They had explosives, weapons, the resolve to sacrifice themselves and tried their best to do as much damage as possible. And they managed to to kill less than 30 people (provisional count).
Of course every death that brought on by this fanatic mob is too much, but we should keep our perspective.
A bus accident in Spain last week left 11 exchange students dead, in the US alone every day more than 50 people die in road accidents.
Of course we should root out the people that try to bomb our freedom away. But don't let us be terrorized by something that doesn't make a statistically recognizable dent in our probability for survival.
Driving a car at least gives you the opportunity to reject taking on the risk.
The fabric of society is based around us not shooting each other/ blowing up trains. Every event like this (or, say, some countries bombing out neighborhoods in other countries) makes it harder to rely on the idea that this sort of thing doesn't happen.
Acknowledging that this happens because of conscious policy decisions by many people is also good.
There's absolutely nothing inevitable about these kinds of attacks. We could bring this sort of event down to a number real close to 0.
Not to mention that it's possible to worry about car crashes and terrorism at the same time
I don't think so.
Even if you exclude international politics completely the number still isn't zero. Take the 2011 Norway attacks where 77 people died. That was one guy, a Christian fundamentalist, likely paranoid schizophrenic who wanted to rid the world of Marxism/feminism/islam/something. Then you have the unabomber, most school shootings, and so on which you can point to.
My point is: This stuff is NEVER going away. All you can do is minimise it. Zero is certainly a laudable goal but likely an unachievable one.
In my life time, I'm much more likely to be murdered by a driver than a terrorist.
> We could bring this sort of event down to a number real close to 0.
Please, would you mind elaborating a bit on these two points?
I appreciate your point, and it is somewhat reassuring, but terrorists can cause damage beyond the raw numbers because their damage can be focused.
I have no intention of belittling the incident, but I fail to see how shutting everything down is a proper response to any incident of less than catastrophic scale.
I take that back, I can see a reason: CYA. Nobody would want to be the one who makes the decision to keep the metro system running and have a second attack occur. I'm still not convinced that CYA is a sufficient reason, however.
Regular old inclement weather does this all the time and people don't cry panic that society is going to implode.
Shutting down transportation for a day is a silly thing to be terrorized about.
>As for us, we behave like a herd of deer. When they flee from the huntsman's feathers in affright, which way do they turn? What haven of safety do they make for? Why, they rush upon the nets! And thus they perish by confounding what they should fear with that wherein no danger lies. . . . Not death or pain is to be feared, but the fear of death or pain. Well said the poet therefore:—Death has no terror; only a Death of shame!
-Epictetus
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_i...
With accidents, you can kinda hope they won't be happening too often because nobody benefits from them. Not so much with violent conflicts, though.
>No terrorist group has achieved a kill rate anywhere near a conventional military; and are vastly less than those death tolls for guerrilla organizations or dictators. Stalin or Mao could, in a bad day, exceed the deaths caused by all international terrorism over the last 2 centuries. 9/11, the crowning incident of terrorism in those centuries, was equaled by just 29 days of car accidents in the USA - and 9/11 was only accidentally that successful! 9/11 is also a sterling example of the availability bias: besides it, how many attacks could the best informed Western citizen name? Perhaps a score, on a good day, if they have a good memory; inasmuch as the MIPT database records >19,000 just 1968-2004, it’s clear that terrifyingly exceptional terrorist attacks are just that. Remarkably, it seems that it is unusual for terrorist attacks to injure even a single person; the MIPT database puts the number of such attacks at 35% of all attacks. Certainly the post-9/11 record would seem to indicate it was a fluke... Many terrorist organizations keep very detailed financial records (consider the troves of data seized from Al-Qaeda-in-Iraq, from Bin Laden’s safehouse, or Al Qaeda’s insistence on receipts), with little trust of underlings, suggesting far less ideological devotion than commonly believed & serious principal-agent problems. Stories about terrorist incompetence are legion and the topic is now played for laughs (eg. the 2010 movie Four Lions), prompting columnists to tell us to ignore all the incompetence and continue to be afraid.
