I thought the point of "terrorism" is to inflict change on behaviors and confidence of a population? Changing someone's way of life impacts their confidence which seems to be the end goal of terrorism. It stands to reason that in order to make it an ineffective tactic, change as little as possible within the population and do not react.
TBH I have been thinking about this since 9/11. I doubt it was that philosophical. They wanted to show that they could attack us. And they did. They had ZERO, no tech, no highly trained snipers and marines, very little funding (compare al-qaida's funding with the US Government's). It is us who did it all. We "refuse to be terrorized" but instead we give up liberties like they are tumors that we will gladly shed to increase our perceived chances of survival.
>We "refuse to be terrorized" but instead we give up liberties like they are tumors that we will gladly shed to increase our perceived chances of survival.
I don't know if it is appropriate here on HackerNews, but there's this one Philosoraptor (an image meme) which just perfectly sums this up in a single sentence:
"If terrorists hate us for our freedom, does this mean
they're starting to like us?"
Agree. What's even stranger is how differently we treat different types of deaths. Anything terrorist related is something that needs to be prevented from happening again, regardless of the costs. Yet as many people die each and every month in auto accidents as died on 9/11 yet we all accept that as the cost of freedom the automobile offers us.
To be honest, I'm not sure that surrendering my bottle of water at airports has impacted my confidence that much. It's not like the experience of passing through airports was an effortless pleasure before. A couple of days ago I spent an hour waiting in line whilst a couple of hundred passengers, some of them possessing five or more suitcases, put every item of their baggage through a single X-ray machine, whilst other security operatives hand-searched the entire contents of selected suitcases. I'm pretty sure the reason Quito doesn't have a green zone in customs has nothing to do with al-Qaeda setting up bases in the Andes though.
As for other measures like the Patriot Act, I'm not sure that security theatre was the prime motivation for their introduction.
