Post by @masek@infosec.exchange

2026-10-03 11:22 UTC

As a side note: during the invasion of Iraq, more than twenty years ago, I used to summarize another problem with counterterrorism like this: Killing one terrorist with a bomb produces ten new terrorists. The number ten was obviously rhetorical, not a statistic. But the underlying mechanism is remarkably similar. Again, you have a selection problem. You are trying to kill a very small number of terrorists embedded in a much larger population of people who are not terrorists. Your weapon and your intelligence are imperfect, so you inevitably produce false positives. Except that in this case, a false positive is not someone who gets investigated. It may be someone who gets killed. And people tend not to react favorably to their children, parents, spouses, friends or neighbors being killed. So the false positives feed back into the system. Every innocent person killed creates a circle of people with a very personal reason to hate whoever dropped the bomb. Most of them will never become terrorists, of course. But you don't need many of them to do so before your counterterrorism operation starts producing some of the very thing it is supposed to eliminate. In surveillance, false positives consume attention. In kinetic counterterrorism, false positives can create enemies. Different consequences, same fundamental problem: when the target is extremely rare and your selection mechanism is imperfect, being wrong vastly more often than being right can dominate the entire system.

Replies (6)

@cjd@pkteerium.xyz 2026-10-03 11:55

Extremely erudite thread. 10/10. And then you've got Funny Guys like me making the problem more difficult on purpose...

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@flyingpenguin@infosec.exchange 2026-10-03 12:03

@masek@infosec.exchange not even a bomb. Palantir surveillance meant they would "disappear" all the middle-aged Iraqi men crossing checkpoints, destroying societal stability, and that is what led to ISIS, which Palantir then used to beg for investment and valuation https://www.flyingpenguin.com/how-palantirs-gods-eye-created-the-very-terrorists-it-promised-to-find/

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@Java@freeatlantis.com 2026-10-03 12:08

@masek@infosec.exchange Makes sense. I know how we do war, but it's seems ridiculous to kill a million people when you just want one leader killed. Hire a sniper, boom, done. Isn't more about Imperialism & conquering land and resources?

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@marjolica@social.linux.pizza 2026-10-03 12:46

@masek@infosec.exchange "Killing one terrorist with a bomb produces ten new terrorists" In Palestine the Israeli have this problem cracked: genocide. Kill everyone.

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@eestileib@tech.lgbt 2026-10-03 23:30

@masek@infosec.exchange Your "terrorist" is often already their "local hero", and would become one by virtue of being murdered by a cowardly outsider. So even if a state only kills "actual terrorists", they're still making enemies.

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@michaelgraaf@kolektiva.social 2026-10-04 08:36

@masek@infosec.exchange On top of all that, "killing one terrorist with a bomb" usually kills others too - average ration 1:10 according to drone operator Daniel Hale, now imprisoned for whistle-blowing.

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