Thriller Writers, Grab Your Notebooks

At the beginning of April, security technology expert Bruce Schneier (the author of Beyond Fear) announced a “movie-plot” terrorism contest, in which entrants were invited to come up with “the most unlikely, yet still plausible” attack plans they could. The reader participation event underscores a point Schneier has made repeatedly, most notably in a 2005 Wired News piece called “Terrorists Don’t Do Movie Plots.”

“The problem with movie plot security is that it only works if we guess right [he wrote then]. If we spend billions defending our subways, and the terrorists bomb a bus, we’ve wasted our money… Security is most effective when it doesn’t make arbitrary assumptions about the next terrorist act. We need to spend more money on intelligence and investigation: identifying the terrorists themselves, cutting off their funding, and stopping them regardless of what their plans are.”

Once Schneier’s readers figured out his contest (which offers up a signed copy of Beyond Fear) wasn’t an April Fools gag, they began posting hundreds of suggestions, and some people have complained that he’s frivolously giving terrorists free ideas—an accusation that isn’t keeping him up nights. “Good terrorist ideas are a dime a dozen,” Schneier commented over the weekend. “Anyone can figure out how to cause terror. The hard part is execution.” (And while I was doodling away on this story over the weekend, the NYT noticed the activity on Schneier’s blog, too…)

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