
Terror on Wall Street - soneca
http://www.damninteresting.com/terror-on-wall-street/
======
cm2187
A useful reminder that terrorism isn't new or even worse now that in the past.
In the 70s and 80s, palestinian movements were regularly blowing bombs and
taking hostages, along with far left extremists. A lot of state sponsored
terrorism in the 80s and 90s, from our new "friends" Iran and Syria. And a lot
of that terrorism was home grown (IRA, ETA, left wing).

For instance in the EU:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_European_Un...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism_in_the_European_Union)
The number of attacks and number of victims has been pretty much consistent
since the 50s with a small spike with the Madrid bombings.

What has changed is our sensitivity to terrorism which has become absurdly
high. There are violent crimes happening every day which kill an order of
magnitude more people. Gang violence alone in the US kills several 9/11 every
year. There are thousands of knife attacks just in London every year. None of
that even make it to the news anymore.

And the number of deaths linked to terrorism (1,100 in Europe since the 50s
according to that wiki article) is dwarfed by things like death due to
accidental drowning (35,000 _every year_ according to eurostat).

It is useful to remember this when we see politicians in pretty much every
western countries throwing out of the window basic civil liberties in the name
of the war on terror. The budget spent on anti-terrorism should be better
spent teaching people to swim.

~~~
JDiculous
What terrifies people about terrorism is that it could affect anyone at any
time, and there's no semblance of control over that.

You can reduce your odds of gang violence by not being affiliated with gangs
or living in/near a ghetto. You can reduce your odds of a knife attack by not
walking alone when it's dark. You can reduce accidental drowning by learning
how to swim. There's not much you can do about terrorism other than not go in
public or live in a remote area.

~~~
msandford
So then create shall-issue laws for concealed weapons nationwide and encourage
ordinary, law abiding citizens to purchase and carry with them guns all the
time. Also ensure that there are no exclusion zones, or else those become the
prime target areas. If it is well documented that 1 in 5 Americans has a gun
at any time, terrorists might think twice about their odds of success.
Further, if they do carry out an attack, they won't be able to hurt many
people before the people strike back.

If you want to put an immediate end to terrorist attacks the only way to do so
is to ensure that there are people witnessing the unfolding events (so they
know who are the good guys and who are the bad guys) and empower them to solve
the problem right away. No matter how you slice it, you can't make 1 in 5
people permanent, paid police officers so you have to look at the citizenry.
If you can't abide the idea of normal people carrying guns _everywhere_ then
you need to learn to live with the idea that the police can't be everywhere
all the time, and that these are the risks you take regarding terrorism to
feel safe from your fellow countrymen who you deem untrustworthy.

~~~
rjaco31
I can't tell if your post is sarcastic or not. If you cannot prevent terrorist
acts on your soil, the solution is pretty obvious then, it's not to give
weapons to everybody or to hire 20% of your population as cop, it's just to be
sure that you're not giving reasons to anybody to come and bomb you.

That's the only realistic & cost-efficient approach given the threat model.

~~~
msandford
That's a long term solution and one I am in favor of. But what do you do in
the interim, between the time that the US stops creating more terrorists
through bad foreign policy and the time that everyone who is angry enough to
want to kill Americans for revenge is either dead or doesn't care anymore?

Edit: I am not being sarcastic at all. It will be _exceedingly_ difficult to
get rid of all the guns in the US so suggesting disarmament is a non-starter
here. That means that terrorists will be able to get their hands on guns if
they desire. Which means that you need _someone_ to counter them with
something. The logical conclusion is another person (preferably many people)
with guns also. And since the police ratio in the US is on the order of 0.1%
that's not going to give you an adequate response time as we've seen from mass
shootings.

The real question is "would the cure be worse than the disease?" and while I
personally think the answer is "no" that doesn't make me right. And given how
much the left hates guns, I suspect that we'll never actually find out, so
don't worry.

------
PhasmaFelis
> _The Washington Post referred to the bombing as an “act of war,” though no
> one could be certain who the enemy was._

Jesus, that sounds familiar. And this:

> _Wall Street soon became a symbol of patriotism in the eyes of the country,
> and stock trading came to be viewed as an act of defiance against the
> terrorists. Before the attack a number of outspoken citizens had decried the
> unchecked growth of power underway on Wall Street, but many of those voices
> fell silent in light of the new public sentiment. Those critics who
> continued to voice their concerns were denounced as supporters of violence
> and terror, a trend which rapidly smothered all public debate on the
> matter._

There seems to be no surer way to solidify a political tendency that to murder
people while demanding its opposite.

