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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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The Government Internet ID Proposal’s Pros and Cons

April 19, 2011 • By • Leave a Comment

Last Friday, the U.S. government unveiled its National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace, a blueprint for the private-industry development of voluntary tools that would authenticate and consolidate your identity online. We need such a thing, the government says — in a pamphlet titled, well, "Why We Need It" — because our proliferating online passwords are inconvenient and insecure, and because last year 8.1 million adults in the U.S. suffered identity theft or fraud, at a cost of $37 billion. The idea seems like one mandated by the moment. Increasingly, important commerce, ... Read More

More like this: Politics, The Idea Lobby
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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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Data Seizure at the Airport

May 12, 2010 • By • 1 Comment

Two years ago a freelance journalist named Bill Hogan returned home to Virginia from a trip to Germany and had his laptop seized at Dulles International Airport. U.S. Customs agents reportedly told him he'd been selected for a random investigation. The agents went through photos on his digital camera, he said, and impounded the computer for two weeks. He was especially angry because "they knew I was a reporter," he said at the time. "They did not seem to give a rat's patootie." One underreported aspect of border security in America since 9/11 is that U.S. Customs and Border Protection ... Read More

More like this: European Dispatch, Legal Affairs, Politics
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A Visa By Any Other Name …

March 31, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment

Europeans who book flights to America have to do something strange. Up to 72 hours before the plane takes off, they need to log on to a Web site and type in some personal details. If they don't, there might be trouble boarding the plane. That's because the U.S., in the wake of 9/11, has insisted on learning a number of things about passengers on every single U.S.-bound flight. Europeans get to use the Web-based "Electronic System for Travel Authorization," or ESTA, because most European countries have visa-waiver deals with Washington, and without ESTA data there would be no way to track ... Read More

More like this: European Dispatch, Politics
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Fumbling FEMA Wants Back in the Game

October 16, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment

In 2003, the Department of Homeland Security gobbled up the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the 30-year-old bureaucracy that coordinates responses to natural disasters. The change left FEMA gutted and impotent, and when Hurricane Katrina struck two years later, the results were devastating. What's troubling, though, is that post-Katrina congressional reforms haven't fully addressed the agency's woes, argues North Carolina State University political science professor Thomas Birkland in a recent paper. Birkland, author of books such as Lessons of Disaster: Policy Change after ... Read More

More like this: Politics
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Close the Turkey Farm

December 22, 2008 • By • Leave a Comment

In 2003, the Federal Emergency Management Agency was combined, with more than 20 other agencies, into the new Department of Homeland Security. The inclusion of FEMA in DHS was controversial, for at least two reasons. First, there was nothing about the Sept. 11 attacks that suggested a need to move FEMA. FEMA's mission was, in the 1990s, to support state and local government in their responses to a range of disasters, and most of these efforts were successful. Second, it was clear before the Department of Homeland Security was formed that President Bush would appoint political allies, not ... Read More

More like this: January-February 2009, Politics, Unsolicited Advice
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