I've had friends consider me crazy for complaining - way after the time, I hasten to add - that I'd had a small deodorant can taken off me in airport security, which I'd then had to purchase in the duty free shop.
My wife's now tired of me complaining - again, after suffering through it in silent, stony-faced contemplation - that in any other context, I've just suffered sexual assault. I won't apologise for it; I find it extremely distressing to have my dick groped by a stranger. All because a machine went "beep" and one two many green bars lit up.
And then you look at the London olympics; where the army will be frisking people who've dared to pay money to watch events. (NB: the army presence was guaranteed regardless of G4S's cockup). The army! And in this instance, it's not like the UK hasn't decades of experience of dealing with terrorism from the IRA.
How well does all this work? Who knows, nobody's telling. I'd argue if there was anyone caught or something prevented by one of these systems, the government concerned would be singing from the rooftops. But no - it's "a deterrent." Gah.
I do find terrifying what's happening in UK lately, seemingly all of the sudden from those of us not living there, like that new law proposal to monitor everyone's private communications. Not too long ago that kind of proposal would've been seen as insane. Now it seems a lot of politicians are taking it seriously, as if history before the past 20 years doesn't even exist, and we've all started from scratch 20 years ago. They now think monitoring everyone is a "necessary" thing to prevent the "evils" of the world.
Also, in US, isn't it strange how they don't talk about terrorists "hating us for our freedoms" anymore? Is it because they've realized what a stupid statement that was to begin with, or because they know they're taking them away one by now one, and it's best not to mention this dirty word "freedom" anymore?
Let's not assume the people implementing these measures are complete morons. There's power to be gained and money to be made from a submissive, unquestioning people.
No one believes your deodorant would take down a plane. It's just that no one wants to pay to back that belief up.
Just putting it out there. It could be better than the alternative.
After the bombing of Khobar Towers, the bombing of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the first World Trade Center bombing, the bombing of the USS Cole, and finally the acts of 9/11, it would seem that US anti-terrorism policies in place at that time were not particularly effective.
On the other hand, if we're just speaking of mass-murderers rather than terrorists, I don't think anyone has expressed an interest in increased police powers or surveillance, but rather implementing some rational gun laws.
Changing laws that could negatively impact millions of people because of the statistically extremely small amount of people killed in mass shootings is just the kind of overreaction the article is talking about.
If you want to debate gun laws you have to weigh the rights of gun owners with the rights of people killed every year. Our policies shouldn't be based on statistically insignificant, but emotional charged tragedies.
Even the Obama administration has said it is against calling for more gun regulation because of this.
This man was apparently very smart and motivated, there was nothing we could have realistically done to prevent this. Look at Norway, they have stricter gun regulation than we do, yet they still had a mass shooting with a death toll that dwarfs anything we've seen.
I don't think it is wise to come to that conclusion so quickly. If his AR-15 hadn't jammed, this probably would have been the most deadly single-man massacre in history (he hit 70 people with a shotgun and pistols, and his AR-15 had a 100-round magazine), and I think that point merits some consideration. From what I understand of AR-15s, gun jams are somewhat common, but that isn't really a problem for adept users. It is too early to say exactly what was going on with this guy, but I get the impression that a growing insanity drove his actions more than rational planning; he probably would have been practiced if he had more of a plan as Brevick seemed to have.
It should be obvious that guns aren't going anywhere, but there is a clear distinction in policy between methods violence that affect a few people and those that affect a large number. It seems like Holmes' goal was closer to killing 100 people, and he came very close to doing so. And he obtained the means to do so without what you could even describe as a speed bump. If he had used a bomb instead, would there be an uproar over attempts to curb bomb making? I don't see why the use of a gun should make the case so easy to dismiss.
Just saying: Despite the attack ad fueled mass hysteria about this, Obama hasn't done anything regarding US gun policy, in any direction.
Edit: I don't particularly like guns, but non-representative, singular incidents to change policy seems like a very poor way to start debates or come to proper conclusions.
You are correct in saying that McVeigh's actions may not fit that definition, as he claimed that his motive was revenge for the government's actions on Waco and Ruby Ridge, rather than trying to force political change, but terrorism also refers to the state of fear that an act can cause, so you can still call him a terrorist.
The problem in the United States is that people are always willing to call Muslim extremists terrorists, but for some reason other individuals or groups that commit terrorist acts are simply labeled nuts, extremists, or the fringe element.
