either side of the argument!) in order to make our point. I think 99% of us can agree that groups (like ISIS) who think it's acceptable and act to torture and kill the innocent to make their political point need to die in a hell-fire and be damned to all eternity. Or maybe that's just me.
Oh, completely agree with that.
The only problem is that this description fits not only ISIS, and its opposing government by Assad, it also fits the US friendly Iraq, and Saudi Arabia, and the US government itself, and anybody else that has the intention of doing anything there.
Ah, and don't forget the European border policies regarding (mostly Syrian) refugees...
Many believe that getting rid of Assad will end the Syrian refugee crisis. Others observe that when the Saddam and Gaddafi heads were cut off the snake grew ISIS.
And so it goes.
The only difference between Assad and the other remaining dictators in the region is that the US was heavily invested in getting rid of Assad -- and then Russia came and basically ruined their plans indefinitely.
If there's one Muslim country whose government is in dire need of being overthrown it's Turkey -- but sadly Erdogan has learned from his country's past and made sure the military won't turn against him anytime soon.
Fast forward a few years and she has completely turned around and regrets her former opinions.
This doesn't really prove what is the correct approach, but I think speaks about the fact that we often make decisions based on some vague ideals as opposed to practical and realistic outcomes - and we are sometimes wrong.
But I agree that this is a problem we can't bomb our way out of.
Alas, the spying is apparently targeting mainly the innocent civilians and is mostly ineffective against criminals.
There doesn't seem to be a "Goldilocks" amount of data. Or if there is, intelligence services seem to have no interest in finding it if it means restraining themselves.
For any city, I could give the advice: avoid the airport, trains stations, the metro, and famous tourist attractions.
On the other hand, these are typically the places that you need and want to go if you visit a city, so it's anyway better just not care. The risk is very, very, very small.
Metros and mass transit are generally the most lucrative target, as we see here, and as we saw in London 10 years ago.
This consisted of a small interview on what I've been doing in Israel, where I am going to, with whom and who packed my stuff. This all was before even entering the actual terminal building.
People interested in killing others will just go for the easiest place, so they will just bomb the line at the scanners entering the terminal.
I talk to a lot of frequent fliers, and almost every one of them has said that there is no point to a terrorist trying to bomb a plane any more. The easiest target for terrorism is simply the insecure portion of an airport. We saw this today in Brussels.
You have to stop the issues at their source: why did people who were born and raised in Europe radicalize in just one or two years? And why did the community they lived in not see or report that this was happening?
Besides, to defend against suicide bombings, the dogs would have to encounter everyone before they enter the airport checkin area, otherwise the bomber could just detonate once the dog start barking (or whatever they do to mark that they've found something).
Unfortunately, by the time there's a bomb at the airport, it is too late unless "James Bond" is on the scene.
The core issues here need to be addressed.
Yes, we should have security and even bomb detection tech in select public places... but that's secondary to what needs to be done to fix this mess.
Moreover, the bomb was set off outside the secure area. It is VERY likely that existing security measures got more people killed because there are dense crowds waiting to clear security. This exact type of attack, outside the secure area, was predicted long ago. And there you have it.
Any security lines are actually past passport control, and I've never seen them particularly packed.
https://twitter.com/mattocko/status/712227775805988864
TATP (acetone peroxide), the type of improvised explosive favored by terrorists because of the easy access to ingredients, is uniquely difficult to detect but there have been some recent advances in this area [0]
Most of these attackers use vests that carry 2-10kg of TATP, or backpacks with 10+ kilograms. They are required to load these devices up and travel to their designated target, the hope is that with explosive detection you could pick these guys up or minimize casualties in the same way you could identify a gunman on CCTV.
It wouldn't be a panacea - but it could form part of a broader set of new tech to assist with these cases
[0] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0925400511...
a) People would bitch more because it would take forever to get into an airport. And,
b) It isn't practical. What's next, stopping you at your car or bus before you park?
People demand security but don't want inconvenience. And if security fails, they point and say "it's ineffective." Even if it stops 80% of attacks, unless it's 100% people will bitch. AND if there aren't any attacks, can they really claim that they stopped one unless they publicly acknowledge every attempted attack?
As a result people have to bunch up outside the terminal, making them even more vulnerable than they otherwise would be.
Any true improvements would have to come from streamlined pre-screening, e.g. chemical detectors (or dogs?) in the concourse sniffing things out without making people stop or bunch up. Hard to do.
Looks like it's not working too well. Surveillance services have gained mass resources since 2015 in France and that did not stop the December attacks at all.
- Bringing more eyes and ears in the form of social workers and community policemen in problematic neighborhoods.
- Provide better education/work opportunities for immigrants.
- Better cooperation between municipalities and Muslim organisations/mosques.
- Deradicalization programs.
Of course, implementing such policies takes time and it's much more popular to present the 'easy solutions' (more surveillance, closing borders, etc.).
France has been doing pretty much the opposite, investing money in surveillance and special forces instead. Belgium has kind of ignored problems.
Edit: getting more downvotes, without any of the downvoters caring to justify them so far, so I can only speculate as for the reasons behind them.
I'm wondering if the downvoters (I'm guessing from the USA) are aware that my views are already a law in many of the liberal democracies of Europe? There are laws which put you in jail for saying certain things, and they are enforced (there are people who are doing time just for saying things).
