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A great morning to be retired (2001-9-11 )

Coffee for the Sleeping Giant (2001-9-12 )

Opportunism knocks (2001-9-18 )

Between the seat and the dinner tray

Summary: Thank you for flying Disenchanted Airways. In case of an emergency, anti-terrorist devices have been installed between your seat and the dinner tray.

You have to run as fast as you can just to stay up
- Red Queen

Ingenuity was one of the weapons used September 11th, and working against it was little more than a cell phone. Alas, the cell phone, as a weapon, only took out one aircraft. It went down in an empty field outside of Shanksville, Pennsylvania. The other three guided missiles made it to their targets and history was made.

History was made for both sides, since the terrorists will probably never be able to use that method of attack again, and the nation they wounded is likely to go only one way or the other at a crossroads for civil liberties. Do we take some of them away and ensure security, or do we loosen them more and put the defense of civilian targets back into the hands of the civilians themselves?

Thinking conservatively, it's a sure bet that freedoms will be clipped at least a little in the future. It'll be harder to get into crowded places and we'll need to deal with heavier scrutiny by the law. A little less freedom of movement and a little less privacy. It's in the cards, it won't really hurt us, and—if doled out in moderation—it won't even make us significantly less American. But chances are it won't significantly hurt the terrorists, either.

A cell phone was the anti-aircraft missile that shot down United Airlines Flight 93 on September 11th. The phone exploded—figuratively—with information that excited civilian agents aboard the plane into taking action. They rushed unsuspecting terrorists, struggled, and consequently disrupted control of the jet until it plunged into the ground like a poorly executed Olympian dive. The reason why the cell phone was such a potent weapon was because it convinced its owner, Thomas E. Burnett Jr., that his life was now forfeit, but thousands more could go out with him if he didn't act. It must have been one of the most horrible decisions a non-soldier could make. But then, what's the difference between a soldier and a citizen, these days? After September, isn't it just a matter of who went to boot camp and who didn't?

When a civilian becomes a legitimate target of enemy action then the concept of the civilian becomes obsolete, which puts him in the position of being responsible for his own country's life and defense as much as it used to be the professional soldier's. The problems indicated by these terrorist attacks have not as much to do with airport security as they do with civilian docility. Maybe a concequence of training civilians to be pliantA is that they take their authority wherever they get it—even if it's a hostile one who doesn't have their best interests in mind. The angry farmer with a pitchfork is a dwindling minority and the fire has been bred out of John Q. Public, who now doesn't know whether to vote on gun control laws or a flag-burning amendment. Something must be wrong if the instinct of a passenger isn't to conspire with other hostages and take on the terrorist, but to wait for the plane to land, negotiations to begin, and the Red Cross to arrive.

Maybe a cell phone had the power to change that.

There are many ways to lock down Infrastructure Y so that a terrorist can't use it to attack you. Infrastructure Y in this case is our air travel system, but could also be other forms of public transport, or public drinking water, or our telephone system, our banking system, or perhaps even our food distribution system. The theme is that we can seal off cockpits with big metal doors, but we can't seal off improvisation. So if the death-ready hijackers can't get to the cockpit from the passenger cabin, then perhaps they'll try getting into it through a career move, instead. Think about what the discovery of Robert Hanssen means here—a highly placed American working as a spy for the Russians, holding title in the uppermost ranks of the FBI. Compared with him, is it impossible to imagine a dedicated agent who could get as far as a captaincy aboard a commercial liner? Or is it impossible to imagine a system that'll guarantee he can't?

Okay, let's take a swig from the bottle of common sense. If that was really a possibility, then it would have happened to El Al (the Israeli airline) by now. Presumably, all other airlines will be copying their draconian procedures very soon (a steel door's gotta be cheaper than a lawsuit). But terrorism is not like vandalism, you can't make it go away with physical barriers. If we find a “once and for all” solution to the hijacking problem, then we've got to find a “once and for all” solution to every potential problem—every potential Modus Operandi—and that's an infinite amount of planning that somehow has to get done in the infinitely short period of time between now and the next attack. Israel hasn't succeeded. Their planes are safe, but their busses and restaraunts aren't.

What got proven on September 11th was that the terrorist M.O. is still changing. Think of war in terms of evolution; you have to run as fast as you can just to stay in one place. If you stop adapting to the enemy's changes, you get wiped out. There must be dozens of terrorist organizations who are dead and forgotten simply because they refused to change their tactics, or weren't smart enough to invent new ones. All this means is that the ones still surviving today are capable of surprising change. They also have the advantage of planning something years in advance, but when the attack comes we won't. We'll have to either accept the losses, or begin thinking on our feet and making very quick decisions.

