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cosToday is the anniversary of the day in 2007 when Boston was under attack by cartoon terrorists.
On this day, we ought to reflect and remember the victims. I don't mean the mooninites' usual victims Master Shake, Frylock, and Meatwad; on January 31st, 2007, they struck further and wider. On this day, remember our fear based policies, our hostility to quirkiness, our collective political sickness of panic and xenophobia. Although the Mooninites (with the aid of![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
lightfixer and his friend) temporarily turned it all into a farce, their job is not yet done.
So today, I'm reposting something I wrote for the Blue Mass Group blog shortly after the cartoon terrorist scare of 2007:
What Does Random Panic Protect Us From?. I've added some new material to this re-post. Please read it, and share it, and re-post it.
Boston and Massachusetts officials, and some people here at Blue Mass Group, have tried to justify Boston's overreaction to some hanging lights last week by saying, "what if they hadn't done what they did, and a real bomb went off?" This makes as much sense to me as trying to justify the Iraq war by asking, "what if we had not invaded Iraq, and there were another terrorist attack in the US?"
Or, they say, "people were just doing their job!" Why, they ask, are we second-guessing the actions of the bomb squad, who were responding to a call? Keeping with the Iraq analogy, this is the "support the troops" tack: It equates criticizing bad policy with attacking the police officers (soldiers) who carry it out.
Let's focus on the real issues:
My answers:
The threat this activity aims to protect us from, they say, is this: A terrorist, fanatic, or violent person of some sort wants to set off a bomb or bombs in Boston, to kill people or disrupt the city or both, and cause fear. Well, the fear's already here and probably doesn't need help, but leaving that aside, let's think about what such a person could do.
If you want to cause death and destruction and terror with a bomb, you could put it in a backpack stuffed with papers and clothes. Dress up like a student, and go sit down in Harvard Square eating a sandwich. Get up, "forgetting" your backpack (you could receive a cell phone call at an appropriate moment if you want to dress up the acting), and walk away into the crowd. Nobody would notice anything suspicious, nobody would call the police. A few minutes later, when you're safely through to the other side of Harvard Yard or on a bus, the bomb could go off, killing people, blasting shops, and closing down part of the red line.
Or, you could take the express bus from Waltham, and get off in Newton, before the bus gets on the pike. Leave your bomb under the seat (again, in a backpack stuffed with papers & clothes). Time it to go off about when the bus is in the I-90 tunnel near Copley - or have an accomplice watch near the entrance to the tunnel and use a remote trigger, so you don't have to worry about traffic delays. Or, do what the 1993 World Trade Center bombers did: rent (or steal) a van, and pack it with explosives. Drive it up to a big building and leave it to explode there. Boston has no shortage of buildings vulnerable to that attack. You could close down some major roads that way, too.
None of what Boston did last week shows that they can protect us from this threat, for the simple reason that none of what Boston did bears much relation to what needs to be done to protect us from it. Boston's freak out started in response to a call about a strange object, and it's highly unlikely that such a call would come in the case of a real terrorist bomb. Protecting us from terrorist bombs requires that we develop a process for spotting them, not that we react in the extreme to the occasional phone call.
Does this make you feel safe? It makes me feel safe.
Really, I mean that. I'm not going to say it's "easy" for a terrorist to plant a bomb, but it's certainly doable and not particularly complex. And if someone does plant a bomb, chances that anyone will stop it are tiny. Given that, and the fact that years have passed since 9/11 with no bombs going off, the lesson is clear: Nobody's trying!.
... and that's the best protection there is.
In Israel, the threat of terrorist bombs is real and prevalent. Israeli authorities and processes are extremely effective at countering it: they catch and prevent real bomb plots and attempts every month - in times of higher tension, multiple times a week. I'm from Israel, and though I've lived most of my life in Boston, I did spend several summers there in the 80s and 90s, enough to be familiar with some of what they do.