That's part of the problem right there that people segregate into enclaves and have little contact with each other's communities.
Meanwhile, people are dying. That is exactly how some people see it, and exactly how I see it. I'm not emotional, I'm logical, and I expect government to protect us from evil individuals/groups. Arguably, it's not there to foster some sort of "long-term" sustainable co-existence between different cultures.
First, you establish security and root out potential problem groups. And once that's happened, and you have almost non-existent danger to the local populace, then you can start worrying about integration and grey-goals such as "peaceful coexistence" and "de-radicalization". And I don't say that as a means to single-out immigrants, or foreign groups. This reasoning should apply just as much to dangerous elements that are within, and part of society currently.
Just before Christmas last year:
French police have foiled an attack targeting police and army personnel in the central city of Orléans, Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said on Tuesday. Two men have been arrested.
...
Cazeneuve said 10 attacks had been prevented this year in France, which suffered its worst atrocity for decades last month when Islamist militants killed 130 people in Paris.
http://www.france24.com/en/20151222-france-terror-plot-foile...
Exhibit A: The Mossad is generally considered one of the best intelligence services world-wide.
Exhibit B: There are still frequent terrorist attacks in Israel.
I also feel governments today are under much more scrutiny than they have ever been. Are we at a place were a new Bin Laden is going to get a new Bush to launch a war. Who knows? But people are much more aware of the costs than in 2001.
Still security responses aren't mature/sophisticated enough to prevent such tragic incidents, and must be given some leeway to evolve.
Knowing how Belgium handles their minorities in Brussels, it's not a big surprise.
The fact that this happens now is neither a surprise. Salah Abdeslam has been caught, and there were messages that he wanted to cooperate with the Belgium police. Whether it's true or not, if they were planning something, and he knew about it, waiting was not a real option.
Could you elaborate? Is this a banlieu situation?
Belgium has big problems between the Flemish and French speaking parts, and particularly in Brussels it's politically very complicated. For some city wide measures, they need like 26 police commanders to agree. I don't know the numbers, but it's very complex to get all people in line. And I'm not talking about the people in the street, this is about city councils, police departments etc.
Brussels itself resembles the EU in this respect.
This article discusses the mess that is Belgian governmental organization: http://www.politico.eu/article/belgium-failed-state-security...
Why is this a bad thing? I feel safer with more police presence but maybe that's just me.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_theater
The security theater was specifically about TSA and other untrained (or minimally trained) symbolic gestures. Actual policing is not theater.
Does it work? The cost and human rights interferences are easier to take if more police works, but there's no evidence that it would.
Police have a bad habit of harassing populations (several riots in France were a result of policing practices such as asking everyone for an ID). It helps to contribute to send a message of unwelcomeness to people who are likely already disillusioned in the system.
It's unlikely that more police could stop attacks. Maybe deal with the aftermath/manhunts better. But it sounds like more precision operations (including human intelligence) will go a lot further.
A lot of people could see it coming, except for the naive PC people
Better than most people that didn't have the privilege of being there in the first place.
Also access to better education and social support, which most people in the world doesn't have
> they blame everyone but their own actions
Yes, that's the main excuse of people who don't make an effort and expect everything from society (including several 'natives')
Belgium certainly does. Its failures in counter terrorism have lead to the Paris attacks and now these attacks. At least that is the understanding I have gleaned from twitter conversations of CT experts
"One Belgian counterterrorism official told BuzzFeed News last week that due to the small size of the Belgian government and the huge numbers of open investigations — into Belgian citizens suspected of either joining ISIS, being part of radical groups in Belgium, and the ongoing investigations into last November’s attacks in Paris, which appeared to be at least partially planned in Brussels and saw the participation of several Belgian citizens and residents — virtually every police detective and military intelligence officer in the country was focused on international jihadi investigations.
“We just don’t have the people to watch anything else and, frankly, we don’t have the infrastructure to properly investigate or monitor hundreds of individuals suspected of terror links, as well as pursue the hundreds of open files and investigations we have,” the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media, said. “It’s literally an impossible situation and, honestly, it’s very grave.”"
See http://www.buzzfeed.com/mitchprothero/belgian-authorities-ov...
It's like the spy agencies and law enforcement are always highly competent and can never do any wrong.
They get fired if they break rules, fail to obey standard operating procedure, do not fill tick marks correctly on a paper.
They work in a system, and the system has responsibility, not individual people who work for it -- unless they neglect or break rules and procedures.
But they did see it coming. From what I gathered from the response of many Brussels residents and airport personnel, the question was "when", more than "if".
It's not like you can say "yeah, we saw that coming and let it happen." Because THAT, sure as hell, will not fly with the people. And "yeah, we saw it coming and stopped it" is questioned as just posturing. When people say "scanning individuals in airports makes us no safer," what are they comparing it to?
Is it that they doubt the effectiveness because people are still getting killed by terrorists in planes? No. It's because there are no attacks, so they have no data to say "yeah... it's been effective."
2) Finding real plots are too hard so they entrap people and even then, they don't find many.
3) They aren't spreading around their "successes" because they are absurdly few and borderline entrapment.
4) Homegrown threats are a greater danger and largely being ignored.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/25/us/tally-of-attacks-in-us-...
