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I am not planning any nuclear attacks

henrysmith.org

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Re: I am not planning any nuclear attacks

#131

Post by arh68 »

BrandonMarc wrote: post #94

Bruce Schneier calls this the "war on the unexpected". If you take average people, who aren't experts at security / investigating / etc, and you tell these people "if you see something, say something", then you're going to get a ridiculous amount of false positives. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/11/the_war_on_th... Everything "unusual" becomes suspicious. See a guy taking photos at an airport? Must be a…

Yeah, it's really odd to spend effort maintaining haystacks, trying to keep their needle:straw ratio high, trying to grow and filter the haystack, et cetera, then pump giant aqueducts and funnels (pass it up!) of absolute crap intelligence into it. There needs to be a word for losing knowledge: instead of extracting knowledge from streams of input, you're smearing it all around, obfuscating the useful bits.

Re: I am not planning any nuclear attacks

#132

Post by pyre »

burkaman wrote: post #128
pyre wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apparently somebody was still worried about the idea of a realistic nuclear attack simulation game. Reminds me of the time some kid was arrested for making a Counterstrike map based on his high school. This is even more ridiculous. The kid could reasonably obtain weapons and bring them to school. The likelihood of obtaining an ICBM is nil.

Sort of, but it's hard for me to get angry at the people who called the police in either case. Yeah, they should have more common sense, but the police are the ones with responsibility here. If you're scared you're scared, and you should be able to call the police for pretty much any reason and expect them to deal with it rationally and professionally. In this case, if the police just show up, look at the whiteboard,…

I agree that the police shoulder the responsibility to say, "this guy is not a terrorist," and that a failure of common sense on their part is more egregious than on the part of the 'common man.'

Re: I am not planning any nuclear attacks

#133

Post by Houshalter »

dragonwriter wrote: post #63
pyre wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that everyone in the chain ends up buying into this. The police make a record of it 'just in case.' You end up on a no-fly list 'just in case.' Everyone in the chain is covering their ass 'just in case' this person really is a terrorist. No one ends up willing to stick their neck out and say, "this person probably isn't a terrorist"... just in case.

The extreme example of "everyone in the chain" buying into an extreme form of this thinking came in the form of the "1% doctrine" articulated by then-Vice President Dick Cheney: "If there's a 1% chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al-Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response. It's not about our analysis ... It's about our response."

http://lesswrong.com/lw/il/hindsight_bias/

>Shortly after September 11th 2001, I thought to myself, and now someone will turn up minor intelligence warnings of something-or-other, and then the hindsight will begin. Yes, I'm sure they had some minor warnings of an al Qaeda plot, but they probably also had minor warnings of mafia activity, nuclear material for sale, and an invasion from Mars.

>Because we don't see the cost of a general policy, we learn overly specific lessons. After September 11th, the FAA prohibited box-cutters on airplanes—as if the problem had been the failure to take this particular "obvious" precaution. We don't learn the general lesson: the cost of effective caution is very high because you must attend to problems that are not as obvious now as past problems seem in hindsight.

Re: I am not planning any nuclear attacks

#134

Post by shostack »

BrandonMarc wrote: post #94

Bruce Schneier calls this the "war on the unexpected". If you take average people, who aren't experts at security / investigating / etc, and you tell these people "if you see something, say something", then you're going to get a ridiculous amount of false positives. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/11/the_war_on_th... Everything "unusual" becomes suspicious. See a guy taking photos at an airport? Must be a…

No kidding...

Was sitting on the runway and the cockpit door was open. Saw a really cool view out the window with the pilots and such, so I grabbed my DSLR and snapped a shot (I'm a photo geek).

Stewardess gave me issues about it and started telling me she didn't think it was allowed (it is to my knowledge), but I held my ground and it was fine.

I'm probably on some list now just for wanting a cool shot.