In Israel, any unattended portable object is a "suspicious object", including the equivalent of a backpack left in Harvard Square or on the 553 bus. Most everyone, except some tourists, knows how to respond. Someone calls "khefetz khashud" (suspicious object); people clear the vicinity of the object; an announcement is made if it's somewhere with a PA system; the bomb squad arrives and destroys the object; they make sure there's nothing dangerous around, and call the all clear. The whole process usually takes about 15-30 minutes, and affects a single restaurant, bus stop, building, or intersection, while the rest of the city keeps going.
Most bombs and bomb plots get stopped well before they reach the stage where that process is necessary - it's in place as a safety net for when intelligence fails. There are other processes to handle suicide bombers, again as a safety net to catch the ones intelligence fails to stop.
The Israeli process of protection against terrorist bombs has a lot of pieces. Intelligence networks, investigators, rapid response, an informed population, well known procedures, and lots of practice. It requires the participation of a majority of people, on a daily basis. It's a lot of hassle, and a big expense. People do it because they know the threat is real and prevalent, and because they know it works. People do it because the cost of not doing it would be bombs blowing up every week.
If we wanted to really protect Boston from terrorist bombs, we'd have to do something like what Israel does.
And yet... Sometimes, bombs do blow up in Israeli cities. Every single year, some plots slip through all the safety nets and succeed, while every single year, zero terrorist bombs blow up in Boston. Why? Because in Israel, somebody's trying. Israel's process, as effective and robust as it is, is missing the most important piece: the political & social. The only true way to protect your city from terrorist bombs is to have a political & social situation in which terrorists aren't trying to plant bombs. That's what we have here in Boston.
We're safer in Boston. But it's not because we don't face a terrorist bomb threat. Actually, the thing most likely to cause sudden death or injury to a typical Bostonian, and to a typical Israeli, is the same: a traffic accident. Even in Israel, cars kill more people than terrorists, by a long shot. We're safer in Boston because Israeli drivers are crazier, and their accident rates are higher. Israelis are safer than Italians, who, in turn, are safer than residents of Nairobi, Kenya (which has one of the highest car accident death rates in the world). On the scale of risk we face, terrorist bombs don't come close to competing with many people's daily commute to and from work.
Incidentally, bumper to bumper traffic on a highway increases accident rates. Accidents in a bumper to bumper portion of a highway tend to be low speed and don't cause injury, but if portions of a road are clear and portions are clogged, accidents at the transition points can be serious. When you close or divert major roads during high traffic times, you increase the risk of injury to a lot of people. Part of our response to the Mooninite scare was to close or divert major roads, in the daytime when traffic is high.
What are we protecting ourselves from, again?
But let's get back to those hypothetical bombs in Boston, the ones that don't exist but that our city claims to be protecting us from. Why, exactly, did they decide to kick in maximum "protection" when they found that first Mooninite?
It's not because the Mooninite sign was more likely to be a bomb than countless other objects in the city. Sure, the Mooninite could have been a bomb, but so could just about anything else that's lying around. If anything, these cartoons were much less likely to be bombs than millions of other things we see lying around. Making something with lights and a pattern to draw attention, and hanging it somewhere visible, aren't exactly on a would-be terrorist bomber's priority list. So why wasn't Chinatown closed down last weekend because of the crate of vegetables some delivery truck left on the sidewalk, that I walked by. Don't tell me a crate of vegetables can't be hiding a bomb.
Why did the cartoons lead to a panic when many other things much more likely to be bombs did not? Because they were weird. And because they were weird, someone called to report them as being weird. As Boston officials have said, and commenters on this blog have echoed, "what if we hadn't responded to the call, and then something happened?" Nobody says, "what if we hadn't called the alarm over that crate of vegetables in Chinatown, and then it turned out to be a bomb?" Nobody says, "what if we hadn't shut down Harvard Square because of that stray backpack, and then it turned out to be a bomb?" Why? Because those things aren't weird, and therefore nobody called about them. The process we have isn't about protecting us from terrorists, it's about covering the city's ass.