Instead they'll find some way to circumscribe the rights of non gun-owners, that will be ineffective, but will play well in Republican states.
It is interesting to think about how much 2011 attacks affected us Norwegians. Living in Oslo, I know people who work in the government buildings that were hit, people who earlier years have been to the AUF camp at Utøya, and I've also personally been to Utøya at a Maths camp. My girlfriend were a only few blocks from the bomb when it went off.
The next six months, I'll be working in R6, one of the buildings in the executive government quarter where the bomb went off, but only suffered minor damages. I'll be walking past the bomb site. In fact, I was there earlier in the summer. Here's a photo I took: http://instagram.com/p/MK9aWrtM3z/
Norwegians are generally peaceful. We have a low crime rate and high employment rate. We do rank 11th on number of guns per capita by country[1], though, but the few people I know who have guns are active hunters. Norway usually tops the UNs list of best places to live. Norway has its share of problems, of course, but it usually pales in comparison to problems other places.
The 2011 attacks were just unbelievable, and I try not to think about them in detail because it's too emotional. Before the attacks, Norway was so very, very innocent and unspoiled. We've managed to retain some of our innocence, perhaps, and even one year after the attack, I feel that we're still trying to find out how to handle it.
I'm not entirely sure what my intention was with this post, but now that I've written it, I might as well post it. If you've read this far, I hope you got something out of it - perhaps new insight into the Norwegian psyche, if anything.
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_of_guns_per_capita_by_co...
To try and compare our reaction to terrorism and how the Norwegians reacted to their recent mass killing is completely absurd.
Second, I'm sorry, but as an American who currently lives in Oslo (and was at work 2 blocks from where the bomb exploded last year), the comparison to how America has reacted to terrorism compared to how Norway reacted to this event is entirely fair.
Immediately after the bombing, nobody knew who was responsible, but many people immediately started theorizing that it must have been Muslim extremists (Norway is active in the international community, and not everyone is happy with them based on their attempts to help with negotiations between Israel/Palestine, opposing forces in Sri Lanka, and not to mention their ongoing attempts to figure out what to do with Mullah Krekar).
After the attacks, the government could very easily have made changes to the law and done so very quickly (look at how the U.S. was able to pass the horrible Patriot Act in less than a month after 9/11). Instead they had a very reasoned response. --The army was deployed to several locations around Oslo for two days (to help keep people out of areas with heavy damage after the bomb, around their parliament, palace, and a few other locations), and then they were gone. Very few new laws have been introduced - the only big one is the one to allow them to hold Breivik in prison even if he is declared insane, although they're now considering laws to allow more internet monitoring, which I hope will not pass.
In comparison, the U.S. reaction to 9/11 (which resulted in fewer deaths and injuries per capita than in Norway) include the Patriot Act, the Department of Homeland Security, and military tribunals where defendants and their legal counsel aren't even allowed to see the evidence against them.
I had a lot of friends and relatives asking me if I wanted to move back to the States after the attack, and I've always been able to point to the reasonable response Norway had to a horrific attack vs how the U.S. responded and easily say no.
Source: https://www.politi.no/vedlegg/lokale_vedlegg/kripos/Vedlegg_...
Still very low, but 580% more than five. That said, I agree that the idea of comparing a country with 5 million inhabitants to the US is not entirely right, given to
(a) The heterogeneity of the US population and, (b) The US being two orders of magnitude more populated. It really is more of a continent than a country.
Probably apocryphal, but it does draw attention to the role that cultural differences play in what sort of rules you can implement in organizing a society.
I usually like Mr. Schriener's work, but this post is a little off.
There are many things that are done differently in other parts of the world, to great success, that we could adapt and learn from.
In 2010, there were 1.33 million foreign-born residents in Sweden, corresponding
to 14.3% of the total population. Of these, 859 000 (9.2%) were born outside
the EU and 477 000 (5.1%) were born in another EU Member State.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Sweden
The number of immigrants in Norway is approximately 550,000.
The total "immigrant population", which includes Norwegian-born children
to immigrant parents, is 655,170, corresponding to 13.1 percent of the
total population (2011).
There is a lot to be learnt from other countries, and I am sure it's not always easy to say that there are countries that do things better than the United States, but people tend to make it sound as if it's all rainbows and ponies, as soon as you get off the plane in Northern Europe.
