Occasionally someone will somehow mistake me for Bruce Schneier and assume that because I have a deep understanding of computer, host and network security, that somehow I can extemporise a lecture about terrorism and the government response to it.

The thing is: unlike Bruce I don’t make a habit of talking about this shit, so I don’t have everything nicely lined-up to spout-off; the security-realist mindset is largely invariant between one discipline and another, and I can confirm that when two or more security geeks are gathered together and mixed with alcohol, discussion will inevitably turn to circumventing any form of security barrier – be it firewall or TSA line; but it still doesn’t mean I can talk about flight security.

The other problem with this behaviour is that one’s more “normal” friends can be quite aghast, indeed horrified at the sang-froid with which a bunch of security geeks can discuss murdering 300+ people by blowing up aircraft “much more effectively than these wannabe terrorists” – so it is convenient to have instead found a journalist who has done such a fine job of outlining reality that no further explanation is required.

The journalist is Lewis Page at El Reg, who is described (to condense two author’s footnotes)

Lewis Page was an armed forces bomb-disposal operator tasked in support of the UK mainland police from 2001 to 2004. He’s just bitter because only the crappiest bombers ever operated on his patch – even worse than these ones, usually – and he had to content himself with clearing up old German stuff.

[He] went through a lot of quite stressful training and preparation to battle the terrorist threat before being assigned as a military bomb-disposal operator in support of the UK police from 2001-04. He has still never got over the disappointment of finding out just how incredibly rare it is, as a bomb-disposal man in mainland Britain, to encounter a terrorist/criminal bomb of any significance at all, let alone one which has not already either gone off or failed to do so.

You get a special tie if you ever do encounter such a device.

So the man has chops, and he has the right attitude, too. There are two essays – one dating from 2007, and another more recently which summarise any number of boozy discussions amongst security geeks to which I have been party, as well as defanging the fear factor rather well.

I’m not going to quote – merely recommend both postings to you. They’re worth it and will hopefully inoculate you from the stupidity of the mass media.

HT to Ian Brown for the original link.