Your War on Terror: The Terrorists Are Winning

So. . . what? No airport security?

Civil rights ONLY pertain to your relationship with the government and when operating on public/personal property. They can and are limited on private property, when on the job, or when engaging in activity where there can be catastrophic results to poor security.

When I fly, I want every goddamned person strip searched, especially men. Extra-especially those segments of the population with a reputation for slamming airplanes into buildings.

~String

 

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Only that which actually makes us safer

 

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Hmmm. I presume you're an expert in this matter (or at, the very least, knowledgeable enough) and can fully explain what you're talking about?

~String

 

Technically, it is the government conducting those searches. It is fundamentally no different than a police stop, or the police's coming into a shopping mall and conducting random searches of shoppers. The only difference is that it is the federal government and we're used to it. The slippery slope argument is often overused, but I think there is a good case to be made that what happened here is that in decades past when plane hijackings spiked (on a statistical basis, the 1970's were a far riskier time to fly than the 2000's), we got used to heightened but non-invasive security. Slowly we have ramped up to the point where the government gets to look at a picture of your junk to save us (actually, not even that, at best it reduces the statistically insignificant risk by a very small amount) from a threat that ranks well below "being struck by lightning" in terms of the risk it poses.

The death toll on planes right now is about the same as it was in the 1960s and between 2000-2009 we've had fewer deaths to passengers and crew on a plane due to violence than we had in the 70's (despite the fact that there are about four times as many people flying now, as compared to then...and of course that includes 9/11. which makes up more than half of those deaths).

[Edit: My mistake, even counting 9/11, the death toll on planes in the 2000's is actually less than it was in the 1960's (and of course the 1970s and 1980s as well): A handy graph shows the rate of death per billion:
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_5ieXw28ZUpg/S0GtSPmXILI/AAAAAAAABc8/XcTbY29am8k/s1600-h/airsafe2.png
/end Edit]

Admittedly, perhaps that's just because all the security is working, but it seems just as likely to me to be yet another example of humans who are bad at math setting policy. We're all bad at math on that sort of level, so I understand why it is, but sober policy makers are supposed to tell us to calm down when we behave irrationally. Instead, they play to the fear. There's more votes that way. That suspicion is bolstered by the fact that the 1990's were comparably as safe in terms of the rate of death (even slightly better, but that is likely due to 9/11 being such a significant outlier).

As I posted before I once heard the story of a professor of mathematics in Moscow during WWII who refused to take cover during Nazi bombardments. Every day, however a colleague and neighbor of his would try to persuade him to go to the shelters just in case. No, no, the professor replied, because he had calculated the odds of being killed in a strike and they were minuscule. One night the neighbor was surprised to find the mathematician in the shelter with him, and asked him what changed his mind. "Well," the mathematician said, "there is only one elephant in the Moscow zoo, and the odds of any one explosion occurring close enough to kill the animal are tiny. Last night, they got the elephant."

Slipping in the bathroom is *far* more likely to kill westerners than terrorists, yet the war on bathrooms goes unwaged. The guy who prepared the steak I ate for dinner is a greater risk to me than terrorists, and yet I object to the government intervening in my dietary choices.

If the restaurant wants me to rethink my choice, that is their right. If the airlines demand a real time picture of me naked before I use their service, that is their right (come to think of it, I bet we would pass laws telling them they can't do that, wouldn't we?). It's different when the department of Transportation sets up an agency in charge of taking pervy pictures and/or groping citizens in the name of reducing the risks of their dying by about 0.0001%, and that is being generous.

In short, anyone who is happy to have airline security at this level, but unwilling to extend government oversight into other areas of our lives (or even just similar security screening at other public places, like concerts, schools, buses and trains, restaurants, etc.) is irrational. Irrational in a very common very human way, because this risk pathology is a well known defect in the human mind, but irrational all the same.

 

In general, you're assuming that TSA employs solely intelligent people. In this case it's pretty clear that the kid is not a threat. However, when you give those security officials the ability to make calls such as this, you automatically increase the risk of an incident in other cases. Would you agree?

