Security quotes of the week

There is one type of surveillance that genuinely would be rendered impractical by widespread use of secure communications, however. Known individual suspects can be targeted by other means, but if the government wanted to do wholesale surveillance, in which the whole communications stream is automatically analyzed and filtered by artificial intelligence software hunting for suspicious communications by unknown parties -- as several accounts have suggested the National Security Agency did under the warrantless wiretapping program authorized by President George W. Bush -- they really would need a back door at the system level. But while governments may consider it a bug when network architecture renders such sweeping surveillance infeasible, citizens should probably regard it as a feature.

Except that we don't forget about it. Over time, these enigmatic warnings do al-Qaida's work for them, scaring people without cause. Without so much as lifting a finger, Osama Bin Laden disrupts our sense of security and well-being. At the same time, they put the U.S. government in the position of the boy who cried wolf. The more often general warnings are issued, the less likely we are to heed them. We are perhaps unsettled or unnerved, but we don't know what to do. So we do nothing-and wish that we'd been told nothing, as well.