Combating Terrorism

Counter-Strike in real life

Since 9/11, a lot has been done to fight "the terrorists": more security at airports, the PATRIOT act, freedom fries, and--of course--the "War on Terror".

I bring this up because just the other day I had a thought. An experience in high school that I had forgotten about. I discovered in my junior year of high school why this whole "War on Terror" will likely bring about no real victory.

In 2005, I had two computer classes back to back: Programming I and Applications II. In those classes, I killed boredom by browsing Wikipedia, posting on web forums, editing images, and an occasional flash game (White Room was one of my favorites) after I had completed my work. Most everyone else played flash games and browsed the web while they were doing their work... and, sure enough, one by one the flash game sites fell to IP blocks. MySpace soon followed (remember, this was 2005).

Necessity breeds invention. It also breeds intuition. Soon, students discovered web proxies that allowed them to bypass these IP blocks and get to the content they wanted to access. We had won.

Not quite. Soon, the network administrators began blocking web proxies. When one went down, the students found another. However, it was useless. As soon as the traffic got heavy enough, the banhammer fell. This wasn't a problem for me, though. I could do without the flash games and MySpace when I was at school. I was content with my forum and my Wikipedia.

The US Government has taken the same type of reaction to the terrorist threat against this country. As George Carlin reflects in his tirade on airport security on the album "You Are All Diseased" (Video), in the pre-9/11 world, you could carry box cutters on a plane. No problem. That changed quickly. Airport security has become reactionary. The terrorists started using non-metallic bombs and the TSA started subjecting people to their infamous "pat-downs". The fact of the matter is, if someone wants to get a weapon on a plane, they'll find a way to do it. They'll find a new weapon that the TSA isn't ready for. They always have and they always will. They're probably working on pocket blaster pistols right now. (Joke. We're years away from Star Wars.)

The best way to fight "terrorism" is at an information level. Espionage. We need more James Bond types. Stopping plots before they come to fruition is the best--and probably only--way to prevent terror attacks. You can't do it at the airport. If they get to the airports, we have failed. Every now and then you'll hear about a foiled terror plot on the news. That's a real success. The aggressive measures taken by the TSA are not only an attack on your liberties (See Fourth Amendment), but totally unnecessary. The people who suffer from these limitations and arbitrary encroachments on personal freedom are the citizens.

Eventually, the forum that two of my friends and myself were active on got blocked by the school network. We were in no way violating the class rules and we always made sure to complete all of our work before we accessed the site. We also made sure to not use any foul language so we wouldn't trigger any profanity filters. I even remember Wikipedia being blocked for a few days because of traffic. So you know what we did? We went elsewhere. Somewhere the content restrictions hadn't touched yet. We're a resourceful race and it's the reason we dominate this planet. We made the system. It's naive to think that we can't get around it.