> But the breakdown of extremist ideologies behind those attacks may come as a surprise. Since Sept. 11, 2001, nearly twice as many people have been killed by white supremacists, antigovernment fanatics and other non-Muslim extremists than by radical Muslims: 48 have been killed by extremists who are not Muslim, including the recent mass killing in Charleston, S.C., compared with 26 by self-proclaimed jihadists, according to a count by New America, a Washington research center.
> Non-Muslim extremists have carried out 19 such attacks since Sept. 11, according to the latest count, compiled by David Sterman, a New America program associate, and overseen by Peter Bergen, a terrorism expert. By comparison, seven lethal attacks by Islamic militants have taken place in the same period.
> The contentious question of biased perceptions of terrorist threats dates back at least two decades, to the truck bombing that tore apart the federal building in Oklahoma City in April 1995. Some early news media speculation about the attack assumed that it had been carried out by Muslim militants. The arrest of Timothy J. McVeigh, an antigovernment extremist, quickly put an end to such theories.
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/other/nsa-program-stopped-no-ter...
> A member of the White House review panel on NSA surveillance said he was “absolutely” surprised when he discovered the agency’s lack of evidence that the bulk collection of telephone call records had thwarted any terrorist attacks.
https://theintercept.com/2015/11/17/u-s-mass-surveillance-ha...
> And even before Snowden, the NSA wasn’t able to provide a single substantiated example of its surveillance dragnet preventing any domestic attack at all.
https://news.vice.com/article/the-line-between-fbi-stings-an...
> A report released this week from Human Rights Watch highlights how, consistently, FBI sting operations are over aggressive and premised on the racist profiling of Muslim communities — that old building block of our contemporary national security state. Based on 215 interviews and focusing on 27 post-9/11 cases of alleged terror plot thwarting, HRW's findings call into question the very legitimacy of the FBI's counterterror work. The authors go as far as to call a number of stings "government-created" terror plots.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/nov/16/fbi-entrapment-...
> But the issue is one that stretches far beyond Newburgh. Critics say the FBI is running a sting operation across America, targeting – to a large extent – the Muslim community by luring people into fake terror plots. FBI bureaux send informants to trawl through Muslim communities...
Some people probably also assume that higher perceived level of threat that justifies tighter security is not a result of natural development, but of direct action by governments when carrying out their foreign policies.
The vicious circle of "we go and do good in the faraway, they blow us up, we tighten local security and do more good in the faraway,…" begs to determine causation in this correlation.
The problem with this argument is that it can be used to justify any security measures, no matter how costly or stupid. Because maybe it's really very effective in practice but we can't tell you about it?
You're basically saying "trust us, we're the government." It's the recipe for total unaccountability.
So no, they have to justify that the costly and stupid security measures actually work. Or we'll have nothing but costly and stupid security measures that don't actually work.
How exactly do you want them to justify. Your demand is too vague to be even considered. How do you propose, they should advertise every thwarted terrorist attack, without alerting the other terrorists?
All security is plain unproductive overhead, which is compulsory in the presence of adversary.
>>You're basically saying "trust us, we're the government." It's the recipe for total unaccountability.
You're basically saying, "don't trust the govt" and that is the recipe for total anarchy, which is heaven for terrorists.
How about they stop doing it and if the level of terrorism remains in the "still kills fewer people than bathtubs" range, we realize we didn't need it.
> All security is plain unproductive overhead, which is compulsory in the presence of adversary.
All security is compulsory? Madness.
Security is risk management. All government activity is risk. You spend a dollar on surveillance technology instead of scientific research that would have led to safer products or life saving medicine and people die. You take a dollar from the taxpayer who now can't afford those products or medicine and people die. Government waste kills more people than terrorism. To say nothing of the people bad governments kill much more directly.
> You're basically saying, "don't trust the govt" and that is the recipe for total anarchy
Only if by anarchy you mean democracy.
Comparing terrorism to bathtub is foolish at its best and outright dangerously misleading at its worst. Tomorrow you can say `if the level of terrorism remains in the "still kills fewer people than old age" range, we realize we didn't need it.`
Statistics can be (mis)used to justify any claim.
One reason why people find terrorism more dangerous than heart disease, cancer, etc is this - bathtub and cars are NOT human beings and thus do NOT actively not tolerate difference of opinions amongst other groups of people and do NOT engage in acts of "killing other people for difference of opinions" while human terrorists do engage in such killings and do constantly search for opportunities to kill people with different opinions.
>How about they stop doing it and ...
Define "it".
Do you want to compare it to numbers instead of things? How about we not worry this much about it as long as the chance of the average person being killed by it is less than 0.1%. Or here's a good one: how about we limit the amount of money being spent on it in proportion to how many people it kills. Spend a trillion dollars fighting heart disease and a billion fighting terrorism instead of the other way around.
> One reason why people find terrorism more dangerous than heart disease, cancer, etc is this - bathtub and cars are NOT human beings and thus do NOT actively not tolerate difference of opinions amongst other groups of people and do NOT engage in acts of "killing other people for difference of opinions" while human terrorists do engage in such killings and do constantly search for opportunities to kill people with different opinions.
