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Compared with other risks to human life and well-being, contemporary international terrorism remains a minor problem

The Islamic State killed 31 people in Brussels on Tuesday, but more than half a billion people in Europe were just fine on that day. So when the British government raised the “threat level” and told its citizens to avoid “all but essential travel” to Belgium following Tuesday’s attacks, it is demonstrating a decidedly non-Churchillian panic. Needless to say, that is precisely what groups like the Islamic State want to provoke.

the same toxic blend of media and politics that brought us Donald Trump’s candidacy makes it nearly impossible to have a rational assessment of terrorism

Newspapers, radio, cable news channels, and assorted websites all live for events like this, and they know that hyping the danger will keep people reading, listening, and watching. The Islamic State and its partners really couldn’t ask for a better ally, because overheated media coverage makes weak groups seem more powerful than they really are and helps convince the public they are at greater risk than is in fact the case. As long as media coverage continues to provide the Islamic State et al. with such free and effective publicity, why should these groups ever abandon such tactics?

The Islamic State wouldn’t have to use terrorism if it were strong enough to advance its cause through normal means or if its message were attractive enough to command the loyalty of more than a miniscule fraction of the world’s population (or the world’s Muslims, for that matter). Because it lacks abundant resources and its message is toxic to most people, the Islamic State has to rely on suicide attacks, beheadings, and violent videos to try to scare us into doing something stupid. The Islamic State cannot conquer Europe and impose its weird version of Islam on the more than 500 million people who live there; the most it can hope for is to get European countries to do self-destructive things to themselves in response. Similarly, neither al Qaeda, the Islamic State, nor other extremists could destroy the U.S. economy, undermine the U.S. military, or weaken American resolve directly; but they did achieve some of their goals when they provoked us into invading Iraq and when they convinced two presidents to pour hundreds of billions of dollars into the bottomless pit in Afghanistan.

Terrorism is not really the problem; the problem is how we respond to it

At the moment, the challenge of contemporary terrorism seems to be bringing out not the best in the West — but the worst. Instead of resolution and grit, we get bluster and hyperbole. Instead of measured threat assessments, patient and careful strategizing, and a realistic sense of what can and cannot be achieved, we get symbolic gestures, the abandonment of our own principles, and political posturing.

how would a grown-up like Marshall or Dwight D. Eisenhower respond to this danger? No doubt they’d see it as a serious problem, but anyone who had witnessed the carnage of a world war would not be cowed by intermittent acts of extremist violence, no matter how shocking they are to our sensibilities. They’d use the bully pulpit to shame the fearmongers on Fox and CNN, and they’d never miss an opportunity to remind us that the danger is not, in fact, that great and that we should not, and cannot, live our lives in fear of every shadow and in thrall to monsters of our own imaginings. They would encourage us to live our daily lives as we always have, confident that our societies possess a strength and resilience that will easily outlast the weak and timorous groups that are trying to disrupt us. And then, this summer, they’d take a European vacation.

when the military took hold of the building, it became forbidden to mention the military. If you did something like that you’d be called ‘an agenda with ulterior motives.’ ”

He insisted that Al Ahram was no longer “the newspaper with one reader” — that was President Mubarak — but now sent its reporters out to truly cover the news. On Wednesday, he promised that Thursday’s front page would feature the photograph of an 84-year-old man who had brought a complaint to President Morsi’s new grievance office — a demonstration of the paper’s new empathy for the common man and fairness to President Morsi. But the picture did not appear; the headline featured a misleading quotation from Mr. Morsi suggesting he had backed down before a new court order again dissolving Parliament. “The media looks to the center of power,” said Hala Mustafa, editor of the state-financed journal Democracy. “I think everybody knows that the military council represents the center of power, the real comprehensive authority in the country.”

The cyber-repression was made easier by the physical structure of Tunisia’s data flow, which runs through just a few choke points. In broad terms, the system has two distinct parts: one for intercepting phone-related traffic and one for the Internet, Saadaoui says.

In each of the three telecom rooms, which are about half the size of a tennis court, a handful of computers known as “boxes” straddle the data pipelines, Chakchouk says. Their function is to siphon off communications, mostly by searching for key words, according to Saadaoui. “You get all the traffic going through these boxes,” Saadaoui says. Once the system flagged a suspect e-mail, a fiber optic network under the streets of Tunis carried it from the telecom offices to the Interior Ministry’s operator room, Saadaoui says. Moez Ben Mahmoud Hassen, a spokesman for Tunisie Telecom, said the company “denies any possible relation with such practices.” He stressed that it follows the law and respects the confidentiality of communications. Asked about the company’s activities during Ben Ali’s government, he said it was a matter for the courts and declined to elaborate. Communications through mobile operator Orascom Telecom Tunisie, also known as Tunisiana, were not monitored, according to a statement released by company spokeswoman Fatma Ben Hadj Ali. The country’s other mobile operator, Orange Tunisia, didn’t respond to requests for comment.

