I spent most of Friday evening working on a company project with a colleague, a young American woman, who will be traveling to England soon. As we hacked our way through an awards submission (not my favorite way to spend my Friday evening) she confessed that she had a lot of anxiety about terrorism. She was worried about flying to England and had been obsessing about the recent terrorism bust in the UK. She had also watched CNN's recent Osama bin Laden documentary and felt a bit --for the lack of a better phrase-- abused by what she thought  had been a sensational approach.

While I was trying to talk her down from this state of mild anxiety it occurred to me that, if not quite terrorized, this woman was certainly living with more fear in her life as a result of recent events. She had, for instance, resolved not to take the tube during rush hour in London. This is a very bright PR professional, mind you, and not the kind of person I would expect to make an easy victim for fearmongering hype.

But what can you do? Terrorists want you to be afraid because, well, inspiring fear is how they achieve their political objectives. The government wants you to be afraid because then you'll support their policies and, ideally, re-elect them to continue dealing sternly with the terrorists (unless, of course, they have proved manifestly incompetent at doing so, in which case you can vote the bums out). The media wants you to be afraid because...alright the media doesn't necessarily want you to be afraid, but its an inevitable side effect of the technique by which they ensure your eyes are glued to the screen or page so that you can, quite incidentally, learn about valuable products and services that may be of interest to you. (Makes you wonder how CNN's salespeople pitched the ad time for the Osama bin Laden special.)

With so many people telling you should be cowering in abject terror, what are you supposed to do? Well, if you're this girl I was working with your general stress level goes up and you make silly resolutions about public transportation. If, on the other hand, you are Imagethief, you give the fear-peddling lot of them the finger and go on with your life. Frankly, I have much better things to be afraid of: Beijing's hyperkinetic traffic, the pollution that is etching the lining from my lungs, the quality of the water, and recklessness with which I approach my workouts in the gym. Any of those things is far likelier to cause me death or injury than terrorists. So I am simply not worked up about terrorism.

Is that irresponsible of me? I doubt it. I wouldn't do anything conspicuously idiotic, such as wander into Pakistan's tribal areas wearing an American flag T-shirt and start squeezing the asses of the women. Also, not living in fear of terrorism doesn't mean being blind to the problem or the origins of terrorism. Personally, I'm fairly interested in the policies and situations that give rise to terrorism and the ways in which it is used to influence mass opinion. It's similar to my interest in war and political propaganda, which is another one of those little things that PR people tend to be fascinated by.

But my interest stems from the fact that I am a communication professional and terrorism is communication. That's what separates it from traditional warfare, among other things. (Note that a communication agenda isn't the sole criterion for labeling something terrorism. There are many other ways terrorism can be sliced vis a vis state vs. non state actors, civilian vs. military targets, my freedom fighter vs. your terrorist etc. Those are separate debates.) An act of terrorism does not directly achieve a military objective. It necessarily achieves a communication objective, which may then contribute to a military or political objective. That's its point. A military victory --including an insurgent one-- can be achieved in secret. A terrorist victory cannot. A secret terrorist incident is a failed terrorist incident. That's one of the great advantages that dictatorships with effective media censorship have over more open societies when dealing with terrorists, although it's not one I'd trade for.

So terrorism is public communication, like advertising or public service messages with Smokey the Bear or Indians weeping by trash strewn highways (Americans over 30 will know what I am talking about). Particularly vile public communication, but public communication nonetheless. And, like all public communication, you can actually choose how susceptible to it you wish to be, and how critically you wish to analyze it.

Because of that, I have found three recent articles particularly interesting, and I thought I'd share them. You may agree or disagree, but all are worth a read.

First is a column for Wired Magazine by security expert Bruce Schneier. Schneier recounts a variety of harebrained incidents and false alarms that have taken place since the recent arrest in the UK of a group of would-be aviation terrorists, and concludes that they have essentially succeeded in spite of being arrested before they could launch their plot. Schneier's basic point --which I agree with completely-- is that it's up to us to decide not be terrorized and to act accordingly:

The point of terrorism is to cause terror, sometimes to further a political goal and sometimes out of sheer hatred. The people terrorists kill are not the targets; they are collateral damage. And blowing up planes, trains, markets or buses is not the goal; those are just tactics. The real targets of terrorism are the rest of us: the billions of us who are not killed but are terrorized because of the killing. The real point of terrorism is not the act itself, but our reaction to the act.

