Re: The Ticking Timebomb
The fact is that most terrorists aren't very good at it. The myth of the "terrorist mastermind" is widely used by the fear-mongers and authoritarians, but there are few to no examples of actual cleverness in terror strategy, planning, tactics, or attacks.
Bruce Schneier used to run a contest for "Hollywood terrorist attack" scenarios, just to show security people could come up with plots as silly as those being bandied about by the fear-mongers and content producers. And many of the ones he printed were considerably more thoughtful and would likely have been considerably more effective than real-life ones.
None of that justifies the assault on civil rights, of course.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
