There's many things going on that use up a lot of money,energy and resources that get spent on not as important as other things,so what? Considering we're not very liked here in america, the protection is nice but still doesn't help. Regradless of what we try to do to stop it, somehow anyhow if something was to happen, it will. Seemingly that the government doesn't really care about our safely as they sit in their big rich houses,with their body guards and panic rooms.

Terrorism is propaganda and designed to produce a psychological effect on the populous whereas car crashes and mudslides for example are not. I haven't read the article but I would guess that the statisticians did not take that, and other things, into account when they called the threat of terrorism statistically negligible.

Someone always has to pay.
The money and resourses paid are a cleansing water.
Washing away the guilt of the comerciality of peoples lives and deaths.
You really are not free if you had to buy it or think you can sell it.
Someone always has to pay
People get feaked out if they are not in debt, people get freaked out if there is no compensation,
act of law you can instead of act of God you cannot, sew,
people would get freaked out if they were and knew they were actualy free.
Someone always has to pay,
and as freedom costs nothing people dont understand what it is.
'Freedom must come at a price' Up yours!
Someone always has to pay
To know we had something rather than the alternative which is knowing you have nothing.
And knowing you will never have anything, again.
Someone always has to pay.
The cost is always higher than the individual, if one of does not feel safe you can bet;
'you are not the only one'.
Someone always has to pay.

We think delude that someone always has to be paid and think this makes us safe.
Someone always has to be paid.

Undressing the Terror Threat

Running the numbers on the conflict with terrorists suggests that the rules of the game should change