And what of it? A lion has a difference of opinion with you about whether you're its dinner. Do we need to spend a trillion dollars and have a war on lions? What about Streptococcus? It's alive, it adapts, it wants to kill you, another trillion dollars?
> Define "it".
Mass surveillance. And pretty much the entire TSA.
The point about lion is good and that's why our ancestors had spent a huge amount of resources (money, time, hunters etc) to "eradicate" lions. Due to our ancestors' efforts and the consequential huge spendings towards this eradication, today we don't have to worry too much about the opinions of lions. Today the lions are rendered as what we proverbially call "toothless tigers/snakes".
A similar argument can be made about Streptococcus or (any such bacteria/virus or even any other such animal) and humans want to be in charge of things so much so that their opinions and thence their consequential actions do not become a significant danger/hazard to the humans.
Many fanatical animal lovers do hate this idea (of humans wanting to be in charge/control of other animals) too. But that is a different story.
Now with terrorists, the things become different in a very important manner. Lions and other animals are different species and thus their eradication problem doesn't first pose a very difficult "identification" problem. To deal with human terrorists, first we have to "identify" them and their sympathizers who can/do provide safe harbour to them and thus help the terrorists in their intended terrorist actions. This "identification" problem is what requires mass surveillance. This brings "cancer" to my mind, as in case of "cancer" also we face a very "identification" problem: problem of identification of dangerous cells.
Hope this helps.
But the identification problem isn't unique. It's true of every crime there is. Criminals don't come with tags labeling them as a terrorist or a murderer or a pedophile. And there is nothing you can ever do to eliminate 100% of all crime. It's about the most cost effective way to provide enough deterrence to keep the crime rate low. And mass surveillance has a huge cost in privacy and in money and in security itself. It's a terrible trade off.
> This brings "cancer" to my mind, as in case of "cancer" also we face a very "identification" problem: problem of identification of dangerous cells.
You're kind of making my point. Cancer kills way, way more people than terrorism. Why are we spending more resources fighting terrorism than cancer?
Correct. But terrorism (inspired by hate ideology or religion) is significantly different in a very important respect from other crimes you mentioned; that is, the terrorist(s) generally find support and shelter amongst large number of otherwise normal citizens inspired/driven by the hate ideology or religion whereas a murderer or a pedophile generally doesn't find such shelter. That's why
>>You're kind of making my point. Cancer kills way, way more people than terrorism. Why are we spending more resources fighting terrorism than cancer?
No, I am NOT making your point. I gave the cancer example to point out the problem of identification. But I am not entirely against you here. You may say that we must spend some more resources to fight cancer but if you say we must curtail on mass surveillance and other anti-terrorism measures to do cancer fight then I don't agree.
>>And mass surveillance has a huge cost in privacy and in money and in security itself.
Privacy is important but NOT as important as survival itself.
That's why what?
> You may say that we must spend some more resources to fight cancer but if you say we must curtail on mass surveillance and other anti-terrorism measures to do cancer fight then I don't agree.
But why not? If spending a dollar fighting cancer saves more lives than spending the same dollar fighting terrorism and we don't have unlimited resources then why should we make the choice that causes more loss of life?
> Privacy is important but NOT as important as survival itself.
Privacy is security. The information they're collecting is inherently dangerous. It's much easier to use it to plan an attack than to defend from one. If you're looking for a needle in a haystack, more data is more hay. But if you're trying to burn everything down then it tells you who is vulnerable where and when. The only way to prevent terrorists from breaking in and accessing the data is to not collect it to begin with.
And terrorists aren't even the main threat. Surveillance of innocent people makes them vulnerable to anyone who has the data. Cartel hitmen, sexual predators, Richard Nixon, take your pick.
I will not agree with your dumping of Richard Nixon with crime cartels and sexual predators. In general, the US democratic government system has proven to be much more successful and benevolent than any other system in the world, including the much touted communism (USSR, China, N. Korea). What I mean to say is Richard Nixon is hardly a threat as compared to Mao or Stalin.
Granted, there is a small non-zero chance of an innocent getting hurt in some way due to privacy issues, but that doesn't and shouldn't mean we should abandon surveillance and deprive ourselves of important and timely information and put many more innocents to risk.
>That's why what?
(Oho sorry, but I guess, the rest of the words got deleted.) That's why surveillance of such hate groups (e.g. Wahabi mosques or extreme left/right groups) is also mandatory.
I don't think there is any solution which makes everyone perfectly safe. Politicians always want to guarantee perfect safety but it's not possible. Some things you can prevent, some things you can stop, but some horrible thing will inevitably happen.
I don't buy it.
On the other hand, religion is probably the most important, yet arbitrary and completely illogical, divisive influence in the world. So, religion most definitely is to blame.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sectarian_violence#Northern_Ir...
Christianity fractured in 1517 over the question of the extent of Papal authority and corruption. This led to centuries of power struggle as to who was superior: papal authority or civil authority? The UK eventually decided for civil authority in 1688 by installing a Parliament-respecting Protestant monarch rather than a Pope-respecting absolutist Catholic monarch. The ensuing fighting was ended at the Boyne in 1690. But it's still a battle the commemoration of which leads to fighting in the street in NI.
This led to a position of Catholic oppression by Protestants for centuries. Is this really a religious issue, or a self-perpetuating cycle of violence?
