The interesting part to me is that the mode of attack for 9/11 can't easily be repeated. It depended on passengers assuming the plane was being hijacked, and that they would eventually be released.
That stopped working on the 3rd (edit: 4th) plane. I don't see how it would work again. Passengers now default to assuming there's no path to live other than fighting back.
Meaning many of the measures we still take aren't really preventing anything. I do understand this doesn't apply to the shoes (shoe bomber), but that's just one of many things we've put in place.
Absolutely. It's not a 9/11-style attack we need to be worried about. No one will let a plane get commandeered ever again. The 9/11 terrorists took advantage of the "comply with the hijackers" policy in place at the time. That opportunity ended the moment the second plane hit the towers.
The real threat is lone wolf random attacks on the general public like the DC sniper. That's a very low-cost high-impact attack that paralyzed an entire metro region for nearly a month. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D.C._sniper_attacks
> The real threat is lone wolf random attacks on the general public like the DC sniper. That's a very low-cost high-impact attack that paralyzed an entire metro region for nearly a month. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D.C._sniper_attacks
Considering how many crazy, extremely radicalized people are out there, I'm surprised attacks like this aren't much more common.
There are plenty of radicalized people, but valuing your life so little that you'll risk it for the cause and having a cause that wants you to kill random civilians is not very common.
Incels, school shooters, bechildrened fathers, it happens a few times per year in most countries. Given they are ready to die, it’s surprising to me when they kill 1 instead of 100 people.
You're right and the two people who have already replied to you are a great example of how people on the internet love to chime in to "correct" someone about some detail of what they said that misconstrues the point. Obviously when the previous user said "extremely radicalized people" they were talking about the kinds of people radicalized to the point that they're willing to start killing people. You rightly (imo) point out that there aren't that many of them. Then two people chime in to "correct" you.
Perhaps writing this reply makes me one of those people as well.
Fair. Terrorists have likely killed far fewer Americans with their actions.
We are not good at evaluating the less flashy risks to life. Wearing a seat belt saves a lot more lives than checking shoes at the airport, but we'll fight the seat belt a lot more.
100yr ago eugenics proponents were saying the same thing while bemoaning societies unwillingness to fully embrace their solutions. 200yr ago people who wanted to build heavy industry were making the same complaints bemoaning insufficient investment. And so on and so on.
~7 billion people aren't stupid. They just don't share your prioritization of whatever the societal issues you perceive to be most important today are. This trope is just a back handed way to call everyone who doesn't agree with you stupid, or some variation thereof.
If you can suggest some other ~100yo example of something a lot of people believed would solve a lot of societal problems I'd be happy to edit my comment.
In any case, you're either missing the overarching point (the charitable assumption) or you don't want to fight my point head on so you're nitpicking that my examples aren't good enough (the less charitable assumption).
> If you can suggest some other ~100yo example of something a lot of people believed would solve a lot of societal problems I'd be happy to edit my comment.
Of the same sort of nature as masking during a pandemic:
Vaccinations, requiring docs to wear gloves during surgery, etc.
I initially thought he was claiming the inverse, that mask proponents were extremists. From the perspective of 2019, that wouldn't be an unreasonable assumption, but here we are. Today people are advocating using the force of the state, in other words violence against those who do not share their views on mask mandates.
Can we kindly stop using hyperbole like “using the force of the state, in other words violence” as an argument against literally any governmental policy ever?
In this same fantasy universe jack-booted government thugs are beating up people who don’t wear seat belts or who mislabel the nutritional contents on a package of cheese, except that’s just not what ever actually happens in the real world. These kinds of laws can be appropriate when they make society better for us all.
To that point, anti-maskers have almost certainly killed more Americans at this point than terrorists could ever have hoped to. You might consider that when attempting to understand why people are seemingly so hard-pressed to get laws requiring their countrymen (and women) to do the literal bare minimum to protect the lives of their neighbors.
There's a distinction between a voluntary practice and a compulsory practice. The distinction centers around individuals being compelled by violence. The kind thing to do would be to minimize our use of compulsion as much as pragmatically possible.
>Can we kindly stop using hyperbole... anti-maskers have almost certainly killed more Americans
Well sure. Plenty of people are willing to invoke the force of the state over pants mandates and shirt mandates too. Masks aren’t really any different.
Perhaps people are less truly radicalized, and substantially more negotiable, than we've been lead to believe. It certainly benefits both the media and politicians to sell us a story that there are an extreme number of radicalized people out there.
