All Things Expounded

Recently the Cato Institute Podcast did a short interview with technologist and security expert Bruce Schneier.   Bruce’s first bestseller and most prominent book was Applied Crytography, and he’s probably become the foremost expert on security, especially computer security. Bruce has been doing a lot to get people to take a more realistic and effective approach to security. He is really good at dispelling common misunderstandings and has done a lot to promote a healthy response to terrorism and other threats.

One of the best things Bruce has done is exposing security theater for what it is, an ineffective response and a waste of money. Bruce also communicates that most things in the news are so ‘exceptional’  that they generally are not the things we should be REALLY worrying about. The news media so often plays the role of “working up fear”.  Simply put, we become pliable when we fear things. For an interesting quote that outlines how economic fear is used to generate servitude, see Bruce’s most recent blog post, Economic Distress and Fear

Going back to 2006, Bruce wrote the following in an article called Refuse To Be Terrorized for Wired News:

The surest defense against terrorism is to refuse to be terrorized. Our job is to recognize that terrorism is just one of the risks we face, and not a particularly common one at that. And our job is to fight those politicians who use fear as an excuse to take away our liberties and promote security theater that wastes money and doesn’t make us any safer.

Whether or not you agree with Bruce on every single point, I think everyone would do well to interact with his advice about security. If this interests you, I suggest you take some time to peruse his blog and articles. His stuff is really thoughtful and I think it presents a good analysis of how security measures are best carried out. And his perspective is really in line with lessons which have been long learned within the cyber/computer security communities. Responding to “new threats” is something computer security experts have been doing for a long time.

I think it is often forgotten that one of the explicit strategies of most terrorists lies in provoking certain responses. Tactically, most of the benefit in terrorism for terrorist groups does not lie in the “payload”,  but what happens after the “payload”. If terrorism were just a matter of inflicting wounds, it would be a pretty futile endeavor. In terms of death tolls, as horrific they may be, they are actually quite small. Especially when compared with more “run of the mill”  threats to our lives.  We are far more likely to die from hundreds of other things,  but the thing about terrorism is that it gets right to our psyche, and intimidates us in ways that other things (car crashes, for instance) can’t. The devious and calculated nature of it gets to us.  Terrorism is a means to an end, an there are other more subtle and yet more important things (besides causing carnage) that terrorists gain from what they do.

In the aforementioned article, Bruce continues to outline how terrorists gain boldness through our reaction:

Our politicians help the terrorists every time they use fear as a campaign tactic. The press helps every time it writes scare stories about the plot and the threat. And if we’re terrified, and we share that fear, we help. All of these actions intensify and repeat the terrorists’ actions, and increase the effects of their terror.

So, in planning a response to terrorism, people can’t let fear or panic guide them. Unless of course they wish to become more vulnerable.  Fearful and panicky people are rarely secure.   And so it is important to contextualize terrorism. Sure, we can come to grips the severity of the threat and the way it has impacted peoples lives, but it needs to be contextualized.  It is one of many threats, and perhaps not even the one that is most immanent in most Westerner’s lives.   I think the mania and rhetoric about this being a totally unique circumstance and people needing to be willing to give up liberties for the struggle is considerably overblown. And Schneier’s security-oriented analysis really shows how the typical response to terrorism (especially ’security theater’) is not even good for us in a utilitarian way.