Shostack + Friends Blog Archive

 

Terrorism Links and quotes

  • Ed Hasbrouck on “Lessons from the case of the man who set his underpants on fire
  • A Canadian woman who’s been through the new process is too scared to fly. “Woman, 85, ‘terrified’ after airport search.” Peter Arnett reported

    “‘It became necessary to destroy the town to save it,’ a TSA major said today. He was talking about the decision by allied commanders to shock and awe the public regardless of civilian casualties, to rout al Qaeda.”

  • Ethan Ackerman on risks of ionizing radiation, via Froomkin, but also see Technology Review, “How Terahertz Waves Tear Apart DNA.” [link to http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/24331/ no longer works]
  • TSA has been telling us that the machines “can’t” record you naked, while ordering machines that can. See EPIC Posts TSA Documents on Body Scanners. TSA responded, and Ed Hasbrouck responds TSA lies again.
  • The EU is objecting to new US rules, and the Pirate Party of Berlin is protesting them.
  • If you want to see why they’re protesting, watch this not safe for work video, “Body scanner, with detailed genitalia reporting
  • There’s a well worth reading article by Paul Campos in the Wall St. Journal, “Undressing the Terror Threat:”

    I’m not much of a basketball player. Middle-age, with a shaky set shot and a bad knee, I can’t hold my own in a YMCA pickup game, let alone against more organized competition. But I could definitely beat LeBron James in a game of one-on-one. The game just needs to feature two special rules: It lasts until I score, and when I score, I win.

    We might have to play for a few days, and Mr. James’s point total could well be creeping toward five figures before the contest ended, but eventually the gritty gutty competitor with a lunch-bucket work ethic (me) would subject the world’s greatest basketball player to a humiliating defeat.

    The world’s greatest nation seems bent on subjecting itself to a similarly humiliating defeat, by playing a game that could be called Terrorball. The first two rules of Terrorball are:

    1. The game lasts as long as there are terrorists who want to harm Americans; and
    2. If terrorists should manage to kill or injure or seriously frighten any of us, they win.