• Crunching the Risk Numbers
  

These rules help explain the otherwise inexplicable wave of hysteria that has swept over our government in the wake of the failed attempt by a rather pathetic aspiring terrorist to blow up a plane on Christmas Day. For two weeks now, this mildly troubling but essentially minor incident has dominated headlines and airwaves, and sent politicians from the president on down scurrying to outdo each other with statements that such incidents are "unacceptable," and that all sorts of new and better procedures will be implemented to make sure nothing like this ever happens again.
Meanwhile, millions of travelers are being subjected to increasingly pointless and invasive searches and the resultant delays, such as the one that practically shut down Newark Liberty International Airport last week, after a man accidentally walked through the wrong gate, or Tuesday's incident at a California airport, which closed for hours after a "potentially explosive substance" was found in a traveler's luggage. (It turned out to be honey.)
As to the question of what the government should do rather than keep playing Terrorball, the answer is simple: stop treating Americans like idiots and cowards.
It might be unrealistic to expect the average citizen to have a nuanced grasp of statistically based risk analysis, but there is nothing nuanced about two basic facts:
(1) America is a country of 310 million people, in which thousands of horrible things happen every single day; and
(2) The chances that one of those horrible things will be that you're subjected to a terrorist attack can, for all practical purposes, be calculated as zero.
Consider that on this very day about 6,700 Americans will die. When confronted with this statistic almost everyone reverts to the mindset of the title character's acquaintances in Tolstoy's great novella "The Death of Ivan Ilyich," and indulges in the complacent thought that "it is he who is dead and not I."
Consider then that around 1,900 of the Americans who die today will be less than 65, and that indeed about 140 will be children. Approximately 50 Americans will be murdered today, including several women killed by their husbands or boyfriends, and several children who will die from abuse and neglect. Around 85 of us will commit suicide, and another 120 will die in traffic accidents.
No amount of statistical evidence, however, will make any difference to those who give themselves over to almost completely irrational fears. Such people, and there are apparently a lot of them in America right now, are in fact real victims of terrorism. They also make possible the current ascendancy of the politics of cowardice-the cynical exploitation of fear for political gain.
Unfortunately, the politics of cowardice can also make it rational to spend otherwise irrational amounts of resources on further minimizing already minimal risks. Given the current climate of fear, any terrorist incident involving Islamic radicals generates huge social costs, so it may make more economic sense, in the short term, to spend X dollars to avoid 10 deaths caused by terrorism than it does to spend X dollars to avoid 1,000 ordinary homicides. Any long-term acceptance of such trade-offs hands terrorists the only real victory they can ever achieve.
It's a remarkable fact that a nation founded, fought for, built by, and transformed through the extraordinary courage of figures such as George Washington, Susan B. Anthony and Martin Luther King Jr. now often seems reduced to a pitiful whimpering giant by a handful of mostly incompetent criminals, whose main weapons consist of scary-sounding Web sites and shoe- and underwear-concealed bombs that fail to detonate.
Terrorball, in short, is made possible by a loss of the sense that cowardice is among the most disgusting and shameful of vices. I shudder to think what Washington, who as commander in chief of the Continental Army intentionally exposed himself to enemy fire to rally his poorly armed and badly outnumbered troops, would think of the spectacle of millions of Americans not merely tolerating but actually demanding that their government subject them to various indignities, in the false hope that the rituals of what has been called "security theater" will reduce the already infinitesimal risks we face from terrorism.
Indeed, if one does not utter the magic word "terrorism," the notion that it is actually in the best interests of the country for the government to do everything possible to keep its citizens safe becomes self-evident nonsense. Consider again some of the things that will kill 6,700 Americans today. The country's homicide rate is approximately six times higher than that of most other developed nations; we have 15,000 more murders per year than we would if the rate were comparable to that of otherwise similar countries. Americans own around 200 million firearms, which is to say there are nearly as many privately owned guns as there are adults in the country. In addition, there are about 200,000 convicted murderers walking free in America today (there have been more than 600,000 murders in America over the past 30 years, and the average time served for the crime is about 12 years).
Given these statistics, there is little doubt that banning private gun ownership and making life without parole mandatory for anyone convicted of murder would reduce the homicide rate in America significantly. It would almost surely make a major dent in the suicide rate as well: Half of the nation's 31,000 suicides involve a handgun. How many people would support taking both these steps, which together would save exponentially more lives than even a-obviously hypothetical-perfect terrorist-prevention system? Fortunately, very few. (Although I admit a depressingly large number might support automatic life without parole.)
Or consider traffic accidents. All sorts of measures could be taken to reduce the current rate of automotive carnage from 120 fatalities a day-from lowering speed limits, to requiring mechanisms that make it impossible to start a car while drunk, to even more restrictive measures. Some of these measures may well be worth taking. But the point is that at present we seem to consider 43,000 traffic deaths per year an acceptable cost to pay for driving big fast cars.
For obvious reasons, politicians and other policy makers generally avoid discussing what ought to be considered an "acceptable" number of traffic deaths, or murders, or suicides, let alone what constitutes an acceptable level of terrorism. Even alluding to such concepts would require treating voters as adults-something which at present seems to be considered little short of political suicide.
Yet not treating Americans as adults has costs. For instance, it became the official policy of our federal government to try to make America "a drug-free nation" 25 years ago.
After spending hundreds of billions of dollars and imprisoning millions of people, it's slowly beginning to become possible for some politicians to admit that fighting a necessarily endless drug war in pursuit of an impossible goal might be a bad idea. How long will it take to admit that an endless war on terror, dedicated to making America a terror-free nation, is equally nonsensical?
What then is to be done? A little intelligence and a few drops of courage remind us that life is full of risk, and that of all the risks we confront in America every day, terrorism is a very minor one. Taking prudent steps to reasonably minimize the tiny threat we face from a few fanatic criminals need not grant them the attention they crave. Continuing to play Terrorball, on the other hand, guarantees that the terrorists will always win, since it places the bar for what counts as success for them practically on the ground.
-Paul Campos is a professor of law at the University of Colorado.

Part of the problem is that the Terrorball doubles as a political football.

Yes, I agree. I think that what you are saying is that the approach of the article is simplistic. And, also, there is the moral dimension. Innocent people are being deliberately targeted.

Well in some ways people do worry about all the wrong things.
If your still smoking or driving without your seat belt but worried about terrorism, you are not being rational. but thats what terrorism is all about the destruction of rationality, the politics of fear, the ineffective allocation or resources and concern.
No amount of money or security efforts can make you perfectly safe. A person willing to sacrifice their own life for a cause can always manage to take others with them. The amount of money and effort put in to security will have to be balanced off against other priorites. Securing the cockpit was probably the most effective and rational of airplane security efforts and it should have been done before 9/11.

