Bruce Schneier has a thought provoking essay on what the “war on terror” has evolved into:
We’ve opened up a new front on the war on terror. It’s an attack on the unique, the unorthodox, the unexpected; it’s a war on different. If you act different, you might find yourself investigated, questioned, and even arrested — even if you did nothing wrong, and had no intention of doing anything wrong. The problem is a combination of citizen informants and a CYA attitude among police that results in a knee-jerk escalation of reported threats.
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This story has been repeated endlessly, both in the U.S. and in other countries. Someone — these are all real — notices a funny smell, or some white powder, or two people passing an envelope, or a dark-skinned man leaving boxes at the curb, or a cell phone in an airplane seat; the police cordon off the area, make arrests, and/or evacuate airplanes; and in the end the cause of the alarm is revealed as a pot of Thai chili sauce, or flour, or a utility bill, or an English professor recycling, or a cell phone in an airplane seat.
Of course, by then it’s too late for the authorities to admit that they made a mistake and overreacted, that a sane voice of reason at some level should have prevailed. What follows is the parade of police and elected officials praising each other for doing a great job, and prosecuting the poor victim — the person who was different in the first place — for having the temerity to try to trick them.
Read the whole article. Check out the stories linked to from the article. Each one shows some silliness that occurred somewhere in the world due to this “war on terror”. Because of this, having to go through a US airport has now become more painful than having to go through Mumbai airport. That’s something I had never expected to happen in my lifetime. The terrorists have had more of an impact on the world than they probably had hoped for. As comedian Lewis Black put it, I guess we should be glad that the shoe bomber was not an underwear bomber.