6 ms·

While the threat of terrorism is not imaginary, it is certainly negligible compared to other threats.

by cjdavis 14y ago

jerf 14y ago
The physical terrorism threat is negligible. The generalized cheap-attack-with-disproportionate-damage threat I can't in good conscience write off quite so readily. Biological attacks are still scarily possible, and if we start talking computer viruses it becomes scarier again. Recall Stuxnet didn't merely inconvenience people, it destroyed hardware. If someone manages to write a virus that, say, destroys a significant number of power plant turbines, we're talking about a disaster that does in fact start killing people in addition to general inconvenience. Electricity really really is one of the lifebloods of civilization, and while the phrase lifeblood is obvious not literal it's more literal than it may appear on first glance. Cut it off and real people will really be hurt and killed. Personally I'd rate this class of threat comfortably above asteroid impact or solar flare-type disaster.
- kbolino 14y ago
  Terrorist victims in 2001: 3,000 Murder victims in 2001: 15,000 Car collision fatalities in 2001: 42,000 Cancer deaths in 2001: 550,000 The only thing that's disproportionate is how we react to terrorism. (statistics are for United States)
  - jerf 14y ago
    That's a canned knee-jerk response, not one that shows you read my message. That's not relevant data to the question of what future bioattacks or computer attacks are possible... and note my continued avoidance of the term "terrorism". Once an attack is launched the source isn't very relevant. Failing to secure our infrastructure because "terrorism isn't something to be afraid of" is still a stupid move because it leaves you open to not-terrorism just as much.
    - ThomPete 14y ago
      But the problem is that it ends up being a self-fulfilled prophecy. People without any part in the original conflict is getting affected by it and then suddenly they are part of it. That is the root of problems here.
    - kbolino 14y ago
      My original response was more thoughtful, but I felt that summed up my point better. The question is not what's possible, but what's likely and how much it will cost. If the likelihood is low and the cost is small, then you cannot justify extravagant preparation. An attack against civilian infrastructure is terrorism no matter who does it. It may be a singular event, part of a chain of attacks, or a prelude to a full-scale military offensive. It's still terrorism, because it terrorizes the civilian population. Irrational fear should not dictate our budget priorities. We can certainly take some precautions, and develop contingency plans. But at the end of the day, if someone is capable and determined enough, it's going to happen, regardless of how many much money and how many contractors and consultants we throw at the problem. The best we can do is take it in stride and rebuild.
      - jerf 14y ago
        You continue to not really be thinking about my point, insisting on framing it in a pre-canned terrorism argument. I am explicitly talking about high-cost events, and at best you can call the probability unknown, for things like a biological attack or a computer attack that perhaps even accidentally ends up taking out some very important part of the infrastructure. We already have good reasons to be concerned that a high-cost biological attack could be launched out of someone's literal garage, and it is not an irrational fear; we have plausible plans on how it could be done. Indeed I'd argue that being unconcerned about it is irrational, and being unconcerned about it because so far "terrorists", a small subset of the group of people I'm concerned about, have only managed to "fly planes into a couple of buildings". It's basically a non-sequitur argument, because a great deal of the point I'm making is that is only a small part of the total interesting threat profile.
        14y ago
  - webXL 14y ago
    Terrorist victims in 2001: 3,000 ... Cancer deaths in 2001: 550,000 I don't think it's fair to the families of the victims, to the people of NYC, or any peaceful, healthy person who has that threat in the back of their mind when minding their own business in public, to equate a cancer death with a death caused by a crumbling skyscraper, a burning skyscraper, or jumping out of a burning, crumbling skyscraper. I know cancer can be just as ruthless and indiscriminate, but it never has struck in such a concentrated, evil manner. The only thing that's disproportionate is how we react to terrorism. Are you implying that we shouldn't react disproportionately? That's not to say I agree with the current level of disproportionateness or that we shouldn't be spending billions of public dollars combatting a disease that's claiming more and more people because they are now living long enough to acquire it.
    - kbolino 14y ago