------
douche
I'm amazed that I had never heard of this incident.

~~~
BinaryIdiot
Honestly it's hard to hear about such instances when it's past the birth year
of most of our parents. If information isn't actively taught about historic
events then we're left with the few who actively seek it that will know. I'd
be willing to bet that by 2110 most wouldn't have heard of the September 11th
attacks simply because the people who experienced it and many of their parents
will be gone by then. It'll be relegated to the history books possibly to be
replaced with bigger issues that happen later.

~~~
tajen
That event didn't shape humanity, whereas September 11 did. Here your
schoolbook in 2110: "The world was recovering from the fall of the USSR. CIA
had reduced operations in the middle east. Apart from minor crisis (Balkans,
or 1998 crack in Russia), tensions were appeasing. On September 11, five
places in US were hit by simultaneous terrorist attacks, the most famous being
NYC with over 3000 deaths. The blame was immediately put on Bin Laden, who was
searched for 10 years until his capture in 2011, and globally on Arabic
people. USA raised CIA budgets, sent its army to Irak, Afghanistan and
Pakistan, created illegal prisons, used torture against what was later proven
to be civilians, sprung unprecendented measures for security. In the middle
east, the recovery from the Cold War was replaced by a constant storm of
missile strikes. Military started using automated robots such as the Predator,
spreading a worldwide solidarity among arabic people. In the USA, impacts were
high on civilians. In airports, people were arrested for not being able to
explain where they were going, military tanks started being used in USA police
stations, military methods were used to bust poker parties, killing hundreds
of Americans per year, and NSA was in charge of establishing a permanent
control on all private communications. In 15 years the most powerful country
of the world became able to squash any interior political movement with
military methods. Worst of all, a poll showed that 40% of the population
believed that September 11 was an attack organized by the CIA to renew the
nationalist sentiment."

> It'll be relegated to the history books possibly to be replaced with bigger
> issues that happen later.

Maybe not, if it's the root explanation of said later events.

~~~
mycelium
What unexplained event, potentially terrorist, catalyzed the US engagement in
the Spanish—American war?

Similar sorts of geopolitical consequences, similar timescale... the ease with
which you recall the event is likely similar to the ease with which
inhabitants of the US in 2115 will recall September 11.

~~~
Thimothy
For those who don't know, the parallels are unnerving.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish%E2%80%93American_War#U...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish%E2%80%93American_War#USS_Maine)

------
weatherlight
If you go to 47 Wall street just 25 feet from where George Washington was
inaugurated as president, you can see chunks of marble missing on the wall
where the shrapnel hit.

~~~
bro-stick
Yup.

Btw: it's kind of shocking to see concrete and metal garbage receptacles
(shrapnel-enhancing, hiding systems) in the US, after working abroad in FR and
UK. These things need to be proactively replaced with tiny alumin(i)um hoops
and clear plastic bags. Even the HS I went to in the 90's had a pipebomb issue
at some point and hence no lockers.

~~~
lsc
I would argue the exact opposite. We need more "life goes on" and less fear.

Like how the stock exchange opened the next day.

I mean, changing garbage cans, really, is fine. It's not a huge cost and
doesn't make it hard for us to continue to live our lives. If making a change
to the garbage cans makes you feel better, go ahead.

But think of the incredible cost of implementing the level of airline security
we have now. For anything under four hours, you are better off taking a car.
Sure, we're trying to improve our rail infrastructure to the point where
that's an option, too, but we're a long ways off.

The terrorists did some damage, sure... but the actual damage they did in the
September 11 attacks has been dwarfed, at least economically, by the fact that
we have essentially ruined our air-travel system in response.

~~~
veddox
> We need more "life goes on" and less fear.

Thumbs up for that. And respect to Boston for the way they handled the
marathon bombings back in 2013.

> the actual damage they did in the September 11 attacks has been dwarfed, at
> least economically, by the fact that we have essentially ruined our air-
> travel system in response.

That however is a one-sided statement. The question is always: how many
attacks did we prevent with the new security? You can't just weigh up 9/11 vs.
the cost of airline security. You have to see 9/11 _plus_ any attack that was
prevented (which I agree is hard/impossible to measure) vs. our security
costs.

I don't deny that some air-travel security is OTT. But you can't claim it's
pointless.

(Quite apart from the fact that customers, out of fear, nowadays probably
wouldn't fly with an airline that didn't provide an insane amount of security.
Despite an almost century long track record of astounding safety, the air-
travel industry still has to convince its customers all the time that flying
is safe.)

~~~
mseebach
> But you can't claim [new airport security is] pointless.

Actually, we can: [http://abcnews.go.com/US/exclusive-undercover-dhs-tests-
find...](http://abcnews.go.com/US/exclusive-undercover-dhs-tests-find-
widespread-security-failures/story?id=31434881)

TL;DR: "undercover investigators were able to smuggle mock explosives or
banned weapons through checkpoints in 95 percent of trials"

To the extend increased security around air travel deterred anything, it's in
the non-airport-screening efforts -- increased/better intelligence is a very
plausible source, and the reinforced cockpit doors another.