How about reading the exact sources in order to avoid even being in position of having to "buy" anything? For example the core texts? Just get one and read it. Don't let anybody tell you anything, especially don't trust any claimed "interpretations," read it yourself, in your language, undiluted, not just one sentence, but at least the whole chapter where it appears, take notes, then discuss.
And then if you question the translation you read, there are enough online sources which display the different translations which can be then compared. You can even search where any word is used through all the texts. Just don't believe anybody who says that you can't do that.
Just like I don't have to know ancient Greek to understand what's written in the Odyssey.
Then investigate if there are any known interpretations by the influential scholars that are equivalent to western approach to other religions "that it shouldn't be taken literally." Investigate the practices and how the ideas are actually applied in real life. Study history to know how they were historically applied and which effect they had. Know the context.
(I'm not going to discuss this further here, this is my only post, but I stand to my claim that everybody can read and understand the sources and research how they are viewed by the influential scholars, and that these facts can be calmly discussed, and that the discussion should not depend on the groupthink or faith but the actual knowledge of the topic discussed. Don't write "I don't buy" this or that, discuss the facts you actually know, then somebody can contribute to your knowledge by stating the facts he knows etc).
Moreover I haven't seen anybody else who wrote what I see only you write: "You and many others seem to post that there is a mental cancer infecting 1.5 billion people on this planet, and at any time it could transform its host into a bloodthirsty murderer seemingly at random."
Careful readers are advised to read what others really wrote (e.g the post to which you respond wrote just "I would argue that religion is the variable that plays the dominant role in this war of ideas"), not what you claim (or somebody else claims) it is supposed to mean.
Analyzing your post in this light, it appears to be strikingly manipulative and dishonest, distorting what others actually wrote and promoting non-thinking and blindly believing (your attempt to discredit somebody with something he hasn't even written).
[1] Jihadi John: http://blogs.reuters.com/great-debate/2015/02/27/the-horror-...
It is an ingredient. Eric Hoffer's _The True Believer_ is a good sketch of the phenomenon. Among the disaffected, some will latch onto any available dogmatic belief system. As long as radical Islam is in the news, and is accessible, some among the disaffected will choose that path.
Not all dogmas result in blowing yourself up in crowds, or setting off bombs or gunning down people in theaters. Doesn't it make sense to preferentially attack those dogmas that bring out, at present, the worst characteristics in their adherents?
It would be great if our foreign policy in the past 1.5 (or 3, or 5, or 7) decades hadn't been a disaster and promoted unrest in the region, because that undoubtedly increased the seriousness of our current situation. We (by that I mean our leaders who make foreign policy and military decisions) should try to learn from history and not repeat the same mistakes, although they all (no matter their politics) seem to do a very poor job of that. But the question of why radical Islam is such a problem now is irrelevant to the question of whether we should fight radical Islam. It's not a very reasonable thing to conclude that because we're partly responsible for the rise of radical Islam, we should do nothing and let it conquer the world if it wants.
What I think would be an awful mistake is to replicate the Roosevelt style policy with regard to Muslims.
Also, The True Believer is already on my to-read list, I'll bump it up after I get done with Piketty. Thanks for the recommendation!
It's certainly religious flamewar, which has no place on Hacker News.
It's also intellectually puerile, as if there's such a thing as "just reading" any text and "going figure", let alone an ancient text with countless interpretive traditions.
The nuance required to understand and attack the big picture is almost nowhere to be found.
I saw the French PM said something like "we're at war" - I'm not sure who they're at war with but onward with the endless war.
I've seen plenty of comments about ISIS. It's like a 99.999% chance it's not ISIS - maybe Al Qaeda, maybe a different extremist group. (For why it's probably not ISIS and one of the most fantastic explanations of the what's and whys of ISIS, see [0].) But it shows just how vastly uneducated most people are about the issues that lead to attacks like this.
This breeds calls for extremism in response, like expelling all Muslims (and can only help Trump's campaign) or comments like the one from the French PM above.
I can't imagine being in charge of trying to address all of the underlying issues that feed into attacks like this. And I don't know that those in charge are up to the task.
[0] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/what-isi...
Edit: ISIS inspired maybe, but not ISIS planned and backed. "During his visit to Mosul in December, Jürgen Todenhöfer interviewed a portly German jihadist and asked whether any of his comrades had returned to Europe to carry out attacks. The jihadist seemed to regard returnees not as soldiers but as dropouts. “The fact is that the returnees from the Islamic State should repent from their return,” he said. “I hope they review their religion.”"
I always stand to be corrected.
You should see the wind go out of politicans sails when they learn an event like this is a random nutcase. They look like their dog died.
What's most sad about it, is that the current situation is the result of doing nothing, despite having crystal clear data on the situation, and in which (wrong) direction things has been changing.
It's been clear that something needs to be done for years, even decades, but actually doing something about the situation would mean publicly acknowledging these facts. And nobody has been willing to do just that.
In fact actually using these known indisputable facts has been systematically avoided for fear of being seen as "racist" or whatever.
Putting the specific issue of immigration aside, I think that it's a very bad sign for the future of enlightened democracy when actually running a fact-based policy is deemed as "risky" and even unacceptable from a public relations point of view.
