War On Terrorism Irrational?

This is why history should be taught in schools. This is why english and literature should be studied by kids. Because if you can't understand the meaning of "They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety", then it's an era of hopelessness.

What Luis said +1...

Despite the massive amounts of social network and e-mail data mining and telephone metadata that the PRISM system was allegedly collecting, it does not appear it was all that efffective in Boston. Not worth it...

With the preponderance of social media, we probably have nobody to blame but ourselves for lack of privacy today. C-net has an interesting article the subject.

As to my opinions on the matter, two thoughts come to mind:

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." - 4th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." - H.L. Mencken

I think the academic arguement is indeed very important, but in many cases is different than the reality of PRISM. It seems the real effectiveness of PRISM is grossly overstated, due to fear. (However, I understand that precedent is what is often being argued here.) It reminds me of those 'anonymous' clips that decry the vast network of facial recognition cameras that can track your every move.

In general, I believe 'Privacy' is an illusion in the 'digital age'. As long as I keep feeding information into free social networks that somebody else owns, using free webmail, and download free (cloud based) apps to my phone, I can't really expect my information is mine, can I?

Maybe we should collectively start reading those EULAs...

IMO, the whole US fascination with their "War On Cause-of-the-Week" is irrational.

I've been meaning to chime in on this one for a while. Is it worth it, overall I feel like its not. Billions of dollars of spending on security and eroding civil liberties. We're treating the symptoms without are barely addressing the causes of the disease.

As for TSA, isn't this what the American public wanted after 9/11? Then they got it and didn't want it anymore? I appreciate that last year TSA kept 821 guns out of carry-ons (691 of them loaded). That is a measureable outcome. At least TSA is stopping something in contrast to the FBI who is literally orchestrating terror plots to stay relevant. You can measure their arrests for terror plots (75 or so) but then when you realize the whole plot was a bunch of informants supplying some dopey, impressionable guys with fake weapons and fake explosives it's not really that impressive. The NSA may release the number of plots where PRISM has been used, but I already predict, it's not going to be worth the amount of data they were collecting and not worth such broad spying.

Can the U.S. afford to drop security to pre-9/11 levels? I think that would be risky. But can some of this stuff go away now? Yeah I think so.

When it comes to topics such as the 'War on...', I always find it first necessary to talk about numbers.

• TSA budget is about $8 billion in 2012.
• NIP and MIP (National and Military Intelligence Programs, respectively) budgets at $53 billion and $27 billion in 2010.
• Dept. of Homeland Security budget at $60.8 billion annually.

Between all these different departments created to 'protect' our civil liberties, we're talking about $140 billion a year spent. Regardless of what you think about it, do you really believe that anything will possibly change when we're talking about 10x more money than the projected $15 billion on surveillance globally in 2013?

As with everything else, security is really just a guise to create a new market, accessible by the few who can afford to lobby and the few who have the network connections into the top brass at each of these agencies that farm out the business to contractors.

So yes, is it irrational? Sure. Does it matter? Nope. Because fear is an economic driver, and we need to keep driving the econonmy any way we possibly can. The goal is to ensure the dollar is the strongest currency and financial instrument- because if it isn't, then the national debt is in serious trouble, since there will be no will across the world to continue to invest in the dollar.

Terrorism is a method not to 'create fear', but to create an asynchronous war. The 9/11 attack was funded by approximately $400,000 to $500,000 in funds from Al Queda. The total 'cost' of the attack is calculated to be $15 trillion, when factoring in debt, markets, capital, budgets, reconstruction, etc.

That's asynchronous. That's a factor of 30,000,000:1 in financial damage.

Can we even afford the war on terror? No. Is it worth it? No. Can we stop it now that it drives a signficant portion of the US economy? No.

Terrorism works because of how we respond to it.

Thumbs up.