SubscribeThe War on the Unexpected
Bruce Schneier has a good post today called “The War on the Unexpected,” about the unintended results of asking the general population to report anything suspicious. Even discounting deliberate malfeasance (reporting the neighbor you don’t like as “suspicious”), people find a lot of things suspicious, and the gatekeepers have no motivation to apply intelligent filtering to public reports. When someone makes a specious report and the police overreact, they’re praised for their vigilance, while the real victim in the situation is lucky to escape without prison time. The result is a paranoid society where merely being unusual can get you into trouble — the very opposite of a free society where your actions are none of anyone else’s business unless you’re directly harming them.
Of course, there’s not much motivation for government to reduce these overzealous “awareness” programs, either. A paranoid populace is always supportive of more government intervention to “protect” them, and making everyone into a criminal makes social control quite easy, since there is no one not subject to arrest, only the people you haven’t chosen to arrest yet.
Terrorism can never be absolutely prevented because terrorism is easy — it is a sad fact of chemistry that many things explode, and there are many ways of being dead. A free society can only prevent crime because criminals have something to lose — people acting in self-interest do not want to die or go to prison, and a free society must fight crime via punishing criminals after the crime has been committed. Since terrorists of the current radical Islamic model aren’t deterred in this way, we are deprived of our normal security responses and forced to try to fight with prevention only, rather than the standard responses of detection & punishment. To truly eliminate this sort of terrorism requires changing the culture from which it emerges — removing the “feed stock” of terrorist organizations by giving people something to live for. This is not a short-term project.
The proper response of a free society to terrorism is not “prevention at all costs,” but rather prevention where the cost is justified and resilience where it is not. Western society is distributed, and has a phenomenal depth of resources that is absent in many other societies — our culture is, in short, extremely hard to destroy. As catastrophic as the September 11th attacks were, your chances of dying in a terrorist attack remain smaller than your chances of dying of heatstroke, inhalation of a foreign object, or drowning in a swimming pool; our society is threatened not by the direction damage of terrorist attacks but by the response those attacks cause in us. Some threats are direct and obvious enough that mitigates them makes sense, but for many threats the rational response is to accept the risk; that is, recognize that the risk is there, understand that the chances of it affecting you, personally, are nearly nil, and that absolute safety does not exist. We need to go on about our lives, and work to recover from attacks in the same way that we recover from natural disasters. When a disaster happens, we mourn, we help the people affected, we rebuild the damage — but we do not change our way of life because of them. Somehow, we think that human-caused disasters should be entirely different, but this is not necessarily the case.