It is almost trivial to be an effective terrorist if body count is what you're optimizing for. In Baghdad they blew a fuel tanker sky high, the blast rattled my windows so hard across the city that I thought we were the ones under attack.
I have wondered (ever since it was my job to think like a guerrilla fighter) why terrorists don't do similar things in the US or other countries. How many fuel tankers are there in the US? How hard would it be to GTA one of them and drive it into a dense gathering of people? How hard would it be to re-enact the CoD MW2 airport scene?
Perhaps it is symbolism not body counts they seek? After all the DC sniper effectively terrorized three states with a rifle.
In the infantry nothing is scarier than land mines and snipers.
All I know is surveillance can't stop every tanker or lone gunman. It's just too easy to do these kinds of things without the use of anything with a significant RF signature.
Saying that terrorist attacks barely impact P(death) trivializes them.
There you go. Killing 50+ people is absurdly easy. Hello, blacklists.
People should be much more afraid of dying in a car accident than dying at the hands of terrorists, yet few people are urgently pushing the government to enforce stronger safety standards in cars / on roads. Instead people demand better security to protect them against things they are unlikely to be involved in to begin with.
Compared with traffic regulation and enforcement, the response to terrorist events like this are vastly out of proportion, and well into the range of irrational response that the terrorists know is the only way to really damage a large powerful nation - by making it turn on its own people and put them in a security-state panopticon.
- we need more surveillance rights and money for the secret services
- we need more police and higher spending
- and possibly bomb some country (Syria is en vogue)
What won't be said is:
- How come this happens again without anyone having seen it coming?
- What does it say about the success of the Western anti-terror foreign policy adopted ~2001?
It's not like you can say "yeah, we saw that coming and let it happen." Because THAT, sure as hell, will not fly with the people. And "yeah, we saw it coming and stopped it" is questioned as just posturing. When people say "scanning individuals in airports makes us no safer," what are they comparing it to?
Is it that they doubt the effectiveness because people are still getting killed by terrorists in planes? No. It's because there are no attacks, so they have no data to say "yeah... it's been effective."
The problem with this argument is that it can be used to justify any security measures, no matter how costly or stupid. Because maybe it's really very effective in practice but we can't tell you about it?
You're basically saying "trust us, we're the government." It's the recipe for total unaccountability.
So no, they have to justify that the costly and stupid security measures actually work. Or we'll have nothing but costly and stupid security measures that don't actually work.
Some people probably also assume that higher perceived level of threat that justifies tighter security is not a result of natural development, but of direct action by governments when carrying out their foreign policies.
The vicious circle of "we go and do good in the faraway, they blow us up, we tighten local security and do more good in the faraway,…" begs to determine causation in this correlation.
2) Finding real plots are too hard so they entrap people and even then, they don't find many.
3) They aren't spreading around their "successes" because they are absurdly few and borderline entrapment.
4) Homegrown threats are a greater danger and largely being ignored.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/25/us/tally-of-attacks-in-us-...
> But the breakdown of extremist ideologies behind those attacks may come as a surprise. Since Sept. 11, 2001, nearly twice as many people have been killed by white supremacists, antigovernment fanatics and other non-Muslim extremists than by radical Muslims: 48 have been killed by extremists who are not Muslim, including the recent mass killing in Charleston, S.C., compared with 26 by self-proclaimed jihadists, according to a count by New America, a Washington research center.
> Non-Muslim extremists have carried out 19 such attacks since Sept. 11, according to the latest count, compiled by David Sterman, a New America program associate, and overseen by Peter Bergen, a terrorism expert. By comparison, seven lethal attacks by Islamic militants have taken place in the same period.