If we let this attitude persist, we can do lots of wrongs in other areas as well: Think about environmental changes, etc etc.
We need to heighten the status of cold data, of facts as a matter of indisputability. But that's not a left/right issue and I don't think you will find any party fronting such a position.
I think the current situation is the result of doing way too much the the past decade (or two). If the US and EU stayed out of the Middle East (Iraq, Libya, Syria), the EU+ME part of the world would be a much more peaceful place.
Allow me to amend my comment slightly, and emphasise that I'm speaking of domestic policies.
Across Europe we've seen increased ghettofication, social segregation and religious extremism.
But because this has mostly been within demographic segments considered "weak" or "minorities", the explicit policy has consistently been sweeping things under the rug and proceeding as if nothing has been wrong.
And that has landed Europe where it is today.
Anyway. This is HN and I don't want to get more political than I need to. What bothers me the most is honestly the low status facts have in the politics of nations today, something I think should be a fairly incontroversial position.
perhaps the fact that they are "weak" or "minorities" is the cause and not the consequence of the attacks... I mean, in a complex society causality goes in any direction.
100% agree....when you can sit and watch a debate or discussion on TV, and one side or the other, or both, are using arguments that are known to be factually incorrect, it's bound to not turn out well.
I think if we are going to accept immigration from anywhere, we should first figure out how to assimilate all cultures to prevent as you correctly note ghettofication, social segregation and religious extremism. The things we're seeing today might be small potatoes compared to what could happen if there's a mass uprising.
I very much doubt that. Of course, there is no alternative reality where you could observe how things went when things were done differently, but there's no lack of violence in parts of the world where US and EU have not been doing things.
And of course you are neglecting that especially after WWII, Soviet Union did not exactly stay out of places, either. For instance, Afghanistan and Somalia, the two most notorious failed states in the world, were actually run under Soviet influence for a considerable time. Syria is still very much in the Russian sphere of influence. Etc.
A "fact-based policy" is utopia. What for you is a fact, for me it's not. You can not have policy without politics.
And what? That "something" needs to be done was clear since the 80s, but so far constructive solutions have been rather sparse. Integration is too expensive to the austerity and privatization loving right wing, and expulsion doesn't work because our economies depend on cheap immigrant labour. So far I've not seen anyone seen pushing for a different solution.
Say what you will about America's institutional racism, but I have rarely heard an American whine about people not acting American enough (maybe I'm hanging in the wrong circles)
Meanwhile I would hear a lot of complaining about riff raff accumulating around ethnic grocers and the like messing up the "culture " of downtown Nantes.
The integration fallacy is one that is doomed to fail from the outset. The people define an area, not the other way around. Let people do what they want, the free flow of ideas will do the rest.
Belgium does not have this problem.
Why?
https://twitter.com/caitlinmoran/status/712254657662418944
> Always good, on days like this, to remind everyone that the guys blowing up Brussels are THE PEOPLE THE REFUGEES ARE RUNNING AWAY FROM
I think it would be fair to call them French/Belgian ISIS members. There is no requirement that you must be Syrian to be a member of ISIS.
Pretending that it was a foreign aggression is a lie.
You're drawing a foreign/domestic distinction when none exists. There is no reason someone cannot be Belgian, and also a member of ISIS. What is your criteria for inclusion in "ISIS" if it's not someone saying "I'm with ISIS"?
I think it's far more likely that these attacks were triggered by the recent arrest of Salah Abdeslam and the killing of Mohamed Belkaid (in two different raids). There were multiple other suspects who were not captured/killed, and it seem plausible that they carried out these attacks now as they felt the police were closing in.
I'm not claiming that all terror attacks are always ISIS, and I'm not saying I'm sure this was ISIS, but given recent events in Belgium, the likelihood of ISIS involvement is a _lot_ higher than 0.001%.
That said, I agree this is likely retaliation, I'm just not sure how big the "enemy" we're fighting in Belgium is. Today's attack took a minimum of what, 3 people?
At least twice that. Some sort of cell leader, a bombmaker, logistics, bombers, etc...
They have been saying that since the terrorists attacks of 2015 in France. Nothing new. And France is actually at war against ISIS, that's not a secret for anyone.
The problem is very simple: cultural incompatibility.
It is better to stay humble, as the parent comment was.
The article you're linking to was written before the November attacks which certainly was by ISIS.
They created the mess in the first place with regressive colonial era imperialist policies. Just take a look at this photo from Afghanistan [0] before the US decided to arm the Taliban in a proxy war against the Russians.
[0] https://www.pinterest.com/pin/107734616059030266/
Everyone loves the material wealth neoliberalism gives them, but acts completely oblivious when confronted with the pure violence of its operation outside of the western bubble.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-belgium-blast-idUSKCN0WO0L...
There are many other strains of terrorism like the last terrorist attack in Ankara last week where a female Kurdish ultra-nationalist militant blew herself in a bus killing about 40 civilians in the process. This was just an instance of a political/nationalist violence/terrorism that has nothing to do with religion or Islam for that matter.
I guess it’s official. Facebook Safety Check is for terrorist attacks in white, western countries only. Good to know.
Edit: I was wrong and I take back what I said: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Safety_Check#Other_de...
A civil war is when two or more parties are actively fighting each other within one country. Current examples in the Middle East: Yemen, Libya, and Syria.
