Saturday, October 14, 2006

Shrink The Targets / IEEE Spectrum, September 2006

http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/sep06/4423
Charles Perrow
"We can't defend everything. So we should take steps that protect against both terrorism and natural disasters. Civilized society is at far greater risk from natural disasters and industrial accidents than from terrorism, yet we behave as if it were the other way around. We spend ­billions on unproven technical remedies for imagined terrorist threats while skimping on known methods of mitigating the effects of hurricanes, floods, and toxic-waste spills, which occur with remarkable regularity and predictability. We should concentrate instead on defending against these more frequent and disastrous threats. By thus identifying our worst vulnerabilities and reducing them, we would reduce the size of the terrorists’ targets as well.