There are several threads floating around the board right devoted to speculating the nature of future terrorist attacks.
Invariably, someone will pop us and say “Hey, we should stop discussing this because we are just giving them ideas”. A reference to “loose lips sink ships” usually follows.
Is it harmful to participate in this kind of speculaltion. Is there a reasonable chance that by dreaming up terrorist scenarios are helping out the terrorist?
I say no. First off, almost all of us are just wildly speculating. We have no real background for our speculation, nor are we seriously investigating and working out the logistics of potential terrorist attacks (e.g. Bob at the Hoover dam told me that if you put a charge here and here the thing will collapse). The idea isn’t the hard part- it is finding out exactly how to carry out that idea.
Secondly, the chance that terrorists read the 'dope is next to nothing. The Internet is vast, and the 'dope is but a small part of it. In my life I have met only one other person that has ever heard of the SDMB. The chances of a terrorist knowing about this site is pretty small- the chances of them devoting their time reading every thread relevent to terrorism (an act that could take a couple hours on a daily basis) are even smaller.
Finally, I propose that our speculation actaully does good. If we could have forseen that passenger planes could be used as flying bombs, then we could figure out how to plan and react to that scenario. One of the hardest things about the Sept. 11 attacks was that we had never seriously considered that possibility. If we had, a lot of things would have happened differently (such as more passenger revolts on the planes). By thinking about and discussing less obvious attack scenerios we alert ourselves to our current weaknesses and put us in a position to correct them.
What do you all think?