> The contentious question of biased perceptions of terrorist threats dates back at least two decades, to the truck bombing that tore apart the federal building in Oklahoma City in April 1995. Some early news media speculation about the attack assumed that it had been carried out by Muslim militants. The arrest of Timothy J. McVeigh, an antigovernment extremist, quickly put an end to such theories.
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/other/nsa-program-stopped-no-ter...
> A member of the White House review panel on NSA surveillance said he was “absolutely” surprised when he discovered the agency’s lack of evidence that the bulk collection of telephone call records had thwarted any terrorist attacks.
https://theintercept.com/2015/11/17/u-s-mass-surveillance-ha...
> And even before Snowden, the NSA wasn’t able to provide a single substantiated example of its surveillance dragnet preventing any domestic attack at all.
https://news.vice.com/article/the-line-between-fbi-stings-an...
> A report released this week from Human Rights Watch highlights how, consistently, FBI sting operations are over aggressive and premised on the racist profiling of Muslim communities — that old building block of our contemporary national security state. Based on 215 interviews and focusing on 27 post-9/11 cases of alleged terror plot thwarting, HRW's findings call into question the very legitimacy of the FBI's counterterror work. The authors go as far as to call a number of stings "government-created" terror plots.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/nov/16/fbi-entrapment-...
> But the issue is one that stretches far beyond Newburgh. Critics say the FBI is running a sting operation across America, targeting – to a large extent – the Muslim community by luring people into fake terror plots. FBI bureaux send informants to trawl through Muslim communities, hang out in mosques and community centres, and talk of radical Islam in order to identify possible targets sympathetic to such ideals. Or they will respond to the most bizarre of tip-offs, including, in one case, a man who claimed to have seen terror chief Ayman al-Zawahiri living in northern California in the late 1990s.
http://www.wired.com/2013/02/american-muslim-terrorism/
> Since 9/11, Kurzman and his team tallies, 33 Americans have died as a result of terrorism launched by their Muslim neighbors. During that period, 180,000 Americans were murdered for reasons unrelated to terrorism. In just the past year, the mass shootings that have captivated America’s attention killed 66 Americans, “twice as many fatalities as from Muslim-American terrorism in all 11 years since 9/11,” notes Kurzman’s team.
> “Until public opinion starts to recognize the scale of the problem has been lower than we feared, my sense is that public officials are not going to change their policies,” Kurzman says. “Counterterrorism policies have involved surveillance — not just of Muslim-Americans, but of all Americans, and the fear of terrorism has justified intrusions on American privacy and civil liberties all over the internet and other aspects of our lives. I think the implications here are not just for how we treat a religious minority in the U.S., but also how we treat the rights & liberties of everyone.”
But I agree that this is a problem we can't bomb our way out of.
Alas, the spying is apparently targeting mainly the innocent civilians and is mostly ineffective against criminals.
But they did see it coming. From what I gathered from the response of many Brussels residents and airport personnel, the question was "when", more than "if".
Knowing how Belgium handles their minorities in Brussels, it's not a big surprise.
The fact that this happens now is neither a surprise. Salah Abdeslam has been caught, and there were messages that he wanted to cooperate with the Belgium police. Whether it's true or not, if they were planning something, and he knew about it, waiting was not a real option.
Could you elaborate? Is this a banlieu situation?
Looks like it's not working too well. Surveillance services have gained mass resources since 2015 in France and that did not stop the December attacks at all.
https://twitter.com/mattocko/status/712227775805988864
TATP (acetone peroxide), the type of improvised explosive favored by terrorists because of the easy access to ingredients, is uniquely difficult to detect but there have been some recent advances in this area [0]
Most of these attackers use vests that carry 2-10kg of TATP, or backpacks with 10+ kilograms. They are required to load these devices up and travel to their designated target, the hope is that with explosive detection you could pick these guys up or minimize casualties in the same way you could identify a gunman on CCTV.
It wouldn't be a panacea - but it could form part of a broader set of new tech to assist with these cases
[0] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0925400511...