My country Tunisia is quite peaceful and is a young and successful democracy. Turkey is a stable country but is unfortunately sharing its border with Syria and has some trouble with extremist Kurd separatists.
I don't see what you're getting at mate.
If that for example is just "has some trouble with extremist Kurd separatists" then ok.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Safety_Check#Other_de...
What we need is to think this through, which also means challenging conventional wisdom, not just be "be united in following whatever said government wants to do".
EDIT: it was a controlled explosion made by the mine-clearing experts.
They had explosives, weapons, the resolve to sacrifice themselves and tried their best to do as much damage as possible. And they managed to to kill less than 30 people (provisional count).
Of course every death that brought on by this fanatic mob is too much, but we should keep our perspective.
A bus accident in Spain last week left 11 exchange students dead, in the US alone every day more than 50 people die in road accidents.
Of course we should root out the people that try to bomb our freedom away. But don't let us be terrorized by something that doesn't make a statistically recognizable dent in our probability for survival.
Compared with traffic regulation and enforcement, the response to terrorist events like this are vastly out of proportion, and well into the range of irrational response that the terrorists know is the only way to really damage a large powerful nation - by making it turn on its own people and put them in a security-state panopticon.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10689118
People should be much more afraid of dying in a car accident than dying at the hands of terrorists, yet few people are urgently pushing the government to enforce stronger safety standards in cars / on roads. Instead people demand better security to protect them against things they are unlikely to be involved in to begin with.
I appreciate your point, and it is somewhat reassuring, but terrorists can cause damage beyond the raw numbers because their damage can be focused.
I have no intention of belittling the incident, but I fail to see how shutting everything down is a proper response to any incident of less than catastrophic scale.
I take that back, I can see a reason: CYA. Nobody would want to be the one who makes the decision to keep the metro system running and have a second attack occur. I'm still not convinced that CYA is a sufficient reason, however.
If you don't shut down and an second and/or third incident then happens in a coordinated attack, it's very easy to say "Why didn't you shut down? Couldn't you see that we were under attack?"
That's "what's the point of using acronyms when you can just write out the full sentence?"
Well, you could ask the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the Central Intelligence Agency, or even consult with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Perhaps you can send them JavaScript Object Notation using the Asynchronous Javscript and Extensible Markup Language standard over HyperText Transfer Protocol?
</s>
I use acronyms to reduce the cognitive overhead of reading, and (relevant to this discussion) make otherwise offensive terms acceptable in a broad range of environments (snafu, CYA, OMFG, WTF, etc). I'm sorry you haven't run across CYA before (though that might be a good thing), but it's not a terribly uncommon acronym either.
Regular old inclement weather does this all the time and people don't cry panic that society is going to implode.
Shutting down transportation for a day is a silly thing to be terrorized about.
>As for us, we behave like a herd of deer. When they flee from the huntsman's feathers in affright, which way do they turn? What haven of safety do they make for? Why, they rush upon the nets! And thus they perish by confounding what they should fear with that wherein no danger lies. . . . Not death or pain is to be feared, but the fear of death or pain. Well said the poet therefore:—Death has no terror; only a Death of shame!
-Epictetus
Driving a car at least gives you the opportunity to reject taking on the risk.
The fabric of society is based around us not shooting each other/ blowing up trains. Every event like this (or, say, some countries bombing out neighborhoods in other countries) makes it harder to rely on the idea that this sort of thing doesn't happen.
Acknowledging that this happens because of conscious policy decisions by many people is also good.
There's absolutely nothing inevitable about these kinds of attacks. We could bring this sort of event down to a number real close to 0.
Not to mention that it's possible to worry about car crashes and terrorism at the same time
In my life time, I'm much more likely to be murdered by a driver than a terrorist.
Most bike deaths are single-vehicle accidents (they do not involve another party).
> We could bring this sort of event down to a number real close to 0.
Please, would you mind elaborating a bit on these two points?
The narrative after 9/11, and after both Paris attacks were "this is a war of civilization, of culture. They attack us because we are free". I think a lot of us realise on a conscious level that this narrative simply isn't true, but the narrative still stands.
Foreign intervention make us targets for "retaliation" (I'm trying hard to not apologise for monsters murdering a bunch of civilians pretty indiscriminately). There are many major countries and populations that are easier targets for Daesch that don't seem to get attacked. If this was about maximum carnage so many worse things could be happening right now.
The whole "having a population not super happy about the current government" thing doesn't seem to help (in terms of building a support network). Though even that requires a pound of salt: a journalist on twitter pointed out that in the case of the Paris attacks, there were support networks... but they were mainly for "normal" criminals (drug dealers and the like). We're not talking about a huge set of jihadists, but a bunch of opportunists [0].
I think most people would recognise that the IRA bombings and the Troubles was a result of policy, not culture. Daesch is, I think, pretty similar. It's not like a bunch of people got up and were like "We hate the West!". There's a lot of stuff involved. Not that it justifies their actions, but it's at least good to be lucid when thinking about the why.
[0]: https://twitter.com/joshuahersh/status/712280093343793153
I agree with you on that; it's unfortunate, though, that a lot of political bad actors have spot-welded "we need to understand why they're doing this" -- which is obviously true, it's much harder to defeat an enemy you don't understand -- to "it's racist to think that we have an enemy at all, never mind actually fight them effectively."