      Neither is any less dead than the other. The cause matters only to the living. My entire point is that fear of the threat in the back of your mind is entirely irrational. You're much more likely to die of cancer, and even then, you're not very likely to die at all. The Stalin quote about "a single death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic" comes to mind here. I understand your point that terrorism is the result of direct, willful action by people with malicious intent, whereas cancer is just a force of nature. But you have no real control over either, so why make such a big deal of the former?
      - terangdom 14y ago
        The former has a large political impact. How many dissidents a year do you think you need to kill to suppress any opposition?
        kbolino 14y ago
        Targeted acts of terrorism are different than indiscriminate attacks, and a coordinated series of attacks is different than an isolated incident. If the group of potentially affected people is very small, or the number of attacks very large, then the probabilities are drastically increased and a larger response is justified.
  - MartinCron 14y ago
    Terrorist victims in 2001: 3,000 That's not entirely true. There were ~3000 terrorism-related deaths, but the point of terrorism is that it victimizes an entire society by creating a culture of fear and uncertainty. That's what differentiates terrorism from (conventional) murder.
    - kbolino 14y ago
      To "create a culture of fear and uncertainty" is certainly the aim of terrorism. However, its effectiveness is dictated by the reaction of the affected population, not by the perpetrators or their actions.
  - einhverfr 14y ago
    While I agree that terrorism is given disproportionate attention (add car-collision fatalities in September 2001 as 3300 and it becomes even more useful comparison-wise), I also think it misses the point. The sorts of terrorism we are afraid of tends to hype fear over risk. Take anthrax for example. Anthrax has been floated as a biological weapon because it's unlikely to spread back and contaminate one's own area, but experiments with weaponized anthrax shows an abysmally low rate of contracting the disease (between 0.1% and 1%) and so it's nearly exclusively a weapon of fear. The very things that make it attractive as a biological weapon also make it ineffective (no person-person transmission for example). Similarly when we look at nerve gas attacks and the problems and sole case in history, it's clear these are relatively ineffective terrorism-wise. VX may be more effective than Sarin given high-tech dispersal systems but it's also very sensitive to things like droplet size and it's not volatile. Sarin, OTOH, is volatile meaning you can expect it to dissolve in the air and spread that way. Despite that, Aum Shinrikyo would have been more successful using plain old high explosives than nerve gas, and only one of their two nerve gas attacks (the one under entirely ideal circumstances) resulted in any fatalities whatsoever. Nuclear terrorism could be significant but I suspect you'd have to blow up a small nuke in a major city every ten years to have an effect similar to car crashes nationally. I am sorry but I just don't see that happening so as long as I don't worry about getting behind the wheel I don't give that a second thought either. All the above being said, cyberwar by non-state actors is different. Traditional terrorist attacks seek to cripple a society or socially disrupt it by killing people and making them afraid. I don't know that this necessarily has to be the intermediate goal of what people call cyber-terrorism (which is why I don't call it that). Instead it can disrupt society and hold it hostage by, well, disrupting it directly. Imagine if power blackouts and communications infrastructure was disrupted repeatedly. Imagine if we suddenly the power grid were taken down repeatedly. What would be disrupted? How well could we recover? What if telecomunications infrastructure was attacked as well? People would die but that's not really the goal. Just as in conventional terrorism deaths are a means to an end, sufficiently successful attackers could hold a society hostage by holding the infrastructure hostage.
- Difwif 14y ago
  Your fear about computer attacks appears to be a bit sensationalized and a typical knee jerk doomsday reaction. You parrot that "Electricity is the lifeblood of civilization" and that people will die when the power goes off but then seem to forget that blackouts already occur in highly populated areas. Are they a major annoyance? Of course! Do they cause mass death larger then asteroid impacts? Where did you get that idea? Many of our critical facilities have backup generators for a reason. If such an event did occur you'd be damn sure that any damage would be repaired ASAP.
  - pyre 14y ago
    I'm thinking that terrorists would have to do enough damage to warrant full replacement of a number (n = ?) of turbines at a number (m = ?) of plants to do significant, lasting damage in an area (you won't necessarily have a 'back-up turbine' lying around).
davidw 14y ago
Yeah, that's certainly something you can argue in good faith. I just disliked the "imaginary", which clearly is not true.