Moreover, the bomb was set off outside the secure area. It is VERY likely that existing security measures got more people killed because there are dense crowds waiting to clear security. This exact type of attack, outside the secure area, was predicted long ago. And there you have it.
Unfortunately, by the time there's a bomb at the airport, it is too late unless "James Bond" is on the scene.
The core issues here need to be addressed.
a) People would bitch more because it would take forever to get into an airport. And,
b) It isn't practical. What's next, stopping you at your car or bus before you park?
People demand security but don't want inconvenience. And if security fails, they point and say "it's ineffective." Even if it stops 80% of attacks, unless it's 100% people will bitch. AND if there aren't any attacks, can they really claim that they stopped one unless they publicly acknowledge every attempted attack?
Ah, and don't forget the European border policies regarding (mostly Syrian) refugees...
Many believe that getting rid of Assad will end the Syrian refugee crisis. Others observe that when the Saddam and Gaddafi heads were cut off the snake grew ISIS.
And so it goes.
It's like the spy agencies and law enforcement are always highly competent and can never do any wrong.
They get fired if they break rules, fail to obey standard operating procedure, do not fill tick marks correctly on a paper.
They work in a system, and the system has responsibility, not individual people who work for it -- unless they neglect or break rules and procedures.
Why is this a bad thing? I feel safer with more police presence but maybe that's just me.
Police have a bad habit of harassing populations (several riots in France were a result of policing practices such as asking everyone for an ID). It helps to contribute to send a message of unwelcomeness to people who are likely already disillusioned in the system.
It's unlikely that more police could stop attacks. Maybe deal with the aftermath/manhunts better. But it sounds like more precision operations (including human intelligence) will go a lot further.
Does it work? The cost and human rights interferences are easier to take if more police works, but there's no evidence that it would.
Belgium certainly does. Its failures in counter terrorism have lead to the Paris attacks and now these attacks. At least that is the understanding I have gleaned from twitter conversations of CT experts
A lot of people could see it coming, except for the naive PC people
The nuance required to understand and attack the big picture is almost nowhere to be found.
I saw the French PM said something like "we're at war" - I'm not sure who they're at war with but onward with the endless war.
I've seen plenty of comments about ISIS. It's like a 99.999% chance it's not ISIS - maybe Al Qaeda, maybe a different extremist group. (For why it's probably not ISIS and one of the most fantastic explanations of the what's and whys of ISIS, see [0].) But it shows just how vastly uneducated most people are about the issues that lead to attacks like this.
This breeds calls for extremism in response, like expelling all Muslims (and can only help Trump's campaign) or comments like the one from the French PM above.
I can't imagine being in charge of trying to address all of the underlying issues that feed into attacks like this. And I don't know that those in charge are up to the task.
[0] http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/what-isi...
Edit: ISIS inspired maybe, but not ISIS planned and backed. "During his visit to Mosul in December, Jürgen Todenhöfer interviewed a portly German jihadist and asked whether any of his comrades had returned to Europe to carry out attacks. The jihadist seemed to regard returnees not as soldiers but as dropouts. “The fact is that the returnees from the Islamic State should repent from their return,” he said. “I hope they review their religion.”"
I always stand to be corrected.
I think it's far more likely that these attacks were triggered by the recent arrest of Salah Abdeslam and the killing of Mohamed Belkaid (in two different raids). There were multiple other suspects who were not captured/killed, and it seem plausible that they carried out these attacks now as they felt the police were closing in.
I'm not claiming that all terror attacks are always ISIS, and I'm not saying I'm sure this was ISIS, but given recent events in Belgium, the likelihood of ISIS involvement is a _lot_ higher than 0.001%.
That said, I agree this is likely retaliation, I'm just not sure how big the "enemy" we're fighting in Belgium is. Today's attack took a minimum of what, 3 people?
The article you're linking to was written before the November attacks which certainly was by ISIS.
