Imagine for a moment that you're in the middle of WWII (instead of the current WWIII). You live in England. Bombs are falling from the skies on the factories in Birmingham and Liverpool. So the government puts out a hightened warning for people who work or live in factories. Everyone else, be vigilant, but you don't need to worry as much as those in and near factories. Sounds preposterous, right? I mean bombs could start falling anywhere (and they did).
This scenario is no different than what actually happened yesterday with this idiotic terrorism warning light system in the U.S. Transit was hit in London, so U.S. Homeland Security raises the threat level to orange, but for mass transit only. So just because bombs went off on a bus and in subways in London, that's the only place terrorists are thinking about right now? Come on.
Sure, security should be heightened...everywhere. The press conference to announce the changing of colors from yellow to orange for mass transit was for PR only. I noticed several mayors announcing this morning that they've taken it upon themselves to increase security in more areas than mass transit. Duh.
It seems that if you're in a war with an unknown and unpredictable enemy that it's easy to assume their targets will be random and unknown. Now we have pick and choose warning systems.
2 comments:
Hmmm... what's up with that?
I noticed yesterday that Yahoo ran a news item talking about the fact that there was no perceived threat to any of the mass transit in the U.S... so need to worry, was the uptake. The article didn't mention that there was also no perceived threat in London just before the bombings.
Bruce Schneier said it well on his blog
I would also like to urge everyone not to get wrapped up in the particulars of the terrorist tactics. We need to resist the urge to react against the particulars of this particular terrorist plot, and to keep focused on the terrorists' goals. Spending billions to defend our trains and busses at the expense of other counterterrorist measures makes no sense. Terrorists are out to cause terror, and they don't care if they bomb trains, busses, shopping malls, theaters, stadiums, schools, markets, restaurants, discos, or any other collection of 100 people in a small space. There are simply too many targets to defend, and we need to think smarter than protecting the particular targets the terrorists attacked last week.
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