I've certainly never met any neo-Nazis. Not to say they don't exist, but if they are truly as common as I've been told, I think I'd have encountered some.
Throwing your average Joe on screen garners much fewer eyeballs and therefore isn't profitable.
As some who had been lucky enough to live many years in both rural Florida and urban California, I can tell you beyond a doubt people are mostly (99%) reasonable, and mostly the same, they are just acting on different priorities, beliefs, and data :)
> I can tell you beyond a doubt people are mostly (99%) reasonable
And yet, actual fascist governments have come to power even in nominally democratic countries.
People might only be "reasonable" when left to their own devices but there could always come a day when propaganda, sectarianism and social turmoil gets so out of hand that people don't see so reasonable anymore.
This is such a terrible argument. 1. You very well might never know you have. People with extreme views don't advertise them everywhere and at all times. 2. There is plenty of video evidence of literal crowds of such people in various places and they quite obviously exist in large enough numbers to draw these crowds (no group has anywhere near 100% participation in events). Your anecdotal experience is irrelevant.
Now you might think the threshold for an "extreme number" is much higher than drawing this type of crowd, but there are enough people for whom that is a big deal, that it makes for compelling news that gets views. Way too many for me, that's for sure.
I happen have a fascist (not neo-fascist, not nazi nor neo-nazi) friend. We do have some common points of view. We both don't believe in meritocrazy. And part of success is cultural and predeterminated (i think 90% is cultural, he think 40% of it is, although this percentage rises after each of our discussions. My communism seems to wear him down /s).
I also happen to know a lot people who have the same ideology that he have, on some discord servers, probably less sharpened and less cultivated (i mean, you've got to read a bit of Nietzsche if you want to argue in good faith with this ideology). I'd say they are proto-fascist, or proto-nazi. And actually, a lot of people i see on the internet called neo-nazi are in fact proto-nazi. It's interesting, because i've seen old TV interviews of 60s and 70s philosophical debate, i've read old books, and they were much, much more philosophically advanced than the current debates are.
By the way, i use nazism to make a small distinction with "usual" fascism. To me, nazis empathize more on personnal success than "regular" fascists, who are more deterministic (genes, culture makes more difference than effort and good will). I worked that out with my self-proclaimed fascist friend, if you disagree i'd like a criticism of the idea.
How many people do you encounter? In which parts of the country? How much do you know about their political views? How do you know whether someone is a Nazi if they don't announce it?
You could have met plenty and not known it. Or your sample size of acquaintances doesn't include people who frequent 4chan.
The DC sniper were two people, with a specially built murder car.
So neither lone wolf or low effort.
My guess is that crazy, extremely radicalized people are not competent at carrying out high impact attacks. Also, very few of them actually want to do such things.
> Considering how many crazy, extremely radicalized people are out there, I'm surprised attacks like this aren't much more common.
The media overreports on how radical these people are. There's very few. However if COVID restrictions keep pushing forward I think that may change. Many people are at their breaking point right now.
I'm fully vaccinated and I've already decided I'm never going to wear a mask again and avoid stores that actually enforce mask rules (most don't, even if they put labels on doors mandated by the state).
Even vaccinated folks can have the virus colonizing their airways, completely symptom free. Intentionally performing acts that could lead to the sickness or death of those around you seems pretty anti-social to me.
>> Considering how many crazy, extremely radicalized people are out there, I'm surprised attacks like this aren't much more common.
They are extremely common, except the main stream "liberal" media's definition of "radicalized" and "attack" doesnt include the most common incidents. If "radicalized" means brown, yes, it isnt common.
If "radicalized" could be expanded to literally hundreds of incidents of ethno-religious-nationalist crazies who kill with guns -- it is actually really common in the US. Except whenever this happens, people instead just talk about how perps were "deeply disturbed" and needed help, rather than classifying it as "attack" or "terror"
The annoying thing is that, ok there are easier targets elsewhere, but if for some reason one of those lone wolfs decide to attack planes in particular the long lines created by those useless security measures are the obvious target.
> The real threat is lone wolf random attacks on the general public like the DC sniper. That's a very low-cost high-impact attack that paralyzed an entire metro region for nearly a month.
Or school shootings. That seem to result in no change except additional loss of innocent lives.
That attack was overhyped by the media, which suggest a way to stop them.
Personally I am far more concerned by the rent/steal truck and mow down pedestrians mode that we have seen in France and Germany. You might be able to do more about gun safety. You can't really prevent a madman from driving up on the sidewalk deliberately and almost any person can rent a van.
