[lit-ideas] Re: Europe's September 11 ?
- From: Teemu Pyyluoma <teme17@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sat, 13 Mar 2004 06:29:47 -0800 (PST)
I accidentally deleted John's reply to me, but the
gist of what he was saying was I believe that
terrorism is a minor risk compared to say diseases or
traffic accidents, and as such we should put our
concern in some perspective. And I fully agree. But
what scares me much more than terrorism is the
response it could generate.
There is being safe and feeling safe. Being safe
simply means the likelyhood of anything bad happening
is low, feeling safe is much more complex. One way to
grasp this is to make a disction between safety and
security, safety being about harm due to accident, or
alike causes and security being about attacks. Latter
involves an attacker. People tend to underestimate
safety risks and overestimate security risks. I
suspect that this is due to fact that safety failures
(traffic accidents, diseases) are seen as something
that just happens ("acts of god") while security
failures such as succesful terrorist attacks are
attributable to some person. The attidue John is
recomming is considering terrorism a safety issue,
something that just happens, and while I find such
fatalism healthy I'm less than confident others around
me will see it the same way.
There are measures that can be taken to make people
feel more secure and measures that make them more
secure. Windows 95 had a login screen where the user
would enter his username and password, and that made
users feel like their computer was protected although
if you just clicked "Cancel" you would get full access
to the computer. Another famous example of what is
called security theatre, after 9/11 National Guard
troops were posted to the airports, with no orders or
(wisely) ammo. The problems is that some measures such
as giving police dragonian powers that may indeed make
people feel more secure while actually reducing
security, because heavy handed law enforcement is a
security risk as such with no obvious gain in
combating terrorism for example. Civil liberties are
themselves a security measure.
And yes, the above owns a lot to Bruce Schneier's
Beyond Fear, which is one the few books I honestly
think is a must read. And no, I don't get a commision.
Yours,
Teemu
Helsinki, Finland
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