Well duh!

Intelligence chiefs say another terror attempt in U.S. is 'certain' - CNN.com

Have you ever watched those "psychic" folks on TV? What they do is tell you the obvious and let you give them the information they need to feed the illusion of knowledge. So called "intelligence" folks these days are playing pretty much the same game.

The United States has 1,969 miles of border with Mexico and 5,525 of border with Canada including the shores of the Great Lakes and the border with Alaska. There are 19,280 total airports in the US accounting for millions of passenger arrivals and departures (more than 45 million at Atlanta alone.) There are 150 ports in the US accepting a million or more tons of freight a year, totaling hundreds of million of gross tons of freight. There are more than 25,000 miles of navigable waterways (excluding the Great Lakes and the St Lawrence Seaway) and 12,280 miles of coastline in the continental US. Alaska, with all its islands has almost 34,000 miles of shoreline and Hawaii, well Hawaii is a bunch of freaking islands.

In short, of course there will be another terrorist attack in the US.  I will go out on a limb here and predict that there will be a terrorist attack in the next ten years whose casualty rate will exceed that of 09/11/2001. Predicting this is like saying that there will be a major storm that will hit Florida.

Security is an illusion it always has been and always will be. We can not be secure against terrorists threats. We can reduce their likelihood certainly, but not through the rather stupid measures that are applied to day. These really amount to nothing more than closing the barn door after its proverbial equine resident has absconded. And detaining eight year old autistic children is probably not going much to put of the fear of Allah into the hearts of al Qaeda. Nor will strip searching eighty year old grandmothers.

All we are doing today is making security companies and gadget makers wealthy - which the more cynical among us suspect is more or less the point of all of the squawking about what makes us more secure.

The thing is this: there is no system designed by a human being that cannot be defeated by a human being. If someone creates a neural network or quantum computer to design a system supposedly unbreakable by humans, other humans will simply create neural networks or quantum computers to defeat it

Does this mean that we should stop trying to save lives and prevent terrorism? No. It just means we should stop being stupid.

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