I’m not a fan of terrorism. That may sound like a blatantly obvious thing to say, but did you know that terrorism is actually a fairly effective method of achieving a specific goal?

Terrorism gathers mass media attention, highlights the struggle the terrorists are engaged in, and helps recruit new members to the terrorists’ cause.

In Northern Ireland terrorism has succeeded in giving nationalist republicans power in the local government.

Palestinian terrorism has helped paint Israel as a villain and brought impulses to the Middle Eastern peace process.

And now Muslim terrorism seems geared towards accomplishing its own goals: a withdrawal of Western influence in the Middle East.

Counter-terrorism, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to work that well. Decades of counter-terrorist actions from the Israeli Mossad hasn’t lead to a decline in Palestinian terrorism. Only when the Palestine leadership was engaged in peace talks did terrorism decrease.

The same in Northern Ireland: the bombs only stopped going off when IRA representatives were brought to the table for negotiations. (Though there are still plenty of disgruntled IRA-offshoots, one of which recently detonated a bomb about half a mile from where I live.)

Muslim fundamentalist terrorism isn’t declining either. There have been several high profile attacks since 9/11, and the West seems to exist in a perpetual state of fear.

Robert Wright argues in his opinion piece for the New York Times, The Price of Assassination, that counter-terrorist assassinations may actually have the exact opposite effect:

“[Jenna Jordan of the University of Chicago] studied 298 attempts, from 1945 through 2004, to weaken or eliminate terrorist groups through ‘leadership decapitation’ — eliminating people in senior positions.

Her work suggests that decapitation doesn’t lower the life expectancy of the decapitated groups — and, if anything, may have the opposite effect.”

Don’t get me wrong, counter-terrorism is absolutely vital in preventing terrorist attacks. We need our intelligence agencies to go out there to find out what terrorists are planning, and stop them from executing their plans.

But that’s where the mandate of counter-terrorism should end. Preventitive assassination, for all its Hollywood-boosted hype, is not a successful counter-terrorist strategy.

Christopher Hitchens is one of my heroes. He writes and edits superb books, he verbally destroys stupid people with quintessential Britishness, he loves to drink, and he has quirky hair.

Now we can add another reason to that list: He speaks truth about airplane security (one of my pet peeves). An excerpt:

“For many years after the explosion of the TWA plane over Long Island (a disaster that was later found to have nothing at all to do with international religious nihilism), you could not board an aircraft without being asked whether you had packed your own bags and had them under your control at all times. These two questions are the very ones to which a would-be hijacker or bomber would honestly and logically have to answer “yes.” But answering “yes” to both was a condition of being allowed on the plane! Eventually, that heroic piece of stupidity was dropped as well. But now fresh idiocies are in store. Nothing in your lap during final approach. Do you feel safer? If you were a suicide-killer, would you feel thwarted or deterred?”

Read the full thing here: The truth about airplane security measures (Slate.com)

(Via Unreasonable Faith)

SEOmoz.org, a site I follow religiously for professional purposes, has published a blog post called ‘24 Hours Without Privacy‘. It describes one young man’s daily activities, and the sheer amount of surveillance and data recording that is taking place behind the scenes.

The total lack of privacy as detailed in this blog post is reminiscent of the Will Smith film “Enemy of the State“, only this time it’s not fiction. This is how we live today. An excerpt:

“Later, after finishing a long day at work, he stops by his local grocery store to pick up a six pack of beer. He goes straight to the back of the store and brings the drink back to the register. Despite his facial hair, the clerk requests to see his ID. He complies and pulls it out of his wallet. The young man keys in his phone number in absence of his grocery store loyalty card so that he can save $0.50. The cash register prints out a receipt and the cashier shoves it in a plastic bag along with the purchase. The man thanks the grocer and continues on his way home.

As soon as he stepped into the grocery store he was picked up by one of about 20 video cameras that continually record shoppers. As he approached the checkout stand he started a three tiered identification process that rivals that of getting a Passport.