There is no perfect safety, but there are degrees of safety, and some circumstances can be extremely safe.

It may be that someone with enough determination can kill others, but it is not true that we have to make it easy for them to do so, as was done with this latest fiasco.

The good professor should consider that this is the price paid to ensure the transient security we rely on to conduct modernity. Sure it's a pain for little appreciable return, but what of the alternative of no security....unbridled terrorist acts I would suggest. It is not about the ones we catch, but the deterrent is the goal.

Of course, it was not suggested that there be no security. The alternative is not no security. That's a strawman. But I agree with you that we need a lot more security than we have now.

K, just as a side bar to the core thread. I recently had a family from the States stay with my family for 6 weeks. The father who is Arabic by birth married American lass who he met in Saudi when she was posted there in the late 80's. I did not know these folks but my brother worked with the father in the States and I was repaying the hospitality and kindness they had extended to him and his family.

Their only child was a daughter of 15, dark hair, brown eyes and not particularly Semitic featured, but not overtly Caucasian either. The parents did not speak of their experience in post 9/11 America but the daughter related her experience and her thoughts to my daughter of the same age. Some of these conversations I heard and some were relayed to me by my daughter later. Even though this child was born in the States she identified with the Middle Eastern culture closely, she could not speak the Arabic language and culturally she was an American teenager, but she harbored an "us and them" attitude in her rhetoric which did not endear her to my kids or their friends. Many of the thoughts she bleated out that got the kids off side here could be exampled by a comment she made about a little blonde haired niece of mine. Upon a visit to these relatives she said of the little one "what a typical nasty white baby", Aussies do not use the term "nasty" as a general derogatory descriptive (we go with less subtle and more direct slurs) so the intent was masked to us initially.

K my point in relating this to you is that to my mind this kid is like a piece of clay that has been molded to consider herself alien to the country that sustains her family. Her mother has little to do with her grass roots Baptist family from the Southern States but the extended family of the father who reside in the States are regular visitors and visa versa. As I said the parents were friendly but not outgoing and did not broach the subject of ethnicity while they stayed with us. After the visit we all thought that this kid is capable of anything given her parents did not rebuke or condone her espousing this divisive dribble. I believe that home grown terrorists are the fifth column that the States will have issues with into the near future..........just my thoughts.........It was an eye opener for us dumb Aussies who tend take people as they present themselves and if the kid did not spew this rhetoric we would not have surmised that these folks were anything but regular Yanks.

Yes. It is sad. I don't suppose the girl could have got this from anywhere but her parents, could she have? I suppose we have to become more cautious, and more restrictive, and profiling may, indeed be necessary. Not that this kid is a threat now, or even later, but I agree with you. Too bad.

I think that democracy has an weakness witch is that all people get to govern, including the less inteligent ones that shouldnt take a part in governmnet, witch are, sadly, the majority. With this I mean that the government has to cope with being idealistic rather than realistic and honest (partly because due to its own egocentrism, because a realist politician will not win again an idealistic one), what involves, like it was mentioned here, spending huge amounts of resources pursuing impossible goals, resources that could have been better applied, only in areas not visible to the public.

Like it has been said, assuming the country has a decent level of security, terrorism cant really hurt it, it can only scare it. I think governs victimized by terrorism should tranquilize its people with statistic, rather than promissing to root out all evil in the world before anything else happens (literally). Off course just defending yourself forever is inneficient, and some sort of fight-back is necessary. But hunting down the terrorists thenselves seems fantastically inneficient to me, not only because its so ******* easy to hide in this big world, but also because the destruction of some terrorists will just have others arise. I think that in order to destroy terrorism we must destroy the ideas behind terrorism. If I was the leader of a country and had to get rid of some terrorists, I would bombard the region they are based at with propaganda against whatever radical ideas support their actions. Reducing their world-wide support, as well as the number of potential recruits, seems the best way to fight terrorism to me. bombing a city with paper its also a lot cheaper and will make people hate you a lot less than bombing it with explosive things =)

P.S: Ah, so that word is actually a bad word? I though it was just a regular adjective =)