Rapid change was crucial enough for survival that nature ended up solving the problem by inventing sexual reproduction about a billion years ago. In war, especially unconventional wars like the one we have now, the solution was the invention of the democratic, capitalistic government, coupled with the rise of civil liberties. Being able to think on your feet and respond on-the-fly ensures a successful economy, and as we'll soon see, it'll also guarantee a matching competetive edge in this new war.

It's understood that we can't have a police officer on every corner, or the national guard rolling through every street. We can't tap every phone, and even if we did, the tsunami of useless information would smother the agencies that tried to interpret it. We might, as Bruce Schneier points out, already have the relevent warnings and evidence hidden away in databases somewhere, but it's impossible for us to process it in real-time. You can use it to figure out what the 5 o' clock target is going to be, but the report will arive on your desk at 6. With luck, someone with a fast brain in his head was in the right place at 5 o' clock. It might have been a soldier, but chances are it was only a civilian.

If civilians are legitimate targets, then they must also be legitimate soldiers. What makes you and I different from a man who's been through basic training is skill and conditioned resolve. He's a tool who can be used by a commander, but you and I are soft, typically cowardly, and most importantly we're convinced that it's somebody else's duty to protect us. This is certainly the case in peacetime, but not during a war fought in our own streets. Despite being an unusual war with an unusually defined enemy, it hardly dismisses the need for a temporary change in attitude: we, the humble citizens, are directly responsible for our own welfare.

It's not easy to imagine yourself being the hero, is it? The cell phone that shot down UA93 could have been jammed. The hijackers could have been better armed. They might have been ready for an uprising with techniques that could have quelled it easily. Thomas E. Burnett Jr. might not have boarded the plane that day. And maybe we'd be rebuilding the Capitol or the White House right now. You could say that a stroke of luck mitigated the disaster, then. But it's not luck we're counting on, is it? What we need is the ability for anybody to improvise in times of duress—and have the guts to follow through with it.

Ingenuity was the weapon used on September 11th. It can really only be countered with more ingenuity, and not by after-the-fact institutionalized changes. And because we can't institute speculative measures without trimming our freedoms and privacies at the same time, maybe we could entertain the idea of going the other way instead, and rather increase freedoms—yes, even the freedoms that assisted the terrorists—and encourage everyone to exercise them more. Take a martial arts class this winter, have some faith in your adrenal gland, and say to yourself "no, I don't have to sit and wait for the hard men to get me out."

So just for kicks and giggles, let's imagine a situation where every passenger is armed. Contrary to what Eric Raymond would like, we obviously don't need firearms going off in a pressurized cabin with enormous fuel tanks strapped to either side, but a bottle of Mace, or a Tazer, could make a world of difference. Lets think of it again in a bus, or a restaraunt. Could a motivated hostage, or group of hostages, suppress even a suicidal lunatic? And if not, what have they got to lose?

All of the hostage negotiation techniques of the past have been written on the assumption that the hostages will be quite bovine in nature, and let themselves be pawns; traded for blankets and soup. And that actually works if the criminal intention isn't to bore holes in skyscrapers. My thinking is that maybe now the price for safety is to suffer a few lynch mobs and escalations, fly a few more planes into the ground, and hope these will only be teething pains for a body of civilians who are getting used to the idea of taking matters into their own hands.

A few scuffles later, however, and we'll have set a new precedent for further terrorists to be wary of; it's not safe for you to be here anymore, we're not going to cooperate, and you're going to need a lot more than box cutters the next time.

The captain and crew wish to thank you for flying Disenchanted airways. The exits are here, here, here, and over there. If you are sitting next to an emergency exit door then please familiarize yourself with the instructions posted next to it. In case of an emergency, oxygen masks will fall from the ceiling, a life preserver can be found under your cushion, and please notice that anti-terrorism devices have just been installed between your seat and the dinner tray. Have a pleasant flight.

Home tree

 (What's this?D)

1. root Between the seat and the dinner trayA
1. categorized by HumanityD
2. categorized by WarD
3. inspired by United Airlines Flight 93D
4. exemplified by Reuters: Three Dead in Shooting at Virginia Law School
5. exemplified by CNN: Flight forced to land; explosive shoes suspected
6. featuring Tia NayD

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