It's a personal experience and I don't feel the need to share. I was fortunate: I didn't lose anyone in the attacks and no one in my immediate circle of friends did either, though an acquaintance had a ticket to go to the observation deck on one of the WTC towers and would have been killed had she not overslept.
I have only two things to say. First, my wife is flying home today! That deserves a bit w00t! She'll be home in 12-13 hours or so, she's been gone about two weeks: she flew to Ohio, picked up her mom, then drove to Maine to see her sister who just turned 50.
It'll be good to have my wife home again.
Second, yesterday the New York Times posted a story called 10 Ways To Avoid The Next 9/11. One of the people who was interviewed but later cut because of space was Bruce Schneir. Here's what he wrote:
Despite what you see in the movies and on television, it’s actually very difficult to execute a major terrorist act. It’s hard to organize, plan, and execute an attack, and it’s all too easy to slip up and get caught. Combine that with our intelligence work tracking terrorist cells and interdicting terrorist funding, and you have a climate where major attacks are rare. In many ways, the success of 9/11 was an anomaly; there were many points where it could have failed. The main reason we haven’t seen another 9/11 is that it isn’t as easy as it looks. Much of our counterterrorist efforts are nothing more than security theater: ineffectual measures that look good. Forget the “war on terror”; the difficulty isn’t killing or arresting the terrorists, it’s finding them. Terrorism is a law enforcement problem, and needs to be treated as such. For example, none of our post-9/11 airline security measures would have stopped the London shampoo bombers. The lesson of London is that our best defense is intelligence and investigation. Rather than spending money on airline security, or sports stadium security -- measures that require us to guess the plot correctly in order to be effective -- we’re better off spending money on measures that are effective regardless of the plot.
Intelligence and investigation have kept us safe from terrorism in the past, and will continue to do so in the future. If the CIA and FBI had done a better job of coordinating and sharing data in 2001, 9/11 would have been another failed attempt. Coordination has gotten better, and those agencies are better funded -- but it’s still not enough. Whenever you read about the billions being spent on national ID cards or massive data mining programs or new airport security measures, think about the number of intelligence agents that the same money could buy. That’s where we’re going to see the greatest return on our security investment.
Maybe some day people will start listening to what he's saying.
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