Re: I am not planning any nuclear attacks

#135

Post by Torgo »

samspot wrote: post #42

Devil's Advocate: You are a nontechnical person and stumble upon what appear to be plans for a terrorist attack. You talk to the person about it and they say "Don't worry. is computer game". A great exploration of this is the 30 Rock episode where Tina Fey reports her neighbor for what ends up being a plan to get on the show 'The Amazing Race'. The problem is, not knowing any better, you feel obligated to report the…

Sometimes it is because, even if the chance it's real is slim, the stakes would be incredibly high. One time I thought I witnessed a kidnapping, a woman shackled and gagged in the back of a car. I contacted the police and they very thoroughly and professionally pursued it. Afterwards they told me the two people involved were engaged in sexual roleplay. She wasn't being kidnapped, it seemed kind of unusual (you had to be there) but I would have been irresponsible in not reporting it.

On the other hand, they could have been SWATed, and it probably cost my city government five digits. I don't have an answer.

Re: I am not planning any nuclear attacks

#137

Post by kjjw »

danparsonson wrote: post #129
jon-wood wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're doing well to be charged £100. We just renewed our tenancy, and got charged £120 by the letting agents to process us signing the same agreement we signed 12 months ago, and update their records to show we're not due to do so again for another year.

For anyone else in this situation who is not aware, by default an Assured Shorthold Tenancy (which you probably have if you're renting all of a self-contained dwelling) becomes a statutory periodic tenancy (i.e., usually, rolling monthly on the same terms) at the end of the initial contract period - this requires no action on the part of anyone involved so you can politely tell the agents where to stick their £100+ b…

This is interesting. I've always been given, along with an initial rental agreement, a letter dated for the end of the tenancy that asks me to leave the property. It was my understanding that this is enough for the agent to easily eject you at the end of the agreement period unless you follow what they want.

Re: I am not planning any nuclear attacks

#138

Post by crazypyro »

ForHackernews wrote: post #127
crazypyro wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are arguing whether it is out of the question to expect that such a system's TARGETING is based on clicking a point on a imprecise map (per the rest of the whiteboard). It is completely out of the question to expect ICBM to be targeted with a mouse. You are (incorrectly) extrapolating the mouse click to mean that there is a mouse click somewhere in the process and NOT at the exact point drawn on the board. If you…

> imprecise click. "Close only counts in horseshoes, hand grenades, and nuclear war" When you're dealing with high-yield nuclear warheads, anywhere within a few hundred miles of your desired target is probably going to be plenty good enough.

Actually, that's a pretty horrendous common mistake. The maximum of the blast radius of every nuclear warhead is below 50 miles. The biggest one ever designed, but not tested, by the USSR (larger than the US) was 100 MT which would've had a blast radius (third degree burns) of 46.5 miles, if it was detonated at 50,000ft , less with lower heights. That is a far cry from "within a few hundred miles".

Re: I am not planning any nuclear attacks

#139

Post by ForHackernews »

crazypyro wrote: post #138
ForHackernews wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> imprecise click. "Close only counts in horseshoes, hand grenades, and nuclear war" When you're dealing with high-yield nuclear warheads, anywhere within a few hundred miles of your desired target is probably going to be plenty good enough.

Actually, that's a pretty horrendous common mistake. The maximum of the blast radius of every nuclear warhead is below 50 miles. The biggest one ever designed, but not tested, by the USSR (larger than the US) was 100 MT which would've had a blast radius (third degree burns) of 46.5 miles, if it was detonated at 50,000ft , less with lower heights. That is a far cry from "within a few hundred miles".

What area was contaminated by radioactive fallout?

Re: I am not planning any nuclear attacks

#140

Post by DmitriRavinoff »

NhanH wrote: post #68
DanBC wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the people higher up the chain don't get to see the whiteboards and so can't easily dismiss this as planning a computer game. Unless the agents took photos?

The priori of a dude planning an ICBM attack on whiteboard in an apt is so low that unless you have very very strong evidences that it exists (and words by random people without photos certainly don't count as one), for all practical purposes, it isn't true. And I sincerely do hope that if such a plan truly exists somewhere, the power that be have better evidences/ discovery than being informed by letting agents.

Unfortunately, the probability that someone is able to understand this logic is lowered considerably once you realize that they're working in a job where they're required to act on such threats. Most people who are capable of such calculations will not find such jobs fulfilling, and those who do will find themselves constantly second-guessed by bosses who don't have that skill. It's a profession that selects against Bayesian reasoning.

Humans are -really- bad at intuitively calculating risk, and I have yet to encounter any sort of formal education in the US that teaches us how to properly calculate it.

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