Last Wednesday, we had a security scare in Boston. Devices, attached to highway overpasses and other spots, turned out to be ads for a new cartoon. Boston, it would appear, overreacted, and closed down major parts of the city for no good reason.
But anyone charged with the public safety has to ask a very important question about any threat: How likely does it have to be?
Jeff Jacoby addresses this question:
…the police weren’t wrong not to take any chances; even before 9/11, thousands of people around the world wound up in early graves because something that appeared to be innocuous — a suitcase, a toy, a man’s bulky coat, a yellow Ryder rental truck — had turned out to be a terrorist’s bomb.
Bruce Schneier frequently laments the attention given to “movie plot” anti-terrorism measures. Pick one particular attack — hiding bombs in your shoes, flying airplanes into buildings, or planting gadgets on overpasses — and focus on stopping that particular attack. Never mind all the other ways terrorists can think of to mount attacks. What we need to do is address the problem before it gets to the specific attack.
It is too easy to focus government attention on specific objects — shoes and liquids at the airport, knives and metal objects at the entrance to public buildings, mysterious Lite-Brites on the undersides of bridges. It is tougher to keep a sustained focus on human beings who share certain beliefs, a form of surveillance from which most Americans instinctively recoil. Ideological and religious profiling goes against our civil-liberties grain. Infiltrating Islamic groups, keeping tabs on mosques, applying heightened scrutiny to Muslims in order to track the extremists among them — we tend to find such activities distasteful, awkward, even un-American.
But if we intend to win the war the jihadists have declared against us, they are unavoidable. The chaos in Boston last week was absurd and expensive and truly much ado about nothing. But it was also a warning: Societies at war cannot wait for bombs to be phoned in to 911. We must stop the Islamists before they strike. That in turn means knowing who they are, what they say, and where they are. Even if we would rather not.
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