 

Recent opinion piece in in the WSJ:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703481004574646963713065116.html#printMode

The point is, you DO reduce the risk of a terrorist incident with all this security, but as Nate Silver points out:

At the end of the day, I don't know what this means. Certainly, the president or government that comes out and says this will be quickly voted out of office---most people want SOMEthing done, even if they don't know what that something is, or how much it will cost, or even if that something is effective.

However, I DON'T think that this statement is fully accurate:

In America, at least, the idea of ``home grown'' terrorists is pretty foreign. Of course, this is not to say that we don't have radical islamic groups in the country, but it seems to be less of a threat than in other countries, like England (for example). Establishing a terrorist organization in America and staying under the radar, after 9/11, means that the easiest and cheapest thing to do is to blow up a plane---this is reinforced by the several plots against America which have been uncovered. Most Americans feel (and this is liable to change with the next terrorist threat) that securing air travel will go a long way to ``ending the war on terror''. So at least until the next terror attack, the majority of resources will be devoted to securing the airports and (to a lesser extent, which is short-sighted) the borders. This means we will have to submit to security searches and no-fly lists until Americans feel safe again.

And as soon as al Qaeda attacks a mall or Metallica concert, there will be government security in charge of screening attendants, I'd be willing to bet.

 

I'm going to change my name to Saddam bin Laden, see how things go on my next flight...

Why can't the parents of this kid do anything about the name he was born with, seeing how a name is such an obvious and immediate threat to the whole of America and all it holds dear?

 

are we safer if a 2 year old gets hassled but someone with no valid ID can get on a plane with just a little pat down? all the efforts taken are more about the illusion of safety than actual safety.

 

The war on terrorism will never succeed until we go after the symptoms.

1) We need to stop pissing off foreign countries. That means avoiding large-scale wars like Iraq whenever possible, only going after regimes that are demonstrably breeding or sheltering terror. This is not the same thing as appeasement, it just means narrowing our focus to those who are actually out there harming us- all Saddam ever did since 1991 was rattle his sabre, and hand out petty sums of cash to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers, and neither of these actions warrants a war causing 1 million deaths and massive regional destabilization.

2) There are countries and people out there who truly do despise freedom and will be pissed off at us no matter what we do, unless we massage their bruised egos by adopting the silly mythologies of their ancient ancestors. I personally believe such countries to include the likes of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, at least based on the news reports I read from these regions. We should not be trading with such countries and enabling their bigoted populations to threaten us, nor should we have meaningful relations with any country that tries to break this containment. Besides, our relations with such countries only give the impression we're supporting corrupt western-leaning dictatorships, which just gives them even more reasons to hate us. The terrorism we face today is a direct product of the international order we've established, and our desire to sell our values to the highest bidder for short-term comforts.

It could be so much simpler than the current system. We just need the balls to tell certain people, "You're a Wahhabist? You attended a radical Madrassa? You're not welcome here, go f*ck yourself and find a flight somewhere else." Problem solved.

 

Of course you do, to some extent, but is it worth it to reduce the chsance of your dying from 1 in 50 million to 1 in 70 million? That is the magnitude of the risks and benefits we are seeing.

Airlines are mostly targeted for cost reasons, I agree. It's the most spectacular thing you can pull for a given level of effort, but that doesn't change the fact that the actual statistical risk is lower than the risk of being struck by lightning. Any politician who proposed spending hundreds of billions on lightning defense would be voted out too...and he'd save more lives with thaqt program. The only difference apart from the relative risks is that we are notoriously bad at evaluating risk. If what we fear is the possibility of an avoidable death, then we are irrational, because our spending on this relatively small risk is way out of proportion to a series of much greater risks.