What's most sad about it, is that the current situation is the result of doing nothing, despite having crystal clear data on the situation, and in which (wrong) direction things has been changing.
It's been clear that something needs to be done for years, even decades, but actually doing something about the situation would mean publicly acknowledging these facts. And nobody has been willing to do just that.
In fact actually using these known indisputable facts has been systematically avoided for fear of being seen as "racist" or whatever.
Putting the specific issue of immigration aside, I think that it's a very bad sign for the future of enlightened democracy when actually running a fact-based policy is deemed as "risky" and even unacceptable from a public relations point of view.
If we let this attitude persist, we can do lots of wrongs in other areas as well: Think about environmental changes, etc etc.
We need to heighten the status of cold data, of facts as a matter of indisputability. But that's not a left/right issue and I don't think you will find any party fronting such a position.
I think the current situation is the result of doing way too much the the past decade (or two). If the US and EU stayed out of the Middle East (Iraq, Libya, Syria), the EU+ME part of the world would be a much more peaceful place.
Why?
https://twitter.com/caitlinmoran/status/712254657662418944
> Always good, on days like this, to remind everyone that the guys blowing up Brussels are THE PEOPLE THE REFUGEES ARE RUNNING AWAY FROM
A "fact-based policy" is utopia. What for you is a fact, for me it's not. You can not have policy without politics.
And what? That "something" needs to be done was clear since the 80s, but so far constructive solutions have been rather sparse. Integration is too expensive to the austerity and privatization loving right wing, and expulsion doesn't work because our economies depend on cheap immigrant labour. So far I've not seen anyone seen pushing for a different solution.
They created the mess in the first place with regressive colonial era imperialist policies. Just take a look at this photo from Afghanistan [0] before the US decided to arm the Taliban in a proxy war against the Russians.
Everyone loves the material wealth neoliberalism gives them, but acts completely oblivious when confronted with the pure violence of its operation outside of the western bubble.
The problem is very simple: cultural incompatibility.
It is better to stay humble, as the parent comment was.
They have been saying that since the terrorists attacks of 2015 in France. Nothing new. And France is actually at war against ISIS, that's not a secret for anyone.
I think it would be fair to call them French/Belgian ISIS members. There is no requirement that you must be Syrian to be a member of ISIS.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-belgium-blast-idUSKCN0WO0L...
You should see the wind go out of politicans sails when they learn an event like this is a random nutcase. They look like their dog died.
"Bombs at Brussels airport. I'm alive but I think there are casualties." - https://twitter.com/lrz/status/712173286281650176
Laurent Sansonetti MacRuby & RubyMotion's creator and lead developer was near the blast.
I don't think there is any solution which makes everyone perfectly safe. Politicians always want to guarantee perfect safety but it's not possible. Some things you can prevent, some things you can stop, but some horrible thing will inevitably happen.
I don't buy it.
But it's important to understand that these feelings are what such attacks are intended to invoke. They're intended to harden the gap between "us" and "them", to make Westerners despise anyone who looks conveniently foreign enough to be suspicious of belonging to "them" and to use them as scapegoats for the perpetrators who have often already escaped justice through death.
These atrocities weren't committed by "Muslims" just like the atrocities in the UK during the Troubles were not committed by "Christians". The perpetrators were individuals -- even if they belonged to a group that group wasn't "Muslims", it most likely wasn't even "ISIS"; just a small group of like-minded dangerous individuals who were convinced they would aid mankind by committing atrocities like these.
In so far as certain ideologies led to these convictions it is important to understand that you can't kill ideas with weapons. Yes, where there are armies fighting for dangerous ideologies they need to be stopped, but where you can't even clearly distinguish the soldiers from the civilians you need to destroy the ideology, not the people.
But unlike people, ideologies are very difficult to destroy and take a long time to fully extinguish. And in times like these it's far too easy to fall prey to politicians promising fast satisfaction rather than a long-term strategy towards a shift in ideologies.