How likely is there to be a correlation between actual bombs, and calls reporting weird objects? First, real bombs are highly unlikely - we haven't had even one yet. Second, if there were a real bomb, there's little chance of it being weird and prompting a call. Third, there are a lot of weird objects around that aren't bombs but could prompt calls. Therefore, the correlation is probably negative. In today's Boston, given what we know and how we act and think, if someone calls about an unusual object, it's almost certainly not a bomb, and is in fact less likely to be a bomb than some other object that nobody called about. The Aqua Teen Hunger Force attack is an illustrative example of this.
We have in place a process that responds to such calls with hysteria, spectacle, and a major disruption of the city. It's a response that, as we've seen, has major costs - not just the $1 million the city says it cost them, but the disruptions and delays for millions of other people. And yet, despite all this cost, it's a response that is triggered essentially at random, with no positive correlation to the (almost nonexistent) threat it's supposed to be a response to. That's why I call it "Random Panic".
First, we need to understand the situation:
Then, we can weigh the tradeoffs involved in putting in place something that actual would protect us from bombs. It should be obvious to us that in our current situation, it's not worth it. We can't go the Israeli way without a major investment, not just on the part of the city & state, but on the part of most residents - and residents simply aren't going to stick to such a program unless they see the threat. Not just abstractly, but for real. Since it's not real, it can't work.
If someone calls about a suspicious object, investigate. But don't assume it's a bomb without evidence - and understand that the fact that someone called about it does not constitute evidence. If someone calls in a specific bomb threat, that is evidence: respond accordingly. But even in that case, don't overreact.
If and when we turn out to have an active, ongoing threat of terrorist bombings, then and only then, start learning how to counter it from places like Britain and Israel. In the meantime:
Stop digging the hole we got ourselves in, deeper.
When I wrote that four years ago, I left out an important part: Obviously this Random Panic process doesn't protect us from anything, but it's part of a system to protect politicians from us.
The threat: If something bad ever does happen, people will punish politicians for not having done enough to prevent it, by taking them out of office.
The countermeasure: Lots of ridiculous measures that do us no good, and plenty of harm, but that make it appear as if those in charge are doing the best they can - and more. If they're ever accused of not having done enough, those accusations will lack credibility with most people, who have seen this stuff being done over the years.
Viewed in this light, the threat is real, and the defense is probably effective to some extent, so it's a perfectly rational thing for those in charge to keep on doing. If we want it to stop, the responsibility is ours to tell them:
So today, call your legislators, both state and federal. Ask them to stop bag searches on public transit, or ask them to dismantle the offensive excessive practices of airport "security" theater, or ask them to ease up on allowing foreign students into American universities. Pick some part of this insane system and call them about it today.
"The mooninite adventure was like MA telling me that they don't want my creativity."
-A brilliant and talented person of the sort our state should want to attract.
On this day, we ought to reflect and remember the victims. I don't mean the mooninites' usual victims Master Shake, Frylock, and Meatwad; on January 31st, 2007, they struck further and wider. On this day, remember our fear based policies, our hostility to quirkiness, our collective political sickness of panic and xenophobia. Although the Mooninites (with the aid of
lightfixer and his friend) temporarily turned it all into a farce, their job is not yet done.So today, I'm reposting something I wrote for the Blue Mass Group blog shortly after the cartoon terrorist scare of 2007:
What Does Random Panic Protect Us From?. I've added some new material to this re-post. Please read it, and share it, and re-post it.
What Does Random Panic Protect Us From?
Boston and Massachusetts officials, and some people here at Blue Mass Group, have tried to justify Boston's overreaction to some hanging lights last week by saying, "what if they hadn't done what they did, and a real bomb went off?" This makes as much sense to me as trying to justify the Iraq war by asking, "what if we had not invaded Iraq, and there were another terrorist attack in the US?"