When I fly, which is often, I pretty much now always think about the possibility that there could be a terrorist on the plane. That is me being irrational. It would akin to me thinking abouyt the possibility of one of my family members trying to murder me at every family get together--save that the odds of my being killed by a family member are *far higher* than the odds of me being killed by a terrorist. Statistically speaking, my dwelling obsessively on my family trying to murder me is far more justifiable. In fact, if I thought about dying every time I started my car, that would be downright sensible, as the odds of my dying in a car crash are an order of magnitude higher than being murdered by family members.

I think anyone who obsessed over dying in a vehicular accident or being murdered by family members would be seen as unbalanced, and yet the same behavior in respect of terrorists, despite being even less likely, is positively encouraged by U.S. policy. Why? First, because humans are irrational about things like terrorism and second, it is a great election strategy to tell people they are being threatened, but that the politician knows how to save them, People are just too stupid to see that they are getting played.

I think it is inarguable that either our airline security is overly strict or all of other security is not strict enough, based on that actual risks we face.

If terrorists really wanted to kill people, they'd sell cigarettes and cheeseburgers instead.

 

I disagree. I think it's because in the cars or the family murder situations, there's a perception of being "in personal control" of those situations. Whereas in an airplane, one has absolutely no control over anything ...including being able to fly the plane or stop it.

I agree with you in using mathematics and probability, but it doesn't work like that. And I know that you've seen news shows where a murder has occured on a residential street. The people interviewed are shocked, amazed, scared, nervous, paranoid, ..........., and every single one of them says something like, "Oh, my god, I just never thought something like this would happen on this street!"

When the threat of planes blowing up lessen or become silent in the media, people do the same thing ...they forget that it could happen to them ...just like that murder could happen on their street.

And now, tell me, if the gov did NOT put in security controls, and a plane was blown up, wouldn't you be one of the first to scream at the gov for not protecting your parents/wife/kids/friends/whatever? Why didn't the gov stop the terrorist? That question is asked over and over now ...even with all the security in place.

Statistics and probability helps no one ....but it does piss some people off.

Baron Max

 

And that is one of the theories for why we have risk pathologies, but it is still irrational, because we don't control over those things, or if we do, the activity/family members are still a bigger threat to us than the uncontrolled threats we ignore. There are other theories of course, as there have to be, as no one in California is afraid of earthquakes or lightning, and they surely have no control over them.

They do say that, but that statement is not evidence of their being rational in their original risk assessment. It's evidence that the event itself was low probability (which it is), and so their excpection for number of muirders on their street was "0." That is usually a good estimate. When it went up to "1" they were surprised.

What matters from the standpoint of identifying an irrational risk pathology is whether (prior to this event) they were more concerned about lower risk events than they were about higher risk ones. Indeed, even having seen that event, most people will not suddenly become more suspicious of their own friends and family, or lessens their fears of terrorism, so it's not even clear that proximity and surprise corrects the miscalculation.

The risk of planes blowing up is far less today, so far as recent history shows, than it was in the 1970's and 1980's. I agree that the media is part of the problem, because sensational stories create the (false) impression that these things are more common than they are. Again though, the inability to separate the emotional reaction caused by the sensationalism, from the actual statistical risk is the irrational response.

From an individual perspective, it makes sense. More so than the "control" theory, I think we have a vestigial "anti-predator instinct" and we become irrationally paranoid whenever it seems plausible that a predator might get us. Lightning, cigarettes and red meat are not predators, terrorists and sharks are predators. From the standpoint of an individual primate, the agitation makes sense, as the most paranoid monkey will likely be the last one eaten. The fearless primates, who boldly stand in the clearing looking for the predator, they tend to get eaten, so over time the population shifts.

There the evolutionary response is about protecting an individual from a circumstance that is a whole lot more common. Or, more to the point, we are exposed to all sorts of "imaginary" predators (imaginary in the sense that they pose no realistic risk to each of us as individuals, any more than asteroids do) and we imagine ourselves being the victim...but the primates that developed that paranoia had no way of comprehending truly long shot occurrences like the 1 in 25 million to 1 in 50 million chance that an airline passenger has of dying ion his or her flight. In their populations, such fluke occurrences happened only once every 3000 generations.

