Dana Blankenhorn has been a journalist, writer and part-time futurist for over 30 years.
OF COURSE engineers have the makings of terrorists. Most of our job is figuring out how things can go wrong, after all. Sure, we then go on to taking preventive steps but the fact remains that we're very much into seeing ways for stuff to go sideways, regardless of Management directives about how Nothing Can Go Worng!
The political system in contrast is based around accepting that The Program (doesn't matter which Program) is a Good Thing and not looking too closely at how the Law of Unintended Consequences will have its way. Just keep focussed on the Wonderful Things that it's intended to do.
Then along comes some engineering type and points out how we're spending billions of hard cash and lots more in wasted time by the public, damage to the air transport system, etc. for measures that have drive-a-truck-through-them vulnerabilities that can't be closed anyway. Obviously not a Team Player. Politically Unreliable. In fact, are we sure that he's not really One Of The Bad Guys?
Two Oxford dons have published a paper which claims that engineering and terrorism share a common mindset. (The lead author is Diego Gambetta, right.)
Personally I can see a closer relationship between being being an Oxford sociology professor and having your head…but I digress. (Someone needs a lesson in logic.)
The real problem is that people who know better are taking this Luddite nonsense seriously. Here’s the lead from an article in the current Foreign Policy (the whole article is behind a paid firewall):
Osama bin Laden studied engineering. So did lead 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta, 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and Ramzi Yousef, the architect of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Exceptions to the rule? Hardly. Most highprofile Islamist terrorists are, in fact, highly educated. And according to new research at Oxford University by sociologists Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog, most of them may be engineers.
Had they been permitted to freely study religion, or political science, don’t you think these people might be more inclined to do that? Seems to be what their chosen majors actually would have been, had they been free. Which they weren’t.
Which is the point.
This wouldn’t be so bad if policymakers weren’t actually falling prey to the nonsense. The UK, for instance, now plans to pass a law making “distribution of hacking tools” a crime. Isn’t a C++ compiler a “hacking tool” if it’s used by a hacker?
Add in the demand by some in the UK to filter the Internet for copyright, the offer by AT&T to do precisely that here, and it doesn’t take a tinfoil hat to realize that, inside this political year, there is some serious dreaming of suppression going on.
I would think that if engineers are inclined toward terrorism, then FOSS programmers are even more so-inclined. Question is what can be done about it?
Non-violent thoughts only, please.