Or, they say, "people were just doing their job!" Why, they ask, are we second-guessing the actions of the bomb squad, who were responding to a call? Keeping with the Iraq analogy, this is the "support the troops" tack: It equates criticizing bad policy with attacking the police officers (soldiers) who carry it out.
Let's focus on the real issues:
- What threat are we trying to protect ourselves from?
- How serious is that threat?
- How would a city protect itself from it?
- What are the effects of the process we currently have in place?
- Is it effective?
- What are its drawbacks?
- Something clearly went wrong - what should we change?
My answers:
- We're not facing a serious threat.
We have a process, which I call "Random Panic", that wouldn't protect us from it anyway.
Our protection method is actually a bigger problem than the supposed threat.
Protecting Us From Nothing
The threat this activity aims to protect us from, they say, is this: A terrorist, fanatic, or violent person of some sort wants to set off a bomb or bombs in Boston, to kill people or disrupt the city or both, and cause fear. Well, the fear's already here and probably doesn't need help, but leaving that aside, let's think about what such a person could do.
If you want to cause death and destruction and terror with a bomb, you could put it in a backpack stuffed with papers and clothes. Dress up like a student, and go sit down in Harvard Square eating a sandwich. Get up, "forgetting" your backpack (you could receive a cell phone call at an appropriate moment if you want to dress up the acting), and walk away into the crowd. Nobody would notice anything suspicious, nobody would call the police. A few minutes later, when you're safely through to the other side of Harvard Yard or on a bus, the bomb could go off, killing people, blasting shops, and closing down part of the red line.
Or, you could take the express bus from Waltham, and get off in Newton, before the bus gets on the pike. Leave your bomb under the seat (again, in a backpack stuffed with papers & clothes). Time it to go off about when the bus is in the I-90 tunnel near Copley - or have an accomplice watch near the entrance to the tunnel and use a remote trigger, so you don't have to worry about traffic delays. Or, do what the 1993 World Trade Center bombers did: rent (or steal) a van, and pack it with explosives. Drive it up to a big building and leave it to explode there. Boston has no shortage of buildings vulnerable to that attack. You could close down some major roads that way, too.
None of what Boston did last week shows that they can protect us from this threat, for the simple reason that none of what Boston did bears much relation to what needs to be done to protect us from it. Boston's freak out started in response to a call about a strange object, and it's highly unlikely that such a call would come in the case of a real terrorist bomb. Protecting us from terrorist bombs requires that we develop a process for spotting them, not that we react in the extreme to the occasional phone call.
Does this make you feel safe? It makes me feel safe.
Really, I mean that. I'm not going to say it's "easy" for a terrorist to plant a bomb, but it's certainly doable and not particularly complex. And if someone does plant a bomb, chances that anyone will stop it are tiny. Given that, and the fact that years have passed since 9/11 with no bombs going off, the lesson is clear: Nobody's trying!.
... and that's the best protection there is.
How to Protect Against Bombs
In Israel, the threat of terrorist bombs is real and prevalent. Israeli authorities and processes are extremely effective at countering it: they catch and prevent real bomb plots and attempts every month - in times of higher tension, multiple times a week. I'm from Israel, and though I've lived most of my life in Boston, I did spend several summers there in the 80s and 90s, enough to be familiar with some of what they do.
In Israel, any unattended portable object is a "suspicious object", including the equivalent of a backpack left in Harvard Square or on the 553 bus. Most everyone, except some tourists, knows how to respond. Someone calls "khefetz khashud" (suspicious object); people clear the vicinity of the object; an announcement is made if it's somewhere with a PA system; the bomb squad arrives and destroys the object; they make sure there's nothing dangerous around, and call the all clear. The whole process usually takes about 15-30 minutes, and affects a single restaurant, bus stop, building, or intersection, while the rest of the city keeps going.