I think the nation should make military training/civil service mandatory. The reality is that random attacks will happen in random places and everyone needs to be equipped to handle accordingly.
Basic combat training and paramedic abilities, disaster recovery and such associated procedures.
This would create a tighter bond between citizens and improve communities ability to look after one-another.
If everyone handles those situations steadfastly, terror won’t work.
Another benefit is less reliance on national guard to handle climate crisis like hurricanes, fires, and floods.
>> military training/civil service mandatory.
>> Basic combat training and paramedic abilities
Those are very different things. Not every soldier is taught hand-to-hand combat. Not every civil service volunteer is taught to handle a weapon. And basic first aid training is almost universal already. More lives could probably be saves by everyone being trained in basic mental health and de-escalation techniques.
Among what populations is it near universal? I grew up in an upper-middle class bedroom community, and I only had to get first aid certified in order to be a lifeguard at a local pool. That was just about a decade ago, and I’d be hard-pressed to do anything other than apply a cold compress and perform the Heinrich maneuver now. My father-in-law was a trained physician overseas but became a pharmaceutical researcher when he came to the US, and the last time he was in a situation where he had to perform CPR, he had no idea what to do. I doubt more than 20% of American adults would be useful in a serious casualty situation.
Maybe additional training in first aid helps in a terrorist attack, maybe it helps when grandpa has a heart attack. At any rate it is hard to see the downside. Maybe, except that if you do this in the US you end up politicizing first aid too.
The other side of the coin is that we should be focusing left-of-bang, preventing terrorism much earlier.
Granted, but the US Army is the only one I have direct experience with. Hand to hand combat seems like such a basic component of combat training that I would be shocked to hear that it is completely absent from any armed forces boot camp.
But most situations that currently result in someone getting shot can be resolved less violently, as demonstrated by the lack of firearms carried or desired by the majority of UK cops.
A culture shift isn’t an overnight thing, but better worlds are possible.
You basically just need to make the odds of encountering a trained responder higher than a lone wolf. FWIW, this would be a much better approach to the “well regulated militia” part of the second amendment than what the US has today.
Edit to fix bad quote of “well regulated militia.”
It would equip everyone with better skills. But more important would be the sense of community involvement—most attackers have a disease of the mind brought on by isolation and lack of empathy.
“ Most investigations apparently involved veterans, some of whom had unfavorable discharge records.3”
Honestly, you’re going to have bad apples no matter what. But what about the rest of the citizens? How can they respond to disaster scenarios without training?
Domestic terrorism is the same thing as abroad terrorism, except one uses patriotism as an ideology, the other uses religion.
People make a way. When the Loma Prieta earthquake knocked down highways, neighborhood workers and residents rescued people from the collapsed structures. The same happened in NYC on 9/11 when the WTC fell.
I Russia, despite a nominal ban, you can buy a gun on the vegetable market, but nobody seem to be going, and shooting people out of a sudden other that 2-3 freak accidents per year.
Being murdered in a banal armed robbery is a by far bigger risk.
For the United States specifically, another good argument for this training to be in place is the importance given to the second amendment, the rationale of which is to have “a well regulated militia”. One would assume that everyone being well trained is part of that.
What made the DC sniper attacks so terrifying was that there was no commonality to the targets, except that it was normal people doing normal everyday things. There's nothing you can do to protect yourself from the sniper except to not go outside (which is in fact what a lot of people did in response to the sniper).
> Basic combat training and paramedic abilities, disaster recovery and such associated procedures.
... Military training teaches none of those, so far as I'm aware, except maybe the first. But even then, you're getting training on a rifle, which is not the most likely firearm a civilian would be carrying.
It also makes citizens more aware of the cost of war. Had conscription use up so much time of a citizen’s prime years, I think it would be more popular.
Im in favor of people concealed carrying for this exact reason...distributed security works better than slow centralized security and a vulnerable public. Obviously this doesnt work for a plane though.
Fully expect to get downvoted for this on HN...because its HN.
>>distributed security works better than slow centralized security and a vulnerable public
Except that it literally doesn't. We know from public verifiable stats that people who own a gun end up hurting themselves or their family several orders of magnitutde more often than defending against an attacker or actually using it for self defense. It happens, but the numbers clearly point that it's massively ineffective for that purpose.
>>Fully expect to get downvoted for this on HN...because its HN.
You mean because people on HN frequently believe in the power of statistical analysis and logical thinking when it comes to deciding when something is worth doing or not?