We need to embrace our humanity and liberties. We have already had our period of enlightenment and we have overcome totalitarianism and theocracy. We must not allow ourselves to regress to the dark age, no matter how appealing it may seem in times like these -- neither here in Europe, nor oversees in the US.
I like that you used "extinguish" here.
I'm not sure if you intended it, but I think the behavioural psychology definition of "extinguish" is especially relevant.
In other words, to get rid of the ideology, we'd have to not reinforce it: i.e. to neither reward it or punish it.
And yes extinction[1] takes a long time.
Also see "extinction burst".
I guess it’s official. Facebook Safety Check is for terrorist attacks in white, western countries only. Good to know.
Edit: I was wrong and I take back what I said: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Safety_Check#Other_de...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Safety_Check#Other_de...
Perhaps some sort of real time image recognition of video streams from major public areas (like airports), which can detect things like guns and unattended packages and alert authorities automatically? Of course, that doesn't help detect the suicide bomber scenario.
Automatic facial recognition of known criminals? That would be hugely open to abuse.
This is not the way I want to feel. If you would've told me around 8:30 a.m. on September 10th the way things would be changed, I couldn't have fathomed it. I was sitting in my high school Spanish class, trying to get the attention of a girl who probably doesn't even remember my name now. But things changed and I kind of came into my own with those changes, growing up, going to college, getting one job, then another. It became normal.
Data is the buzzword now. I eat it and breathe it every single day. I work with collections of numbers and information. These are the same things that keep us safe from attacks - collections numbers and information. The NSA and others rely on it. For every attack we hear about, I cannot even venture a guess on how many are thwarted.
Given that numbers and information are critical tools in trying to prevent future tragedies, I struggle with the same question we all do: how much is too much? What do I want to let the government know about me? About my family? About where I travel and when? Is there an inevitable trade-off between safety and privacy?
I think abut these things at work, at home, while driving. It seems now that we are facing a new breed of terror that has evolved, even since 2001. It is calculated yet seemingly random, completely lawless yet in their eyes the only lawful way to live, more violent, vile and sadistic any other terrorist cell I have heard about.
So you would think, given the way I feel about this new iteration of terror, and the struggle I have with personal privacy questions, I would've been paralyzed with anxiety this morning, seeking meaning, trying to configure a strategy in my head for how the governments involved will deal with it and prevent future attacks.
But I did not feel or do those things. I poured my coffee and walked out the door. Of course I feel horrible for the poor innocent lives lost, but as far as worrying and obsessing about it, I just cannot. This is not how I want to feel. I fear that my not panicking signals attacks like this as a new normal for me, something my 17 year-old self never could've or would've wanted to imagine. Thanks everyone for sharing thoughts and insights on this, I think it is helping me process yet another attack in my own way.
Edit: I don't claim to have a rich understanding of the issue, but I appreciated the nuanced analysis in this article:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/03/what-isi...
Many people seem to view doing this kind of reading and learning as some kind of gesture that is sympathetic to those who commit such acts. I will never understand how wanting to be educated on the history of a group automatically means you are siding with them ideologically...but I am from the midwest and left quite a few beliefs I will never understand.
What we need is to think this through, which also means challenging conventional wisdom, not just be "be united in following whatever said government wants to do".
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11334908 (67 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11335167 (79 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11335518 (115 comments)
Is it getting flagged for being off-topic?
EDIT: it was a controlled explosion made by the mine-clearing experts.
If you want a link without a paywall.
Anything even remotely rational.
> Always good, on days like this, to remind everyone that the guys blowing up Brussels are THE PEOPLE THE REFUGEES ARE RUNNING AWAY FROM
Will wonders never cease. But let’s stick to what HN does best, discuss the wonders of technology. In this case, I’d liek to administer a Turing Test:
The hypothesis is that ”odinduty" is a reasonably sophisticated bot, trained to emulate the kind of comments you find on /r/Europeans. Can we find it making a statement inconsistent with this hypothesis?