Most bombs and bomb plots get stopped well before they reach the stage where that process is necessary - it's in place as a safety net for when intelligence fails. There are other processes to handle suicide bombers, again as a safety net to catch the ones intelligence fails to stop.
The Israeli process of protection against terrorist bombs has a lot of pieces. Intelligence networks, investigators, rapid response, an informed population, well known procedures, and lots of practice. It requires the participation of a majority of people, on a daily basis. It's a lot of hassle, and a big expense. People do it because they know the threat is real and prevalent, and because they know it works. People do it because the cost of not doing it would be bombs blowing up every week.
What's the Risk?
If we wanted to really protect Boston from terrorist bombs, we'd have to do something like what Israel does.
And yet... Sometimes, bombs do blow up in Israeli cities. Every single year, some plots slip through all the safety nets and succeed, while every single year, zero terrorist bombs blow up in Boston. Why? Because in Israel, somebody's trying. Israel's process, as effective and robust as it is, is missing the most important piece: the political & social. The only true way to protect your city from terrorist bombs is to have a political & social situation in which terrorists aren't trying to plant bombs. That's what we have here in Boston.
We're safer in Boston. But it's not because we don't face a terrorist bomb threat. Actually, the thing most likely to cause sudden death or injury to a typical Bostonian, and to a typical Israeli, is the same: a traffic accident. Even in Israel, cars kill more people than terrorists, by a long shot. We're safer in Boston because Israeli drivers are crazier, and their accident rates are higher. Israelis are safer than Italians, who, in turn, are safer than residents of Nairobi, Kenya (which has one of the highest car accident death rates in the world). On the scale of risk we face, terrorist bombs don't come close to competing with many people's daily commute to and from work.
Incidentally, bumper to bumper traffic on a highway increases accident rates. Accidents in a bumper to bumper portion of a highway tend to be low speed and don't cause injury, but if portions of a road are clear and portions are clogged, accidents at the transition points can be serious. When you close or divert major roads during high traffic times, you increase the risk of injury to a lot of people. Part of our response to the Mooninite scare was to close or divert major roads, in the daytime when traffic is high.
What are we protecting ourselves from, again?
Random Panic
But let's get back to those hypothetical bombs in Boston, the ones that don't exist but that our city claims to be protecting us from. Why, exactly, did they decide to kick in maximum "protection" when they found that first Mooninite?
It's not because the Mooninite sign was more likely to be a bomb than countless other objects in the city. Sure, the Mooninite could have been a bomb, but so could just about anything else that's lying around. If anything, these cartoons were much less likely to be bombs than millions of other things we see lying around. Making something with lights and a pattern to draw attention, and hanging it somewhere visible, aren't exactly on a would-be terrorist bomber's priority list. So why wasn't Chinatown closed down last weekend because of the crate of vegetables some delivery truck left on the sidewalk, that I walked by. Don't tell me a crate of vegetables can't be hiding a bomb.
Why did the cartoons lead to a panic when many other things much more likely to be bombs did not? Because they were weird. And because they were weird, someone called to report them as being weird. As Boston officials have said, and commenters on this blog have echoed, "what if we hadn't responded to the call, and then something happened?" Nobody says, "what if we hadn't called the alarm over that crate of vegetables in Chinatown, and then it turned out to be a bomb?" Nobody says, "what if we hadn't shut down Harvard Square because of that stray backpack, and then it turned out to be a bomb?" Why? Because those things aren't weird, and therefore nobody called about them. The process we have isn't about protecting us from terrorists, it's about covering the city's ass.
How likely is there to be a correlation between actual bombs, and calls reporting weird objects? First, real bombs are highly unlikely - we haven't had even one yet. Second, if there were a real bomb, there's little chance of it being weird and prompting a call. Third, there are a lot of weird objects around that aren't bombs but could prompt calls. Therefore, the correlation is probably negative. In today's Boston, given what we know and how we act and think, if someone calls about an unusual object, it's almost certainly not a bomb, and is in fact less likely to be a bomb than some other object that nobody called about. The Aqua Teen Hunger Force attack is an illustrative example of this.