If you saw such a thing happen, you would assume that it was common (more common than it actually is), because primates assimilate data on the basis of anecdotal evidence, as they have no other way to do it. So living in central Africa, a primate sees a troupe-member eaten by a polar bear (or something similarly unlikely), and his assumption will be to start watching out for polar bears. That then needs into the evolved predator paranoia response, and he becomes VERY concerned about polar bears, even though that was the only one he will ever see.

Now, we all see everything newsworthy, and our instinctual paranoia makes us very interested in predators. We're so interested, that we invent them, and then believe in the invention, like werewolves and vampires. It's irrational to be afraid of the dead, but I'd wager that most of us, even the hyper-rational, if we found ourselves walking through a graveyard at midnight would find themselves involuntarily succumbing to an adrenaline surge.

(Fear of the dark is also an evolved trait, albeit a little less intense than our fear of being eaten.)

I think family and friends happen to fall into a loophole in the predator response, in that it would have been tremendously maladaptive to be afraid of them, given that we are a social animal and need one another for security. So I think the paranoia was bred with that as an exception.

From the standpoint of "How do I run society given our limited resources" rationality is definitely the way to go. Sometimes that means speaking the truth to the monkeys.

Not by me, though I will admit that it's possible I could in the future. There's also every reason to think that if I do, then I will be behaving irrationally. The truth is that it is easy to catch terrorists in retrospect. In retrospect, I think we could have defeated Hitler by the end of 1942. knowing what we know now. I have the same sorts of cognitive biases as anyone, so in the heat of the moment I can see me exclaiming that they should have done more, at least until I more thoroughly analyze the situation (rationally).

And in any event, one terrorist doing anything will not likely change the risks (although it is an additional data point, and we develop our risk profiles much as the monkey does, one incident at a time). That quintessentially the time that people need to be comforted, and their advice ignored as irrational. After 9/11 many people I knew were talking about carpet bombing the *whole of the middle east*. Would that have helped? No. There would just be other terrorists in other places responding to the genocide.

Statistics do "help" people if by help you mean "save their lives." Allocating resources on the basis of actual risks will save more lives than allocating resources on the basis of irrationally overstated fears. We need to spend dollars and effort where those dollars and that effort will save the most lives, not where it will sate the most fears. The solution for the fears is education, explaining to people that, though tragic, taken kill fewer Americans each year than Phillip Morris, and we could stop Phillip Morris tomorrow if we wanted to, it would be easy and highly cost effective.

If you want to safeguard human life, you don't need expensive x-ray scanners to picture them naked (unless they are brown in which case it's ye olde full body cavity search--or so some argue it *should* be), you can save money and save even more lives by installing $5 worth of anti-slip decals people's bathrooms. It's not as sexy, and bathroom-hazards don't trigger any adrenaline in anyone, but them's the facts.

Now, I am off to have a banana.

 

I don't know if you'll find a lot of disagreement with this statement, certainly not from me

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But implementing policies along this line, and ensuring those policies are carried through, is a bit more tricky. Case in point: the eight year old white kid who can't fly.

Of course, it's easy to fall into the trap of small statistics---Tiassa pointed to a single case where a person has a problem. Frankly, if it's a few isolated incidents of people who happen to have unfortunate names, then I'm fine with that. Individual liberties versus collective liberties you know---even as a conservative I'm willing to concede that all policies implemented at this scale WILL have holes, and people WILL fall through the cracks. A more relevant discussion of the no-fly list would include statistics about how many people are wrongfully prohibited from flying, versus the number of people who are wrongfully allowed to board planes.

This whole discussion is not about the no-fly list, but of the culture of the war on terror in general. It's a different kind of war, and we don't know what we're doing. One curious thing, though, is that the cynics in the peanut gallery don't seem to be advancing any alternative ideas, near as I can tell. From what I hear, it's a long list of people with long lists of complaints, who have no solutions or alternative ideas to offer. People hated Bush's policies, now there seems to be a growing distrust of Obama's policies. What alternative policies are there that would both reduce the risk of an attack (however infinitesimally) AND satisfy the people's desire to see SOMEthing done? Are the alternatives just ``Do nothing and spend the money on health care?''