While the threat of terrorism is not imaginary, it is certainly negligible compared to other threats.

by cjdavis 14y ago

While the threat of terrorism is not imaginary, it is certainly negligible compared to other threats.

jerf 14y ago

The physical terrorism threat is negligible. The generalized cheap-attack-with-disproportionate-damage threat I can't in good conscience write off quite so readily. Biological attacks are still scarily possible, and if we start talking computer viruses it becomes scarier again. Recall Stuxnet didn't merely inconvenience people, it destroyed hardware. If someone manages to write a virus that, say, destroys a significant number of power plant turbines, we're talking about a disaster that does in fact start killing people in addition to general inconvenience. Electricity really really is one of the lifebloods of civilization, and while the phrase lifeblood is obvious not literal it's more literal than it may appear on first glance. Cut it off and real people will really be hurt and killed. Personally I'd rate this class of threat comfortably above asteroid impact or solar flare-type disaster.

kbolino 14y ago
Terrorist victims in 2001: 3,000 Murder victims in 2001: 15,000 Car collision fatalities in 2001: 42,000 Cancer deaths in 2001: 550,000 The only thing that's disproportionate is how we react to terrorism. (statistics are for United States)
- jerf 14y ago
  That's a canned knee-jerk response, not one that shows you read my message. That's not relevant data to the question of what future bioattacks or computer attacks are possible... and note my continued avoidance of the term "terrorism". Once an attack is launched the source isn't very relevant. Failing to secure our infrastructure because "terrorism isn't something to be afraid of" is still a stupid move because it leaves you open to not-terrorism just as much.
  - ThomPete 14y ago
    But the problem is that it ends up being a self-fulfilled prophecy. People without any part in the original conflict is getting affected by it and then suddenly they are part of it. That is the root of problems here.
  - kbolino 14y ago
    My original response was more thoughtful, but I felt that summed up my point better. The question is not what's possible, but what's likely and how much it will cost. If the likelihood is low and the cost is small, then you cannot justify extravagant preparation. An attack against civilian infrastructure is terrorism no matter who does it. It may be a singular event, part of a chain of attacks, or a prelude to a full-scale military offensive. It's still terrorism, because it terrorizes the civilian population. Irrational fear should not dictate our budget priorities. We can certainly take some precautions, and develop contingency plans. But at the end of the day, if someone is capable and determined enough, it's going to happen, regardless of how many much money and how many contractors and consultants we throw at the problem. The best we can do is take it in stride and rebuild.
    - jerf 14y ago
      You continue to not really be thinking about my point, insisting on framing it in a pre-canned terrorism argument. I am explicitly talking about high-cost events, and at best you can call the probability unknown, for things like a biological attack or a computer attack that perhaps even accidentally ends up taking out some very important part of the infrastructure. We already have good reasons to be concerned that a high-cost biological attack could be launched out of someone's literal garage, and it is not an irrational fear; we have plausible plans on how it could be done. Indeed I'd argue that being unconcerned about it is irrational, and being unconcerned about it because so far "terrorists", a small subset of the group of people I'm concerned about, have only managed to "fly planes into a couple of buildings". It's basically a non-sequitur argument, because a great deal of the point I'm making is that is only a small part of the total interesting threat profile.
      - 14y ago
- webXL 14y ago
  Terrorist victims in 2001: 3,000 ... Cancer deaths in 2001: 550,000 I don't think it's fair to the families of the victims, to the people of NYC, or any peaceful, healthy person who has that threat in the back of their mind when minding their own business in public, to equate a cancer death with a death caused by a crumbling skyscraper, a burning skyscraper, or jumping out of a burning, crumbling skyscraper. I know cancer can be just as ruthless and indiscriminate, but it never has struck in such a concentrated, evil manner. The only thing that's disproportionate is how we react to terrorism. Are you implying that we shouldn't react disproportionately? That's not to say I agree with the current level of disproportionateness or that we shouldn't be spending billions of public dollars combatting a disease that's claiming more and more people because they are now living long enough to acquire it.
  - kbolino 14y ago
