Schneier has excellent powers of reason and logic to be sure. The problem here is that he has zero facts to backup his claims.

You and I read very different debates apparently.

So no, I can agree with Schneier and still be outraged about the silly TSA cases.  In fact, that would put me in greater agreement with Schneier.

Not to defend him too vigorously or anything.  I actually disagree with his analysis and think the original headline and article are fine.  Sometimes you have to rub someone’s nose in their stated opinions. :)

I can’t judge whether Harris is, personally, a bigot, but he certainly sounds bigoted in this particular piece.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0Ti-gkJiXc

Substitute “religion” for “race” in the above video.

You keep saying the same things over and over. And yet you never provide any kind of facts or citations to back up your assertions. Please stop.

Honestly, a central drive of my original comment is that BoingBoing is clumsily assigning “expertise” to the debate participants.  I would argue that it is peculiar to call Sam Harris a “neuroscientist”, and I gather you would prefer that Bruce Schneier were referred to as a “crypographer” (as opposed to “security expert”), which very well may be a fairer description.However, I think that the text of the debate is nice insofar as we do not have to rely on the supposed-expertise labels that BoingBoing ascribes to these two people.  Each participant lays out an argument, and there are many concrete pieces of evidence put forth.  Plenty of factual grist to make up your own mind without appealing to a ham-fisted battle of “credentials”.

But seriously, BoingBoing needs to stop screwing up the neuroscientist/neurologist thing.  It just sounds ignorant.

Bruce is a cryptographer which is about the worst possible training you can have to understand the human factors in security. They tend to look at problems from a technical solution perspective rather then understnding how bad guys work.

Basically Bruce is way out of league when he starts talking about terrorism.  

Seriously, though, maybe most of the readers don’t care, but is it old-fashioned to think that you shouldn’t use big, fancy words if you don’t know what they mean?

I don’t think that Sam Harris is claiming otherwise (at least, not based on his “about” page), but Cory seems to not even know/care/understand the difference between a neurologist and a neuroscientist (which is an absurdly large difference), so I wonder why he felt compelled to put it in there in the first place.  If Sam Harris once lived in Iowa, you wouldn’t call him an “Iowan” in the headline, because it would be silly.

Just feels intellectually sloppy, like he’s trying draw science/neuroscience into this debate, whether or not that makes sense.

(Personally, btw, I think Schneier totally pwns the other guy)

I believe that of Americans. Their democratically elected government is using drones to kill people in far away places. People who have not been convicted of any crimes.

But other than that, a majority of octogenarians on a plane would be unusual, though I probably wouldn’t notice if they were atheists just because they were actively Not Praying before takeoff.  A majority of people dressed like some predominantly Muslim ethnic group would usually just tell me I was somewhere other then Kansas (like maybe Detroit – there was some air terrorism scare a few years ago where a gringo who was flying there freaked out when he saw that there were lots of Arabs on the plane.)

Harris recognizes security is about understanding people

Then why doesn’t he understand that our policies have consistently increased hostility to the US and greatly increased the threat of attack from people who are infuriated at being treated like criminals? He understands nothing about people if he doesn’t understand that systematically terrorizing one group through security theater is a recruiting tactic for potential terrorists.

Of course, since the purpose of most of the US government’s “anti-terrorism” activities has been to increase police and military power rather than to reduce risk to the public, that’s not directly relevant.

Also, he avoids the fact that white supremacists are now the largest terrorist threat facing the US & Europe. And that airport security is not just about stopping Islamic terrorists, but about stopping madmen of all stripes getting on board with weapons, plus the usual filtering out of drugs, endangered animals etc etc.

Schneier keeps viewing identifying terrorists as a technical problem and since their is no easy technical solution, their must be no solution. This is always the danger of letting the techies run security.