We have in place a process that responds to such calls with hysteria, spectacle, and a major disruption of the city. It's a response that, as we've seen, has major costs - not just the $1 million the city says it cost them, but the disruptions and delays for millions of other people. And yet, despite all this cost, it's a response that is triggered essentially at random, with no positive correlation to the (almost nonexistent) threat it's supposed to be a response to. That's why I call it "Random Panic".
What Should We Do?
First, we need to understand the situation:
- We're not under a serious threat of terrorist bombs.
- If we were, the process we have now would not protect us from it at all.
- We're basically safe, but we suffer from the process that's supposed to keep us safe.
Then, we can weigh the tradeoffs involved in putting in place something that actual would protect us from bombs. It should be obvious to us that in our current situation, it's not worth it. We can't go the Israeli way without a major investment, not just on the part of the city & state, but on the part of most residents - and residents simply aren't going to stick to such a program unless they see the threat. Not just abstractly, but for real. Since it's not real, it can't work.
If someone calls about a suspicious object, investigate. But don't assume it's a bomb without evidence - and understand that the fact that someone called about it does not constitute evidence. If someone calls in a specific bomb threat, that is evidence: respond accordingly. But even in that case, don't overreact.
If and when we turn out to have an active, ongoing threat of terrorist bombings, then and only then, start learning how to counter it from places like Britain and Israel. In the meantime:
- Admit that the city screwed up in a big way.
Apologize to the people.
Apologize to the artists.
Investigate and fix the broken process.
Investigate the implementation of that process in this particular case: how those in charge acted.
Apply some accountability to city authorities if appropriate.
Drop all threats & court cases against the scapegoats.
Stop digging the hole we got ourselves in, deeper.
CYA Security [new]
When I wrote that four years ago, I left out an important part: Obviously this Random Panic process doesn't protect us from anything, but it's part of a system to protect politicians from us.
The threat: If something bad ever does happen, people will punish politicians for not having done enough to prevent it, by taking them out of office.
The countermeasure: Lots of ridiculous measures that do us no good, and plenty of harm, but that make it appear as if those in charge are doing the best they can - and more. If they're ever accused of not having done enough, those accusations will lack credibility with most people, who have seen this stuff being done over the years.
Viewed in this light, the threat is real, and the defense is probably effective to some extent, so it's a perfectly rational thing for those in charge to keep on doing. If we want it to stop, the responsibility is ours to tell them:
- We see the harm these processes do to us.
- We know that none of this makes us any safer.
- We don't want them to keep doing it, and we won't punish them at the ballot box for stopping it. We'll reward them.
So today, call your legislators, both state and federal. Ask them to stop bag searches on public transit, or ask them to dismantle the offensive excessive practices of airport "security" theater, or ask them to ease up on allowing foreign students into American universities. Pick some part of this insane system and call them about it today.
"The mooninite adventure was like MA telling me that they don't want my creativity."
-A brilliant and talented person of the sort our state should want to attract.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
the only thing we have to fear...
also, because of the security default practice of hiding information (e.g., excessive Federal classification of information), we might never hear about most incidents of attempted bombing, so we (as civilians) can't accurately evaluate our risks. of course, officials can publish artificially inflated counts of "foiled threats" to promote an atmosphere of fear, but (this may be a pipe dream) having some sort of impartial oversight might help avoid that.
one problem with correcting the "CYA Security" attitudes is reeducating the public. many interests, both political and commercial, profit from a public that lives in an atmosphere of fear and that cannot distinguish real threat from imagined threat. until there is a concerted effort to improve this ignorance, i fear that political efforts to prevent future overreactions will have minimal effect. some recent pieces in popular media about the TSA body scanner insanity do help the situation, but even more would be better.
Link roundup: security measures edition