So if I want to create real mayhem I just need to have two suicide attackers starting a firefight in roughly opposite directions in a crowded open place and wait for dozens of bystanders to join in?
I could think of 100 ways you could still do damage to an armed public. Whats your point? Its a deterrent and if someone is doing massive damage they are going to be spotted.
They teach you this in the course you need to take to concealed carry.
If someone is doing massive damage...cornered people in a restaurant and is shooting them one by one. Someone can respond to that. Youre going to hear it and see it. Not every scenario is going to play out perfectly but at least theres mitigation on the table.
If everyone has a gun, then either you teach this skill to everyone including the bad guys[0], or you don’t teach it to everyone and now a lot of normal people with guns are indistinguishable from bad guys with guns.
[0] because if you actually knew they were bad guys before you gave them such training you could stop them before they fire a single shot
You’re vastly overrating the ability of the common American to make rational decisions. In a stressful situation where a gun may be necessary, without proper and continual training, that ability drops to near 0. Look at the police - they use their guns incorrectly all the time and they’re trained peace officers. An average American, in an argument, maybe mix in some alcohol, with a gun in their pocket…many many senseless murders.
You can name even one law enforcement agency that wants vigilante firearm violence? Because that is literally what it means to desire the general public act as armed first responders.
Cockpits are now locked by default, so there's no terrorist getting in there anymore, they can threaten anything, all it would do is divert to closest landing spot.
TK1476 in 2006. Flying from an EU country to Turkey on a major airline.
"Italian Interior Minister Giuliano Amato reported that the hijacker slipped into the cockpit with a package which could have been a bomb when flight attendants opened the cockpit door, and the pilots acted according to the international rules in the matter and did what the hijacker wanted."
There's procedure to leave a tray on corridor and have cabin crew protect it so people cant just jump in cabin.
Pilot also can check camera and deny the open.
So having a successful takeover depends on multiple failures at same time... chernobyl happened so its not impossible but much less likely then before.
At this point id be more worried about pilots or malware on flight computers.
Yes, and this is why crazy pilots suffering from depression can bury their planes in the ground and nobody can do anything about it.
200 people lost their life in the crash of Germanwings 9525 on March 24, 2015, but this is not classified as a terrorist attack so it doesn't really count for anything.
However, it is the direct consequence of the so-called security procedures implemented the world over; those 200 people are victims of "security".
This lead directly to the rule that nobody can be alone in the cockpit. If you're in the front of the plane when a pilot needs to use the toilet you'll see the dance; service cart blocks the aisle, flight attendant goes into the cockpit, then one pilot comes out.
To me this sounds like a risk for service cart/flight attendant/exiting pilot being overcome and entry gained to the cockpit. Even better a hijacker knows exactly when the opportunity arises as the service cart will be moved into place indicating the dance is about to start.
Furthermore, what's to stop suicide pilot murdering co-pilot behind a locked door?
That might be true, but there is a difference in causing the deaths of passengers somewhere behind the closed doors by crashing the plane — and dealing with flesh and bone co-pilot right here and now.
> Aviation authorities swiftly implemented new regulations that required two authorized personnel in the cockpit at all times, but by 2017, Germanwings and other German airlines had dropped the rule.
But a service cart and flight attendant seems like an entirely ineffective obstacle so what's the point? I think I don't know enough about how this "dance" works to comment, so maybe I'll just shut up :)
I don't remember the details, but remember reading that attack wouldn't have worked under US aviation rules, that it took advantage of some EU protocol oversight which was subsequently rectified. Don't quote me on it though.
EDIT post downvotes: what I mean is that even without a lock on the cockpit to prevent their copilot from entering, it seems difficult to prevent a determined pilot from crashing a plane.
It's a pretty well known event. The copilot locked the captain out and used the purposefully designed system to also disable the cockpit entry code. Of course the primary cause wasn't the security setup, but it did contribute to the event.
"The captain had a code to unlock the door, but the lock's code panel could be disabled from the cockpit controls...The captain then tried to break down the door, but like most cockpit doors made after the September 11 attacks, it had been reinforced to prevent intrusion."
> Robin said that when the captain left the cockpit, possibly to use the toilet, Lubitz locked the door, preventing anyone from entering. The captain had a code to unlock the door, but the lock's code panel could be disabled from the cockpit controls. The captain requested re-entry using the intercom; he knocked and then banged on the door, but received no response. The captain then tried to break down the door, but like most cockpit doors made after the September 11 attacks, it had been reinforced to prevent intrusion.