By 2010, it became a contest as Tunisians increasingly employed encryption the packet inspection couldn’t crack. Communications on Facebook boomed, and the regime demanded better tools, Saadaoui says. The same European contractor that provided e-mail surveillance signed a deal to add monitoring of social networks, he says. It was too late. The supplier hadn’t yet delivered the solution when the “Facebook revolution” crested in January. The government’s last-ditch attempts to quell online organizing included hacking and password-stealing attacks by Ben Ali’s regime, outside the purview of the Internet agency, Saadaoui says. Slim Amamou, a blogger who was arrested during the uprising and briefly became a minister for youth and sport after the revolution, says the presidential palace and ruling party orchestrated the final cyber attacks.

Today, Chakchouk, the new head of Tunisia’s Internet authority says he’s working to dismantle Ammar 404, and turned off the mass filtering, he says. Now he’s locked in legal battles over court orders to block specific Web pages. On Saturday, May 7, he and his team pulled an all-nighter to set the filtering equipment to block a single Web page to comply with a military court’s demand related to a defamation complaint. The following Tuesday, still looking tired, Chakchouk says it took so long because they were figuring out how to replace the page with a message explaining the blockage -- rather than the customary Error 404. Since the revolution, Chakchouk has spoken at conferences around the world, decrying censorship. Yet he won’t say much about surveillance. For now, the packet inspection boxes are still on the network. “We tried to understand the equipment and we’re still doing that,” he says. “We’re waiting for the new government to decide what to do with it.”

reach of religious figures is far greater than that of the revolutionaries, media personalities and entertainers comprising the site’s elite in other Arab states

It is part of a wider embrace of Twitter in the Gulf that has been as messy – and sometimes ugly – as might be expected in a region suddenly offered a mighty platform for long repressed public discourse. “Twitter has contributed to an expansion of freedom of expression,” says Dima Khatib, a correspondent for Qatar’s Al Jazeera, who has emerged as one of the region’s biggest Twitter stars since the start of the Arab uprisings. “But things have cracked wide open – we still don’t know how to respect other points of view yet.”

When they discuss US policy options for Syria, administration officials repeatedly point to the fact that Americans have bigger concerns closer to home and that President Barack Obama is very mindful that the public has no appetite for interventions abroad, no matter how limited

The question is whether it would become more tenable for the president to take action if the public demanded it. Possibly, but that's not how public opinion works. People demonstrate to end wars and bring the troops home, like with Vietnam. They protest against invasions, like Iraq in 2003, when their country's troops are about to be shipped overseas. Or they support military action when their own country has come under attack. But people rarely rise up to demand action because of a sense of collective justice.

it hasn't just been the past twelve days that has exposed the biased and obsolete agenda of Egyptian state TV--that's been happening gradually for the last 15 years. The model for controlling a people, once a great tool, is "locked in the past, in a world where the government controls the message," according to Lawrence Pintak, a professor, former journalist, and the author of forthcoming book "The New Arab Journalist: Mission and Identity in a Time of Turmoil."

News media in Egypt are "weapons of war," said Pitnak. "Government media is a weapon of pro-Mubarak people; the majority of the rest of the media have become weapons of people."

"As journalists, we're human beings. Once they start shooting at you or beating you up, it's hard not to take it personally. It is no longer objective, unbiased coverage. It has become a struggle between media--Arab and Western--and Mubarak."

Perhaps most indicative of the changing face of Egyptian television is Shahira Amin, whose departure after twelve years at Nile TV drew attention to the network's habit of prioritizing regime solidity over truth. Her resignation became a news story in and of itself, and when she told it to the media, she did so live from Tahrir Square--in an interview with Al Jazeera.

what were the Americans doing? Rumour: US diplomats were on their way to Egypt to negotiate between a future President Suleiman and opposition groups. Rumour: extra Marines were being drafted into Egypt to defend the US embassy from attack. Fact: Obama finally told Mubarak to go. Fact: a further evacuation of US families from the Marriott Hotel in Cairo, escorted by Egyptian troops and cops, heading for the airport, fleeing from a people who could so easily be their friends.

The demonstrators still chant “peaceful, peaceful” but some now also carry sticks of wood and steel