January 31st, 2008
Are all engineers secretly terrorists?
Two Oxford dons have published a paper which claims that engineering and terrorism share a common mindset. (The lead author is Diego Gambetta, right.)
Personally I can see a closer relationship between being being an Oxford sociology professor and having your head…but I digress. (Someone needs a lesson in logic.)
The real problem is that people who know better are taking this Luddite nonsense seriously. Here’s the lead from an article in the current Foreign Policy (the whole article is behind a paid firewall):
Osama bin Laden studied engineering. So did lead 9/11 hijacker Mohammed Atta, 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and Ramzi Yousef, the architect of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Exceptions to the rule? Hardly. Most highprofile Islamist terrorists are, in fact, highly educated. And according to new research at Oxford University by sociologists Diego Gambetta and Steffen Hertog, most of them may be engineers.
Had they been permitted to freely study religion, or political science, don’t you think these people might be more inclined to do that? Seems to be what their chosen majors actually would have been, had they been free. Which they weren’t.
Which is the point.
This wouldn’t be so bad if policymakers weren’t actually falling prey to the nonsense. The UK, for instance, now plans to pass a law making “distribution of hacking tools” a crime. Isn’t a C++ compiler a “hacking tool” if it’s used by a hacker?
Add in the demand by some in the UK to filter the Internet for copyright, the offer by AT&T to do precisely that here, and it doesn’t take a tinfoil hat to realize that, inside this political year, there is some serious dreaming of suppression going on.
I would think that if engineers are inclined toward terrorism, then FOSS programmers are even more so-inclined. Question is what can be done about it?
Non-violent thoughts only, please.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
Subscribe to Linux and Open Source via Email alerts or RSS.
| 01/31/08