This seems like a pretty direct consequence to me. Similar to how an ultra isloated air-gapped environment with only one-way networking[0] would mean that the ops people couldn't easily stop e.g an ransomware attack in its tracks when detected. It's a cost/consequence of having the isolated network in the first place.
(If there was some magic code that always opened the cockpit door, then that could be coerced out of someone, yielding the system almost pointless)
I wonder if they should have separate external door for the cockpit and no door from the cabin to the cockpit. Absolutely no chance of hijacking whatsoever.
What about relief pilots on long trips or in the event of incapacity?
We could keep going I think: there are numerous downsides to maintaining an egress unreachable from the cabin and, given the ability to lock down existing doors, few superior benefits to justify it.
9/11 was such a singular event for Americans that future terrorists don’t have to kill people to be successful, if the goal is to create enmity and get the US to waste billions of dollars. Just an occasional scare will set us off again.
You act as if Afghanistan and Iraq are very happy to have been invaded and considered it a mission-accomplished. If the objective of terror is enrage your adversary then by all means, but the U.S. will only be more and more heartless and effective at those attacks continue.
This kind of argument is honestly a big part of why the theater is still in place. People keep making poorly thought through arguments about why we don't need it. Those arguments are inevitably shot down, and everyone remembers that rather than thinking about it for themselves.
The passengers re-taking the third plane was a stroke of luck. That flight was actually delayed long enough that passengers were making phone calls to friends and family and heard that the first plane (or two) had already crashed, so they knew what was happening. That's when they decided to storm the cockpit. Had they not been delayed, they probably wouldn't have known and not retaken the plane.
edit: but agreed - point being we know now if a plane is hijacked, there's very little chance of it coming down peacefully.
It does seem like that's the right numbering, thanks. I said "3rd" because the flight was hijacked around 9:30am EST. And I assume what they heard was news of the first two planes, rather than the one that hit the Pentagon.
Putting the fate of our airline safety to the collective bravery of humanity seems like a bad idea to me. If I'm getting on a plane, I have no problems taking my shoes off and being scanned to have a better chance of a bad scenario not happening.
Yes, but that has rarely happened in history. And to prevent that, we do scan the luggage and make sure that there is no unidentified luggage on the plane.
The shoe scanning is an extension of that, based off of the real threat that someone will pack shoes with explosives. The only reason it didn't work the last time it was tried was that the bomber stayed in their seat as opposed to e.g. using the toilet.
Wishful thinking. Even if passengers assumed there's not path to survive other than fight -- and you're not in a position to say that they assume this -- most people will not do anything about the hijack anyway.
It doesn't take 'most' passengers to overpower some people. All it takes is one hero to move and others will pile on, just one person to break the bystander effect. This is scientifically proven with crowd modelling.
If it's alleged el qaeda, and their "billions of dollars in funding" they would've just raised an army, and razed the place.
If someone needs on a principle to have the plane shot out of the sky, there are way dumber, and more sure ways to do that than trying to get a bomber on board.
Al Qaeda was in the middle of losing Afghanistan when the shoe thing happened, it’s not entirely implausible they’d tell some random person to try something dumb.
Any attempt at this, the terrorists will have a game plan of how to convince people on the flight to chill out, that they have no mal-intent towards the passengers, etc etc. I mean it might not work, but I reckon they'd put on a really good act and manipulate people heavily into making it feel like they are actually quite safe and it would be a poor decision to try and overrun them.
So any future attempt requires higher level of competence to pull it off, which means it's probably very unlikely that such an attack will ever happen again.
If we want to prevent hijacking of planes for terrorism purpose, then we'll need to go deeper and fix the root cause of extremism which required tons of focused effort, probably tackling seemly intractable problems. Not spend billions upon billions more on likely ineffectual screening procedure and tools to satisfy the surveillance state.
Yes, I'd be someone who jumps up to rush the hijackers. Because I'd have nothing to lose. And if all I do is soak up some damage and die, it may give others behind me a chance.
I'm not especially brave or fearless or anything. But if you back me into a corner with no way to survive, then I'll fight back like a caged, starving rat.
I don't see any situation where that works. The only variation I can think of that might work is enough hijackers to control the passengers, which seems unlikely outside of a lightly booked flight or small plane.
That stopped working on the 3rd (edit: 4th) plane. I don't see how it would work again. Passengers now default to assuming there's no path to live other than fighting back.
Meaning many of the measures we still take aren't really preventing anything. I do understand this doesn't apply to the shoes (shoe bomber), but that's just one of many things we've put in place.