From 2006, and sadly so; this advice should have been followed back in 2002, and been the reality by 2010. Schneier is well known, but somehow still isn't being heard by the right ears...how can we help change that?
What seems interesting to me as a European is that this type of reactions happened mostly in the US. Terror attacks have happened for a long time in Europe (red brigades, IRA, algerian terror cells, etc...), and the reaction has been quite different to say the least. Granted, the amount of damages has been different (nothing near 9/11 has ever happened on European soil), but I don't think that explains it.
This is even more incomprehensible to me because I have always considered American citizens to be more attached to civil liberties and individual freedom than most Europens.
Ask a Jewish Frenchman in 1942, an Indian Briton in 1920, or 5th generation Korean immigrants to Japan today. America may have struggled to keep its ideals alive in practice, but at least it has such ideals. And it has been far more successful at living up to them than just about any other country in history. We should celebrate that even as we strive for further improvement (current anti-immigration sentiment in America is far too prevalent, for example).
Current anti-illegal-immigration sentiment is pretty prevalent. If there's actually a massive anti-immigrant sentiment I haven't really noticed it much. I do notice a lot of people trying their hardest to conflate the two, though.
If there's actually a massive anti-immigrant sentiment I haven't really noticed it much.
I've watched several highly-educated friends try to get green cards, jumping through hoops all the way.
The fact that emigrating to the USA has been deliberately engineered to be very difficult is a relatively polite, bureaucratic, impersonal form of anti-immigrant sentiment, but it is definitely real.
I assume you didnt live in northern ireland in the 70s/80s, where stop and searches where normal way of life and where you could see British soldiers patrolling the streets daily
Personally I think the lesson to be learned from Northern Ireland is to avoid demonizing terrorists - it really doesn't achieve anything. Try and understand what it motivating them and you might stand a chance of working things out.
Every culture that's experienced terrorism has different scars. The US was attacked using airliners; hence airliners are a target of paranoia. The IRA was fond of planting bombs in public trash cans ("rubbish bins" in the British vernacular); the British pull all the trash cans off the street and then invent a bomb-proof rubbish bin (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article5051419.ece)
I think perhaps you don't appreciate the degree of erosion of civil liberties that has come with the reactions of most European governments to modern terrorism. Most European governments took measures more drastic than the US. The things that the police in Britain are allowed to do in the name of "fighting terrorism" are extreme, for example.