    Neither is any less dead than the other. The cause matters only to the living. My entire point is that fear of the threat in the back of your mind is entirely irrational. You're much more likely to die of cancer, and even then, you're not very likely to die at all. The Stalin quote about "a single death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic" comes to mind here. I understand your point that terrorism is the result of direct, willful action by people with malicious intent, whereas cancer is just a force of nature. But you have no real control over either, so why make such a big deal of the former?
    - terangdom 14y ago
      The former has a large political impact. How many dissidents a year do you think you need to kill to suppress any opposition?
      - kbolino 14y ago
        Targeted acts of terrorism are different than indiscriminate attacks, and a coordinated series of attacks is different than an isolated incident. If the group of potentially affected people is very small, or the number of attacks very large, then the probabilities are drastically increased and a larger response is justified.
- MartinCron 14y ago
  Terrorist victims in 2001: 3,000 That's not entirely true. There were ~3000 terrorism-related deaths, but the point of terrorism is that it victimizes an entire society by creating a culture of fear and uncertainty. That's what differentiates terrorism from (conventional) murder.
  - kbolino 14y ago
    To "create a culture of fear and uncertainty" is certainly the aim of terrorism. However, its effectiveness is dictated by the reaction of the affected population, not by the perpetrators or their actions.
- einhverfr 14y ago
  While I agree that terrorism is given disproportionate attention (add car-collision fatalities in September 2001 as 3300 and it becomes even more useful comparison-wise), I also think it misses the point. The sorts of terrorism we are afraid of tends to hype fear over risk. Take anthrax for example. Anthrax has been floated as a biological weapon because it's unlikely to spread back and contaminate one's own area, but experiments with weaponized anthrax shows an abysmally low rate of contracting the disease (between 0.1% and 1%) and so it's nearly exclusively a weapon of fear. The very things that make it attractive as a biological weapon also make it ineffective (no person-person transmission for example). Similarly when we look at nerve gas attacks and the problems and sole case in history, it's clear these are relatively ineffective terrorism-wise. VX may be more effective than Sarin given high-tech dispersal systems but it's also very sensitive to things like droplet size and it's not volatile. Sarin, OTOH, is volatile meaning you can expect it to dissolve in the air and spread that way. Despite that, Aum Shinrikyo would have been more successful using plain old high explosives than nerve gas, and only one of their two nerve gas attacks (the one under entirely ideal circumstances) resulted in any fatalities whatsoever. Nuclear terrorism could be significant but I suspect you'd have to blow up a small nuke in a major city every ten years to have an effect similar to car crashes nationally. I am sorry but I just don't see that happening so as long as I don't worry about getting behind the wheel I don't give that a second thought either. All the above being said, cyberwar by non-state actors is different. Traditional terrorist attacks seek to cripple a society or socially disrupt it by killing people and making them afraid. I don't know that this necessarily has to be the intermediate goal of what people call cyber-terrorism (which is why I don't call it that). Instead it can disrupt society and hold it hostage by, well, disrupting it directly. Imagine if power blackouts and communications infrastructure was disrupted repeatedly. Imagine if we suddenly the power grid were taken down repeatedly. What would be disrupted? How well could we recover? What if telecomunications infrastructure was attacked as well? People would die but that's not really the goal. Just as in conventional terrorism deaths are a means to an end, sufficiently successful attackers could hold a society hostage by holding the infrastructure hostage.
Difwif 14y ago
Your fear about computer attacks appears to be a bit sensationalized and a typical knee jerk doomsday reaction. You parrot that "Electricity is the lifeblood of civilization" and that people will die when the power goes off but then seem to forget that blackouts already occur in highly populated areas. Are they a major annoyance? Of course! Do they cause mass death larger then asteroid impacts? Where did you get that idea? Many of our critical facilities have backup generators for a reason. If such an event did occur you'd be damn sure that any damage would be repaired ASAP.
- pyre 14y ago
  I'm thinking that terrorists would have to do enough damage to warrant full replacement of a number (n = ?) of turbines at a number (m = ?) of plants to do significant, lasting damage in an area (you won't necessarily have a 'back-up turbine' lying around).

davidw 14y ago

Yeah, that's certainly something you can argue in good faith. I just disliked the "imaginary", which clearly is not true.