 

How odd ...you've mentioned it several times in your long post, you seem to have a good grasp of it, yet you also seem to gloss right over it without a second thought -- rational vs. irrational.

This airport security is not about saving lives! It's about making the flying public feel good about flying, to not be scared or panicky, to continue flying and spending money on the airline industry. Having heard many casual conversations in airport, it's a good guess that most people actually realize that security is simply a feel-good thing, yet few will come right out and say that we should just do away with all of the security features.

It's irrational to be scared of a suicide bomber on "your" plane. But it's rational to hope or expect a little "insurance" for long-shot odds. It's also rational to want to feel good when you walk through an airline terminal on the way to board the plane.

You carry insurance on your car, don't you? What are the odds in that situation? You carry insurance because it makes you feel good ...that you're covered "just in case". You "know" that you're not going to have an accident, because you're a good driver, right? But "just in case" is something to make us feel good.

Emotions play a large part of the security ...just seeing a man in a security uniform will usually make people feel better -- totally irrational, yet it's true. When dealing with humans, if one fails to take emotions and irrationality into account, then he's probably going to be wrong about something.

Baron Max

 

But if people feel better without being substantially safer, then that is irrational. We'd be better off educating them so they realize that the threat they are concerned about is insignificant. It's like a family spending a thousand dollars on a Vampire Detector because it makes their kids feel better about going to sleep at night. It's a waste of money, and education is the better alternative.

As the WSJ article above notes, even a small delay for every airline passenger is, taken cumulatively, billions of dollars wasted in the name of protecting those passengers from these bogeymen.

It is rational to buy insurance, so long as you do not overpay for it. My point is not necessarily that people are too paranoid about terrorists...they might not be...but anyone who thinks airport security is worth the cost based on the magnitude of the risk must think that bathrooms are absolute deathtraps. It's not irrational to have the current level of security in airports, so long as we treat bigger risks with a proportionately bigger response, and we don't.

The irrationality is revealed in the relative difference in our response to different risks, because we are treating high magnitude risks as if they were less serious than this relatively low magnitude risk. You can fix that imbalance either by treating other risks more seriously, or airport risks less seriously. I obviously think the latter more sensible, based on my own subjective valuations, but if someone valued human life more than I do, they could be perfectly rational keeping airport security intact, and increasing security on everything else, from buying deli meats, to crossing streets, to lightning, automobile accidents, cigarettes (which I suspect would have to be banned), red meat, etc. I think we could not sustain it if we allocated money in a truly cost effective way.

 

i think you mean the causes

 

Yes. And I think we agree that humans are irrational. So why do we keep talking about things being irrational if we both know that humans are irrational and won't listen anyway?

How? And they all point to the Twin Towers falling, and the death of some 3,000 innocent people, and they say "You call that insignificant?" And you expect them to willingly, happily and fearlessly walk onto a plane ....because you gave them a nice little pep talk about statistics and probability?

And again, you keep talking about irrationality when we both know that humans are irrational. All the talk in the world isn't going to help much, if at all.

Agreed. But what if the little bastards won't listen to your silly-assed "educational" speeches? And they're still scared of going to sleep at night? Just saying "education" doesn't mean that it's going to work. People use that term a lot around here, but education costs lots of mony, lots of time, and is NOT guaranteed to work even when it's done.

Baron Max

 

Throw in some coke (the drink).

*OMG....the cheeseburger kills people. bad cheeseburger...bad

:wallbang:

 

Because we have the ability to overcome our irrationality.

I am not going to write the speech, but I'll adit that if you phrase it as stupidly as "The Twin Towers falling was insignificant," then that is a bad start.

SO the alternative to spending time and treasure on something that may not work as well as we'd like, in your opinion, is wasting time and treasure on something that definitely will not work as well as we'd like?