I don't think so.
Even if you exclude international politics completely the number still isn't zero. Take the 2011 Norway attacks where 77 people died. That was one guy, a Christian fundamentalist, likely paranoid schizophrenic who wanted to rid the world of Marxism/feminism/islam/something. Then you have the unabomber, most school shootings, and so on which you can point to.
My point is: This stuff is NEVER going away. All you can do is minimise it. Zero is certainly a laudable goal but likely an unachievable one.
Edit: However I agree with the part that this is never going to go away (completely). You cannot totally prevent terror, and living in a society that could would be terror itself.
They should look up north, Norway is the shining beacon in terms of how a country can handle terrorism responsibly.
With accidents, you can kinda hope they won't be happening too often because nobody benefits from them. Not so much with violent conflicts, though.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_i...
Saying that terrorist attacks barely impact P(death) trivializes them.
There you go. Killing 50+ people is absurdly easy. Hello, blacklists.
It is almost trivial to be an effective terrorist if body count is what you're optimizing for. In Baghdad they blew a fuel tanker sky high, the blast rattled my windows so hard across the city that I thought we were the ones under attack.
I have wondered (ever since it was my job to think like a guerrilla fighter) why terrorists don't do similar things in the US or other countries. How many fuel tankers are there in the US? How hard would it be to GTA one of them and drive it into a dense gathering of people? How hard would it be to re-enact the CoD MW2 airport scene?
Perhaps it is symbolism not body counts they seek? After all the DC sniper effectively terrorized three states with a rifle.
In the infantry nothing is scarier than land mines and snipers.
All I know is surveillance can't stop every tanker or lone gunman. It's just too easy to do these kinds of things without the use of anything with a significant RF signature.
>No terrorist group has achieved a kill rate anywhere near a conventional military; and are vastly less than those death tolls for guerrilla organizations or dictators. Stalin or Mao could, in a bad day, exceed the deaths caused by all international terrorism over the last 2 centuries. 9/11, the crowning incident of terrorism in those centuries, was equaled by just 29 days of car accidents in the USA - and 9/11 was only accidentally that successful! 9/11 is also a sterling example of the availability bias: besides it, how many attacks could the best informed Western citizen name? Perhaps a score, on a good day, if they have a good memory; inasmuch as the MIPT database records >19,000 just 1968-2004, it’s clear that terrifyingly exceptional terrorist attacks are just that. Remarkably, it seems that it is unusual for terrorist attacks to injure even a single person; the MIPT database puts the number of such attacks at 35% of all attacks. Certainly the post-9/11 record would seem to indicate it was a fluke... Many terrorist organizations keep very detailed financial records (consider the troves of data seized from Al-Qaeda-in-Iraq, from Bin Laden’s safehouse, or Al Qaeda’s insistence on receipts), with little trust of underlings, suggesting far less ideological devotion than commonly believed & serious principal-agent problems. Stories about terrorist incompetence are legion and the topic is now played for laughs (eg. the 2010 movie Four Lions), prompting columnists to tell us to ignore all the incompetence and continue to be afraid.
Perhaps some sort of real time image recognition of video streams from major public areas (like airports), which can detect things like guns and unattended packages and alert authorities automatically? Of course, that doesn't help detect the suicide bomber scenario.
Automatic facial recognition of known criminals? That would be hugely open to abuse.
But it's important to understand that these feelings are what such attacks are intended to invoke. They're intended to harden the gap between "us" and "them", to make Westerners despise anyone who looks conveniently foreign enough to be suspicious of belonging to "them" and to use them as scapegoats for the perpetrators who have often already escaped justice through death.
These atrocities weren't committed by "Muslims" just like the atrocities in the UK during the Troubles were not committed by "Christians". The perpetrators were individuals -- even if they belonged to a group that group wasn't "Muslims", it most likely wasn't even "ISIS"; just a small group of like-minded dangerous individuals who were convinced they would aid mankind by committing atrocities like these.
In so far as certain ideologies led to these convictions it is important to understand that you can't kill ideas with weapons. Yes, where there are armies fighting for dangerous ideologies they need to be stopped, but where you can't even clearly distinguish the soldiers from the civilians you need to destroy the ideology, not the people.
But unlike people, ideologies are very difficult to destroy and take a long time to fully extinguish. And in times like these it's far too easy to fall prey to politicians promising fast satisfaction rather than a long-term strategy towards a shift in ideologies.
We need to embrace our humanity and liberties. We have already had our period of enlightenment and we have overcome totalitarianism and theocracy. We must not allow ourselves to regress to the dark age, no matter how appealing it may seem in times like these -- neither here in Europe, nor oversees in the US.
I like that you used "extinguish" here.
I'm not sure if you intended it, but I think the behavioural psychology definition of "extinguish" is especially relevant.
In other words, to get rid of the ideology, we'd have to not reinforce it: i.e. to neither reward it or punish it.
And yes extinction[1] takes a long time.
Also see "extinction burst".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_(psychology)
https://www.wnyc.org/story/breaking-news-consumers-handbook-...
If you want a link without a paywall.
https://twitter.com/sacca/status/712270790037610499