And we're doing exactly what the terrorists want.

The second article is from Patrick Smith, Salon's long-running aviation columnist. (You need to watch an ad to see the Salon column and when I created this link, the ad was, ironically, for the next installment of CNN's bin Laden special.) Smith writes about why airliners are such seductive targets for terrorism. It has a lot to do with the communication agenda:

Some might wonder: Why the obsession with planes when so many other, less protected targets are available -- shopping malls, movie theaters, subways? There are two main reasons, beginning with the simple fact that airplanes go to where terrorists already are, and/or to places where it's easy for them to operate, the blueprint of Sept. 11 notwithstanding. Seizing or destroying aircraft overseas makes for a simpler job than having to infiltrate and coordinate on your enemy's home soil.

Psychological impact, though, is the bigger reason. Downing a jetliner, that foremost vehicle of international commerce, is a massively symbolic statement. Crashes are automatically high-profile events, even when they're accidents. Throw terrorism into the mix, and you've pushed it to a whole new level of drama. Part and parcel of this, targeting aviation exploits people's innate fears. Rile those fears enough, and you're able to influence entire economies and ways of living. Flying is one of those things we will always be skittish about, no matter how many statistics the experts cite, or how much knowledge we equip ourselves with. Try as we might, we'll never be fully comfortable soaring above the earth at hundreds of miles per hour in pressurized tubes. Start knocking those tubes from the sky, and the ripples can be widespread and profound.

But, like Schneier, Smith thinks we are on the edge of becoming unhinged in our reaction to the recent threat. He cites some similar examples of silly overreaction, and explains how our current hypersensitivity benefits terrorists:

We seem to be losing our grip, sliding from a state of reasonable anxiety to one of mass hysteria. At this rate, we're making the task of the terrorist easier by the day; nobody needs to actually destroy a plane anymore to ignite a debilitating plague of panic and foolishness. Merely planning the act is liable to get the job done, encouraging an entire population to act like lunatics, surrender its dignity (and liberties), and squander away millions of dollars.

The third and final article is a post that is becoming a minor classic from John Rogers, the screen and comic writer behind a blog called Kung Fu Monkey. Rogers explains with great wit that not all dangers should treated equally, notes the disintegration of our collective spine since the Great Patriotic War, and deconstructs this most recent terrorist threat:

To be honest, it's not like I'm a brave man. I'm not. At all. It just, well, it doesn't take that much strength of will not to be scared. Who the hell am I supposed to be scared of? Joseph Padilla, dirty bomber who didn't actually know how to build a bomb, had no allies or supplies, and against whom the government case is so weak they're now shuffling him from court to court to avoid the public embarassment of a trial? The fuckwits who were going to take down the Brooklyn Bridge with blowtorches? Richard Reid, the Zeppo of suicide bombers? The great Canadian plot that had organized over the internet, was penetrated by the Mounties on day one, and we were told had a TRUCK FULL OF EXPLOSIVES ... which they had bought from the Mounties in a sting operation but hey let's skip right over that. Or how about the "compound" of Christian cultists in Florida who were planning on blowing up the Sears Tower with ... kung fu?

And now these guys. As the initial "OH SWEET MOTHER OF GOD THEY CAN BLOW US UP WITH SNAPPLE BOTTLES!!" hysteria subsides, we discover that these guys had been under surveillance, completely penetrated, by no less than three major intelligence agencies. That they were planning on cell phones, and some of them openly travelled to Pakistan (way to keep the cover, Reilly, Ace of Spies). Hell, Chertoff knew about this two weeks ago, and the only reason that some people can scream this headline:

"The London Bombers were within DAYS of trying a dry run!!!"

-- was because MI-5, MI-6, and Scotland Yard let them get that close, so they could suck in the largest number of contacts (again, very spiffy police work). The fact that these wingnuts could have been rolled up, at will, at any time, seems to have competely escaped the media buzz.

This is terrorism's A-game? Sack up, people.

Who says common sense has to be dull?

Yes, the threat is real and the problems are real, and they demand attention, vigilance, and thoughtful and thorough precautions. But if you let the vague threat take over your life, well then, you've already lost, haven't you?

Note: Post title with apologies to Douglas Adams.


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