------
PhasmaFelis
Have terror bombings _ever_ accomplished the bombers' demands? Every one that
I've heard of just seems to mobilize people to do the opposite of whatever
they think the terrorists want, as violently as possible.

~~~
Houshalter
Gwern has an amazing essay on this:

[http://www.gwern.net/Terrorism%20is%20not%20about%20Terror](http://www.gwern.net/Terrorism%20is%20not%20about%20Terror)

And also:
[http://www.gwern.net/Terrorism%20is%20not%20Effective](http://www.gwern.net/Terrorism%20is%20not%20Effective)

>In a [previous study of mine] assessing terrorism’s coercive effectiveness, I
found that in a sample of 28 well-known terrorist campaigns, the terrorist
organizations accomplished their stated policy goals 0% of the time by
attacking civilians.

>Jones and Libicki (2008) then examined a larger sample, the universe of known
terrorist groups between 1968 and 2006. Of the 648 groups identified in the
RAND-MIPT Terrorism Incident database, only 4% obtained their strategic
demands. More recently, Cronin (2009) has reexamined the success rate of these
groups, confirming that less than 5% prevailed…Chenoweth and Stephan (2008,
2011) provide additional empirical evidence that meting out pain hurts non-
state actors at the bargaining table. Their studies compare the coercive
effectiveness of 323 violent and nonviolent resistance campaigns from 1900 to
2006. Like Gaibulloev and Sandler (2009), the authors find that refraining
from bloodshed significantly raises the odds of government compliance even
after tactical confounds are held fixed. These statistical findings are
reinforced with structured in-case comparisons highlighting that escalating
from nonviolent methods of protest such as petitions, sit-ins, and strikes to
deadly attacks tends to dissuade government compromise. Chenoweth and Stephan
employ an aggregate measure of violence that incorporates both indiscriminate
attacks on civilians and discriminate attacks on military personnel or other
government officials, which are often differentiated from terrorism as
guerrilla attacks (Abrahms 2006; Cronin 2009; and Moghadam 2006). Other
statistical research (Abrahms, 2012, Fortna, 2011) demonstrates that when
terrorist attacks are combined with such discriminate violence, the bargaining
outcome is not additive; on the contrary, the pain to the population
significantly decreases the odds of government concessions.

------
mikk14
Isn't a bit bizarre from the author to point the finger to Italian anarchists
for this unsolved case? I mean the "pair of Italian-American anarchists had
been indicted five days earlier for bank robbery and murder" he mentions are
none less than Sacco and Vanzetti, who were victims of one of the most
spectacular miscarriages of justice willingly perpetrated for political
reasons I can recall. To find an Italian anarchist guilt of something in the
US during the 20s proofs were not really a requirement, so this case wouldn't
end up unsolved.

~~~
scribu
> Isn't a bit bizarre from the author to point the finger to Italian
> anarchists for this unsolved case?

It's the investigators that are pointing the finger, not the author:
"Investigators immediately suspected that the bombing was the work of
Galleanist anarchists"

~~~
jessaustin
The author chose how much context to include. Not to even mention the issues
that most historians have with the treatment of S&V, while mentioning the case
in apparent support of a completely opposed proposition, is odd in a work of
this length.

~~~
DamnInteresting
Author of the article here. I did not intend to imply support for the
conclusion that Galleanist anarchists were to blame. To the contrary, I feel
the response of the public was misdirected and the response of the government
was heavy-handed. Hence my phrase "the orgy of misguided justice."

~~~
mikk14
I understand and I hope you'll forgive my nitpicking. It's just that when I
read the paragraph with the Sacco & Vanzetti reference, I got the vibe of
something in the lines "look what else the Italians were doing" and that
rubbed me the wrong way. I would have much preferred something like "were
_wrongly_ indicted of", to avoid the misunderstanding. I hope this comment
will be taken not as a void critique by somebody who got offended, but as a
reminder that phrasing is important to not to have your writings be
interpreted the other way around.

~~~
jessaustin
I write obnoxious comments all the time, and I can't recall when I've been
downvoted as much as this thread. It's clear that you and I and our non-
psychic reading habits have touched a nerve with this author and his band of
acolytes.

~~~
DamnInteresting
> this author and his band of acolytes.

I'm just keeping you distracted while my minions and I complete construction
of my doomsday device. Mwahaha, etc.

~~~
jessaustin
Haha, touché! b^)

------
retrogradeorbit
So there was an attack on Wall Street and The US didn't immediately invade an
unrelated middle eastern country? How times have changed...