It's not like they don't have their own problems to wrestle with in areas where the United States does better.
Sure, we Norwegians like to blow our own horn and preach peace and tolerance, and can sometimes be shocked when we travel the world and discover how other people think. It won't stop us from preaching socialism and believing that the world can be a better place, though.
Interesting that you make a point about diversity - that was one of the things Breivik was fighting (or multiculturalism, specifically).
b. There's a very different social reaction to domestic terrorism ("there's something rotten in us, we can fix this from the inside") and terrorism from the outside ("we're being attacked, we need to protect ourselves from those people"). Sure, even in domestic terrorism there's a social mindset of differentiation (i.e. "us v.s. them perpetrators") but not to the same extent.
c. One year strikes me as too soon to assess anything and to pat on anyone's back.
d. One could argue the US can't afford what Norway can afford, whether it's because of size, number of enemies, etc. Yes, one could counter-argue those same American policies perpetuate some of these reasons (i.e. number of enemies), but please keep it mind when doing such a comparison.
Any Brit here caring to comment on British public perception of the tubes bombing? Would you say it's considered domestic terrorism in Britain? Please chime in.
EDIT: in any case, while this IS an interesting discussion (about the tubes), British reaction to terrorism does not reflect on the original comparison and points, so far anyway. Just want to mark different discussions and tangents as different.
Of course the race (and religion) plays a huge role in the emotional reaction to violence. Uncomparatively more so than the technical "domestic/external" categorization based on residence, citizenship and whatnot. Race and religion are the top factors in eliciting the "us vs them" reaction.
The difference seems to be the same as with car v plane crashes. Kill lots of people over time v many at once and society reacts very differently, even though the first kills more.
One year after 9/11 (ok, 14 months but the work was being publicly done within a year) - we had Homeland security, PATRIOT Act, a war, and noise about another war. Sales of duct tape went through the roof (along with plastic tarps, some sort of voodoo chem weapon protection scheme), new warrantless wire taps everywhere, the NSA box to read all internet traffic, and so on.
So yes, a year is plenty of time to compare responses in the first year.
Example of when I was last in Bulgaria: Bulgarian president was in town, he danced Horo (traditional Bulgarian dance) with the people and made toasts.
Can we please stop the USA hating around here?
Okay maybe just pick and choose bits to emulate. But comparisons for the purpose of constructive criticism is not equivalent to hate.
It's not like they evacuate DC every time the Presidential motorcade drives across town. I know because I've seen Obama wave from the back seat!
Back in 2000, Israel had a series of suicide bombing attacks, which resulted (among other things) in a law requiring every mall, restaurant, cafe, theatre, office buildings and many other businesses to have a full time security guard who will check every person coming in with a metal detector.
There were a lot of cries about how useless and what a waste of money that was (as, of course, the cost was shifted to the customers). However, it turned out to be a deterrent in a strange way:
There were several cases of suicide bombing later that year, in which the bomber saw the guard, and decided to go to an unguarded place (most establishments observed this law, but not all). In one case, there was no visible unguarded place, so the bomber blew themselves up in the middle of a busy crosswalk.
I think the bottom line is that these measures did not change the overall outcome, which was just as tragic, but they did manage to shift the locations of the events.
Hopefully people will think ahead far enough to downplay the effectiveness of such security measures.
http://www.newsday.com/news/nation/aurora-shooting-highlight...
A white lie, I'm afraid. Lex Breivik [1] has changed the laws so that regional security departments have a lot more power, in fact more power than what prisons have as of today.
[1]: http://www.google.com/translate?hl=en&ie=UTF8&sl=no&...
The problem was that if the court declares Breivik insane, Norway couldn't (legally) put him in a high-security criminal prison, and there was no equivalent for psychiatric cases. Now there is.
It is a change, and clearly in response to this case, but the scope of the change is limited.
That's wrong - they can do that without Lex Breivik. The issue is when he's declared healthy, what would then happen? It's legal to detain him if it can be proved that he constitutes a danger to society. However, if he is not considered a danger to the society, he will be able to walk freely. With Lex Breivik, they will be allowed to detain him as long the society is a danger to the person.
Think about that for a moment. With Lex Breivik, you can be isolated even if you've not done anything illegal (or have finished serving your imprisonment) or is considered healthy, because some people in the society want to do you harm.
