Bruce Schneier weighs security trade-offs in a compelling TED talk:
Ezra Klein summarizes key points from Schneier's talk and ponders the impact on policy:
If Congress does a bad job fortifying our ports against terrorist attack, there still might never be a successful attack on our ports. And if there is a successful attack, it likely won’t happen for years, at which point it’ll be another Congress’s problem. So if voters are demanding you make them feel safe now and you’re not likely to be around for, or connected to, the consequences of ignoring risks that no one is thinking about, it’s pretty natural to focus on the dangers your constituents want addressed rather than the dangers that actually need to be addressed.
Alex Tabarrok's thoughts on childhood safety trends add more data points to the debate:
It is true that one of the most horrible things we can imagine, homicide, is up. For kids aged 5-14 homicide mortality went from 0.5 per 100,000 in 1950 to 0.8 per 100,000 in 2005. Overall, however, kids are much safer today than in the 1950s. Accident mortality, for example, is down from 22.7 per 100,000 in 1950 to 6.2 per 100,000 in 2005 (see Caplan’s Selfish Reasons for more details). Maybe buckling up and ocean supervision isn’t so bad. Maybe parents today worry too much. Probably some of both.
The Dish 