2010-01-07 20:58 | fche blog politics it's inevitable

For years, people complained during the W. years about preemptive military action, endangered civil rights, the terrorism-inducing inhumanity that is the USA, all of which was counter-intuitively (to them) effective in keeping the bad guys away from the homeland. The same ones are starting to crow that it is inevitable that some bad guy will get through and cause major terrorist damage. And when that happens, by golly we shouldn’t blame anyone — especially current government leaders — since, you see, it was inevitable.

The reasoning looks sound — if you ignore time. Yes, eventually, some guy is likely to successfully exploit one of the many weaknesses of the system. But the failures don’t have to happen on this guy’s watch. One can fight them by reacting to what they’ve tried, predicting what they’ll try next … smart and willing people can put up a fight.

But what does Mr. Security suggest? To roll over: all those new security measures and evolving counter-tactics are all a stupid game we should stop playing. Maybe they bad guys will just leave the “playground” and go home to shag some goats. Right. Or else they will succeed in an attack against weakened defenses, in which case it sure wouldn’t be our chief-executive pal’s fault, since it was inevitable.

Brilliant.

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I can’t say I agree with your criticism of Schneier. I think he has always been quite consistent in saying that eventually some terrorist would be successful no matter what we do. The main points were that it was inevitable, that it was a relatively low risk compared to other things, and that our current airport security approaches weren’t doing much. His complaint with Bush mostly had to do with the intense fear mongering and domestic spying.

Also he’s never recommended ignoring the threat. Rather he advocates police and intelligence work.

The only difference in this last incident is that he actually acknowledged that the screening had some benefit in forcing the terrorist to use a less reliable type of bomb. But other than that I think he’s been quite consistent in his positions. I can’t find a citation right now but he gave Bush the exact same excuse for missing the intelligence clues for 9/11, the indicators of the attack were there, but so were a lot of other indicators and it’s not possible to follow up on all of them.
Aaron - 2010-01-08 13:15

  
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