Re: Quote of the Day: Bruce Schneier

[Valdis.Kletnieks () vt edu]

On Thu, 17 May 2007 08:42:02 CDT, Dennis Henderson said:

> These(terror attacks) are carefully planned and the perpetrators may lay low
> for years waiting for the right time to strike. I think he mistakely
> compares "rare" to one-shot-premeditated-carefully-planned" attacks. So we
> shouldn't discount the rarity of terror simply because it doesnt happen
> every day.

A bit of thought will show that for planning purposes, these are in fact
essentially identical.

> Someday hopefully Bruce will dare to prescribe a solution to all our risks
> instead of just arm-chairing decisions made by the government and
> organizations around these rare risks. So Bruce, what do we do instead of
> banning box cutters? </rhetorical sentence>

Umm.. if you bother paying attention to Bruce, you'd notice that he HAS
been trying to tell us what to do instead.  As you note:

> If the media wouldn't make so much of these rare incidents when they occur
> and if ambulance chasing lawyers wouldn't lead the charge to sue for every
> little misstep that is made when these events happen, its likely that cooler
> heads would prevail and security measures would  be better thought through
> and implemented. Security measures that really work instead of the current
> theatrical ones.

Cooler heads often prevail out in industry, because "ROI" tends to mitigate
most of the stupider ideas in time (it's not perfect, and some stupid things
manage to survive, but a good CFO is probably security's best friend...)

However, out in the political arena, this won't happen as long as The Great
Unwashed are voting.  You can propose a *lot* of different "fixes" for the
"problem" of terrorism, but *none* of them will work until you address the
base problem, which in the case of the US is that:

a) Fundamentalist Muslims find our lifestyle and culture insulting.  Most of
them would be quite happy to let us rot in our own country if we let them run
their country the way they want to.

b) We insist on exporting our lifestyle and culture.

Now, given those two setup points, how can you *possibly* expect a good outcome
from us invading not one, but two sovereign countries and installing a puppet
regime that we selected?

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