<deadpan> This is not about Republicans. </sarcasm>
Of course Norway's response is different. Norway isn't the target of a terrorist organization. It had a terrorist incident that's now over. We had something similar in the US with Timothy McVeigh, and our response wasn't any more radical than Norway's.
Is this not a little dangerous surely if we take this over to USA where gun ownership is part of their core values?
http://zalmi.blogspot.com/2011/07/utoya-not-so-innocent-yout... http://www.debbieschlussel.com/40472/karma-2-norway-utoya-ca...
This is a factor that seems to go unmentioned in all discussions of the Utoya massacre, but is necessary knowledge to understand the event in its entirety. It adds detail to Breivik's motive, and it raises the question of why there has been no condemnation of the Labour Party's support for similar massacres elsewhere being conducted on racial and religious lines so long as they happen far away and are done by a faction that the Party approves of.
This is beside the point that Schneier makes, so I apologise for going off topic. To that point, the US overreacted (an understatement) and Norway faced little threat of further attacks. Norway did consider fudging its laws to give Breivik a life term as a mental inmate rather than the statutory limit of years as a prisoner, and that can be questioned as an expansion of security. More generally, no one in Norway could argue a need for greatly expanded security since the threat ended with Breivik's capture.
The links you provide equates this to antisemitism, which is very strange to me. Who was it, you mean, who were being "enthusiastically for" terrorism?
We are comparing an apple to a boiled egg : putting them in a microwave & trying to commend apple for not exploding !
Forget legislative or leadership moronism at times, but blasting US for reacting in a way for something no other country has ever faced seems too harsh.
The death toll from the 9/11 attacks far exceeded any other single terrorist attack.
Some of the focus in the debate has been more about how to avoid people ending up with value systems (or mental disease) that permit and promote such horrible violence.
Also the political system is based on pluralism so there is a built in conservatism in the system that will cause changes to take time. However, changes will come and this is a big eye-opener for many people.
When the bomb exploded I was sitting on work around 30m away. I remember the day well, it was very quiet because it was in the middle of the summer vacation and we were only 3 people working in the "Web Department" of the central government, which usually have 26 people on work.
I was working on testing the software behind https://go.usa.gov/ which is based on Drupal and I was struggling with it, working late. Short story, I suddenly was on the floor 2m away from my desk and when I looked around I was shocked to see that all my colleagues offices was blown in with papers, desk and computers laying all around. Luckily my office was facing the backside and the blast threw me away from the blown in window and I was fine again after some weeks.
Anyway, one year has past and these are now only memories.
I have visited the State Departement in Washington and seen the security messures in place there. It's really not comperable to Norway in any way, but Norway is living in the same world and I hope we can keep things as open as possible. Maybe in the future I can someday be as trusting again as I were when I was hacking Drupal back on the 22. July 2011.
[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spirit_Level:_Why_More_Equa...
I don't think any state could sit by and do nothing institutionally after such a terrible event. The problem in Norway is that whilst there is a self-congratulatory air about their response to Brevik - "love and democracy", they do not seem to want to engage in substantive debate about the planned changes to their security apparatus. To be honest they trust their government to do the right thing, even if that means extremely illiberal changes to the legal right of the person and the criminal system. Whether that trust is misplaced or not, and remember this is a highly consensual society, the Janteloven that Brevik has revealed will be controlled now via new laws - including new laws on using the Internet and making comments (Brevik was a big user of the internet and left comments on Norwegian websites).
If the killer was not white and "Norwegian" (as we think a true norwegian should be), but rather a muslim extremist from Saudi Arabia, would they react the same way?
Here in Scandinavia (and maybe everywhere) racism may seem alien but is never far away. I am sure, and saddened by the fact, that we would have reacted with hate and fear if the killer was not white, Norwegian and christian.
"[]...What we Norwegians are afraid of is actually the situation you have in the US and UK either with Police or prosecutors with way too much power or CCTV cameras everywhere etc. We have been a peaceful society based on trust to each other for a long time, and intend to let that continue. I can only quote FDR: "The Only Thing We Have to Fear Is Fear Itself". Stoltenberg actually had to come with that statement. As doing the "US style fixit" would have backfired on him politically. Popular demand is different here, and that is the true power of Norway."