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The Physics of Terror

September 9, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment
The Physics of Terror

Last summer, physicist Aaron Clauset was telling a group of undergraduates who were touring the Santa Fe Institute about the unexpected mathematical symmetries he had found while studying global terrorist attacks over the past four decades. Their professor made a comment that brought Clauset up short. "He was surprised that I could think about such a morbid topic in such a dry, scientific way," Clauset recalls. "And I hadn't even thought about that. It was just ... I think in some ways, in order to do this, you have to separate yourself from the emotional aspects of it." If the professor's ... Read More

More like this: Culture, Culture & Society, January-February 2011, Magazine Feature Story, Science
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Can Biosecurity Go Global?

April 27, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

A tall, modest academic with graying temples, Ren Salerno was happily toiling away in obscurity at a small biological threat research program at Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, N.M., "studying issues nobody really cared about," he recalls. Then the attacks on Sept. 11 burst his academic bubble. As one of the few experts on the security of biological agents, Salerno was called to Washington, where, as soon as he arrived, he met with Deputy Secretary of Agriculture James Moseley, a man with a lot to worry about. Some of the greatest bioterror threats are zoonotic pathogens — ... Read More

More like this: May-June 2011, News and Options, Politics, Science
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Debunking Theories of a Terrorist Power Grab

December 17, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment

You know all those doom-and-gloomers who get up before Congress and testify about how terrorists are going to attack America's electric grid, sending blackouts toppling across the country like dominoes? Well, here's what Seth Blumsack, a power-system expert at Pennsylvania State University, has to say about the terrifying prospect: "That's a bunch of hooey." Blumsack and his colleague Paul Hines at the University of Vermont have just published a report in the journal Chaos — and we can only imagine what the deadlines there are like — that refutes the drumbeat of warnings, many of which ... Read More

More like this: January-February 2011, Science, Science & Environment, The Cocktail Napkin
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Hey TSA, Racial Profiling Doesn’t Work

November 30, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment

Arguments over racial profiling at the airport security line typically turn around the assumption that such screening, at least to some extent, works. The idea may be unsavory, but it sounds logical: If we target people with a higher probability of being terrorists — whether they have Saudi passports, beards or headscarves — we'd have a better chance of catching real terrorists in the process. The question becomes one of morals. Is this the right thing to do? Does the societal benefit (catching more terrorists) outweigh the cost (compromising our ethics)? William Press, a professor ... Read More

More like this: Culture, Culture & Society, The Idea Lobby
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Respect Human Rights, Reduce Terrorism

April 8, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment

Does respect for human rights prevent or promote terrorism? While some — perhaps most notably Dick Cheney — contend that restricting human rights is necessary to prevent terrorist attacks, others argue that the practice fuels terrorism by increasing support for extremists. Political scientists James I. Walsh and James A. Piazza of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte find the latter true. Their research, which compares records of terrorist attacks alongside a country's documented respect for rights, appears in the latest issue of Comparative Political Studies. The authors ... Read More

More like this: Politics
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Where Terror Suspects Should Be Tried

March 14, 2010 • By • 2 Comments

When President Bush first announced his intention to try suspected terrorists by military commissions back in November 2001, criticism rightfully (and necessarily, given the absence of any actual cases) focused on their procedural shortcomings. Over the intervening eight-plus years, many, but certainly not all, of these procedural issues have been redressed, most recently through the adoption of the Military Commissions Act of 2009 late last year. This leads many observers to question whether there is still any substantive basis to object to the use of this forum to try those affiliated ... Read More

More like this: CAROUSEL, Legal Affairs
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Who Are You and What Did You Eat?

February 25, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment

One of the most schizophrenic aspects of American border policy since 9/11 is the way Washington treats its friends: "Welcome to America," the government all but literally says to people arriving from Europe. "Line Up Here for Secondary Inspection." The controversy over body scanners at Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport last December — after Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to destroy a plane with his undershorts — was just a powder flash in the ongoing struggle between the U.S. and Europe since 2001 over how to manage America's traditionally open borders. Individual acts of pressure to foist ... Read More

More like this: Culture, Culture & Society, European Dispatch, March-April 2010
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The Mind of a Terrorist

February 24, 2010 • By • 1 Comment

Can reading William James help us defeat terrorism? University of Maryland social psychologist Arie Kruglanski is convinced of it. He opened a recently published paper on the motivation of suicide bombers with a quote from the Victorian-era psychologist and philosopher: Mankind's common instinct for reality has always held the world to be essentially a theatre for heroism ... no matter what a man's frailties otherwise may be, if he be willing to risk death, and still more if he suffer it heroically in the service he has chosen, the fact consecrates him forever. Ninety-nine years after those ... Read More

More like this: Culture, Culture & Society, March-April 2010, Views Reviews and Interviews
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Is al-Qaeda Still a Threat?

November 14, 2008 • By • 1 Comment

On Nov. 13, CIA Chief Michael Hayden told an audience in Washington that al-Qaeda still remains a growing threat, and that the terrorist network is, in fact, extending its reach. Though the al-Qaeda of 2008 looks very different from the hierarchical organization that existed before the U.S. and its allies invaded Afghanistan, Hayden, like many experts, sees al-Qaeda as drawing strength from its ability to fan out as a network and operate in multiple places at once, from North Africa to Somalia to Yemen to Pakistan. It is in this networked form, with its supposed capacities for flexibility ... Read More

More like this: Politics
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Bioterror in Context, Again

August 7, 2008 • By • Leave a Comment

The FBI has released a set of documents to make its case that Bruce Ivins, a biodefense scientist who killed himself just as the Justice Department was about to file charges against him for the 2001 anthrax attacks, carried "sole responsibility" for the crimes that left five people dead and 17 infected. Not everyone agrees: The Wall Street Journal, hardly a bastion of left-leaning conspiracy theorists, declared flatly on its opinion page that "Bruce Ivins Wasn't the Anthrax Culprit." Much of the suspicion regarding the FBI's announcement centers around the example of Steven Hatfill, the ... Read More

More like this: Findings
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