The first method was via government ID and was paradoxically the least useful to the grocery store. The cashier ignored his picture and instead focused on typing his birthdate into the register computer as speedily as possible.“

Privacy is an illusion. There is very little about you that isn’t known and stored somewhere, permanently, and accessible to parties who most certainly do not have your best interests in mind.

Good news for digital rights proponents in the Netherlands: Bits of Freedom, the once-defunct digital rights group, has been re-ignited.

New funding from XS4All has enabled BoF to restart the fight and once again oppose online government censorship, corporate lockdowns on online behaviour, and other symptoms of the decreasing freedom of the Internet.

I’m not sure if it’s possible to support BoF financially at this stage, but seeing as how XS4All is the primary sponsor of the organisation it might be a good idea to switch internet providers to them (if you’re not a customer of them already) and let them know your main reason for choosing them is their support of digital freedom.

In our current terrorist-scare and copyright-fascism era where every citizen is guilty until… well, forever, and where increasingly desperate corporate institutions are suing everything and everyone to protect their outdated and obsolete business models, it’s prudent to protect yourself and your data from snooping eyes.

Not having committed a crime is no longer a guarantee that you won’t be arrested, charged, and extorted by government agencies and lawsuit-happy bureaucracies.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has now published a guide to help protect you from surveillance. As governments increasingly allow your civil rights to evaporate in the name of security and corporate interests, you need to safeguard your private information.

There are many ways to do this, and the EFF Surveillance Self-Defense guide is a good place to start learning how to protect yourself.

The Rand Corporation, the militarist neocon think tank that came up with such brilliant ideas like the for-profit health care system the USA currently employs, has finally joined the realm of reason and common sense and has concluded, after extensive study, that the best way to stop terrorism is not to throw huge armies at it, but to effectively use law enforcement and intelligence agencies and practice the right kind of politics:

How do terrorist groups end? The evidence since 1968 indicates that terrorist groups rarely cease to exist as a result of winning or losing a military campaign. Rather, most groups end because of operations carried out by local police or intelligence agencies or because they join the political process. This suggests that the United States should pursue a counterterrorism strategy against al Qa’ida that emphasizes policing and intelligence gathering rather than a “war on terrorism” approach that relies heavily on military force.

Well, duh. Not a particularly surprising conclusion, seeing as that’s exactly how Europe has been dealing with domestic terrorist groups for the past fifty years or so. Fairly effectively, I might add.

(Via Boing Boing)

Wired has a cute little quiz that emphasizes the points people like Bruce Schneier and John Allen Paulos have been trying to make for years: that which we fear the most is often the least likely to kill us.

Cory Doctorow has written an insightful column about how we all intuitively misinterpret statistical odds of events occurring. Events like terrorist attacks for example.

“The single most pernicious threat to liberty today is humanity’s natural tendency to misunderstand the statistics of rare events. We’re just not wired to have good intuition about things that happen with extreme infrequency.”

Others have made this point before. Bruce Schneier and John Allen Paulos come to mind.

I’m still amazed at how many people are worried about flying, and how readily we surrender our freedoms in the name of ’security’ from events that are excruciatingly rare. If you’re really worried about your life, stop worrying about ridiculously rare ‘threats’ and focus on some real ones. Like how many days that Big Mac will shave off your lifespan.

Wired has posted an excerpt of the upcoming book Zero Day Threat. The sample chapter is pure computer security pr0n. The book has definitely earned a spot on my wishlist.

Google doesn’t believe IP addresses should be considered ‘personal data’. They argue that an IP address cannot be used to identify an individual. IP addresses assigned to PC’s often change, and even with static IP addresses you cannot determine who is using the computer. Not to mention IP spoofing.

I agree with Google wholeheartedly on this, however there’s one problem: the law doesn’t. As has been proven in many lawsuits filed by the RIAA and other members of the copyright mafia, IP addresses can be used successfully to extort users out of large amounts of settlement cash for unproven acts of ‘copyright violations’ (i.e. music downloads).

So while Google may have the moral high ground here, in the end users will still be shafted.