Surveillance Considered Harmful
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Surveillance Considered Harmful
There is an interesting detail emerging from the attempted terrorist attack on Flydubai Flight 1073.
According to current reports, the co-pilot had already been barred from flying by Oman Air because of concerns about extremist views. Yet somehow he ended up flying for Flydubai. And somehow an Omani citizen, from a country whose pilots are not allowed to fly into Israel, ended up in the cockpit of a flight to Tel Aviv (Source: https://apnews.com/article/cf64a228799e6e788e834cac2a489ab2).
This happened in a region containing some of the most heavily surveilled societies on the planet. Saudi Arabia, where the aircraft eventually landed, is a particularly extreme example: internet activity, social media and private communications are subject to extensive state surveillance (Source: https://freedomhouse.org/country/saudi-arabia/freedom-net/2025). Other Gulf states are not far behind in the scale and reach of their surveillance.
And yet here we are. This points to a more fundamental problem with surveillance as a weapon against terrorism.
What does a terrorist actually want?
Physical destruction is only the means. The real target is psychological: fear, distrust, disruption and ultimately the fragmentation of society. A terrorist cannot destroy a society through physical violence alone. But it may be sufficient to make that society afraid enough to start damaging itself.
And this is where mass surveillance becomes dangerously counterproductive. A functioning society depends on trust: trust between citizens, trust in institutions, and the assumption that most people around us are not our enemies. Terrorism attacks exactly that trust.
Mass surveillance does, too.
It tells everyone that everyone is potentially suspicious. It normalizes observation, suspicion and self-censorship. In trying to make society more resilient against individual terrorists, we risk weakening the very social cohesion that makes a society resilient in the first place.
The irony of Flight 1073 is therefore hard to miss.
We have built extraordinarily powerful machinery for watching millions of ordinary people, while apparently failing at the much more mundane task of asking why a pilot previously considered an extremism risk was sitting in the cockpit of an airliner bound for Israel.
Surveillance considered harmful. Not merely because it invades privacy. But because it can fail even at the trivial things while quietly weakening the society it was supposed to protect.
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Surveillance Considered Harmful
There is an interesting detail emerging from the attempted terrorist attack on Flydubai Flight 1073.
According to current reports, the co-pilot had already been barred from flying by Oman Air because of concerns about extremist views. Yet somehow he ended up flying for Flydubai. And somehow an Omani citizen, from a country whose pilots are not allowed to fly into Israel, ended up in the cockpit of a flight to Tel Aviv (Source: https://apnews.com/article/cf64a228799e6e788e834cac2a489ab2).
This happened in a region containing some of the most heavily surveilled societies on the planet. Saudi Arabia, where the aircraft eventually landed, is a particularly extreme example: internet activity, social media and private communications are subject to extensive state surveillance (Source: https://freedomhouse.org/country/saudi-arabia/freedom-net/2025). Other Gulf states are not far behind in the scale and reach of their surveillance.
And yet here we are. This points to a more fundamental problem with surveillance as a weapon against terrorism.
What does a terrorist actually want?
Physical destruction is only the means. The real target is psychological: fear, distrust, disruption and ultimately the fragmentation of society. A terrorist cannot destroy a society through physical violence alone. But it may be sufficient to make that society afraid enough to start damaging itself.
And this is where mass surveillance becomes dangerously counterproductive. A functioning society depends on trust: trust between citizens, trust in institutions, and the assumption that most people around us are not our enemies. Terrorism attacks exactly that trust.
Mass surveillance does, too.
It tells everyone that everyone is potentially suspicious. It normalizes observation, suspicion and self-censorship. In trying to make society more resilient against individual terrorists, we risk weakening the very social cohesion that makes a society resilient in the first place.
The irony of Flight 1073 is therefore hard to miss.
We have built extraordinarily powerful machinery for watching millions of ordinary people, while apparently failing at the much more mundane task of asking why a pilot previously considered an extremism risk was sitting in the cockpit of an airliner bound for Israel.
Surveillance considered harmful. Not merely because it invades privacy. But because it can fail even at the trivial things while quietly weakening the society it was supposed to protect.
@masek yeah none of it is adding up. I have a feeling this was staged.
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@masek yeah none of it is adding up. I have a feeling this was staged.
@farseen I see no real indications for a staged incident. The competence level I have perceived in the surveillance industry failed to impress me.
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@farseen I see no real indications for a staged incident. The competence level I have perceived in the surveillance industry failed to impress me.
@masek what I can't believe is that they can track down Ayatollah of Iran, or Jamal Khashoggi, but they let a person with obvious extremist tendencies to fly a plane to/from Israel. Imagine how many layers of vetting they must do for a pilot flying to/from Israel, given delicate of a situation they're in.
I can't imagine that they don't have a multi-layer vetting process. And I can't imagine someone with such obvious signs of extremist tendencies slipped through that process. So the only other explanation is that, it was staged. They have the motive and means for staging this. -
@masek what I can't believe is that they can track down Ayatollah of Iran, or Jamal Khashoggi, but they let a person with obvious extremist tendencies to fly a plane to/from Israel. Imagine how many layers of vetting they must do for a pilot flying to/from Israel, given delicate of a situation they're in.
I can't imagine that they don't have a multi-layer vetting process. And I can't imagine someone with such obvious signs of extremist tendencies slipped through that process. So the only other explanation is that, it was staged. They have the motive and means for staging this.@farseen I work in IT Security. I often see fantastic solutions combined with failures at the most basic level.
Surveillance works similarly. Catching the enemy head of state give karma and promotions. That gets a lot of attention.
But when looking at the pilot: /operator clicks on next. "If he were dangerous, he wouldn't be a pilot."
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@masek what I can't believe is that they can track down Ayatollah of Iran, or Jamal Khashoggi, but they let a person with obvious extremist tendencies to fly a plane to/from Israel. Imagine how many layers of vetting they must do for a pilot flying to/from Israel, given delicate of a situation they're in.
I can't imagine that they don't have a multi-layer vetting process. And I can't imagine someone with such obvious signs of extremist tendencies slipped through that process. So the only other explanation is that, it was staged. They have the motive and means for staging this.@farseen @masek What you've missed is that because it's a mass process, the vetting is carried out *as cheaply as possible*, mechanised if possible and operated by minimum wage drones. So there are holes in the process, and sometimes the holes line up—the Swiss Cheese model of accident causation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model
We see the one bampot who gets into a cockpit, we don't see the dozen others who were silently blocked and didn't set any alarm bells ringing because they just didn't get a job.
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@farseen @masek What you've missed is that because it's a mass process, the vetting is carried out *as cheaply as possible*, mechanised if possible and operated by minimum wage drones. So there are holes in the process, and sometimes the holes line up—the Swiss Cheese model of accident causation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_cheese_model
We see the one bampot who gets into a cockpit, we don't see the dozen others who were silently blocked and didn't set any alarm bells ringing because they just didn't get a job.
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