Reflections on 9/11

25 years ago I was taking AP courses at a local community college early in the morning and then driving to my high school mid-morning for the rest of my classes. I recall arriving slightly before 10 AM and walking into an eerily quiet building. I proceeded to the band room for my next class only to find everyone staring at the television, watching a news broadcast. Keep in mind: back in 2001 we didn't have smart phones, we didn't have social media, and few folks even had broadband internet on their desktop computers - television and radio were the fastest ways to spread information. I sat down, and moments later watched thousands of my countrymen die before my eyes.

It was the first time I had felt such a sense of existential dread, from the realization that there were people out there who wanted to kill me. The dread was followed by intense anger that anyone would dare to harm innocent people. I knew that this was the beginning of a war, perhaps even the first war that would occur on American soil in 150 years. I, and many others, fully expected that there would be follow-up attacks with a similar level of creativity and asymmetry.

I'm ashamed to say that we Americans allowed those feelings of fear and anger to justify us causing orders of magnitude more harm (both to others and to ourselves) over the ensuing decades.

The Costs

2,977 victims were killed during the attacks. The economic cost of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon was also staggering.

The physical damage costs included:

• $21.8 billion to replace New York's infrastructure destroyed in the attacks
• $500 million to repair the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.

The second order economic impacts were also severe. An estimated $123 billion was lost in the first 2-4 weeks after the WTC collapsed in New York City, as well as from decline in airline travel over the next few years.

The human capital costs were significant as well, with direct job losses amounting to 83,000 positions and $17 billion in lost wages.

When considering broader economic effects, studies of the impact on U.S. GDP, including business interruptions, generally estimate losses of $80 billion to $160 billion (in 2025 dollars).

The total cost of the ensuing War on Terror eclipsed the damage from the attacks in both financial terms and human lives. According to the Costs of War project at Brown University, which has conducted the most comprehensive analysis of these costs, the United States has spent over $8 trillion on its global counterterrorism efforts since 9/11.

This financial expenditure includes:

• Direct military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and other conflict zones
• Homeland security expenditures
• Veterans' medical care and disability benefits (~$2.2 trillion)
• Interest payments on money borrowed to fund the wars

The human toll has been equally devastating. The Costs of War project estimates that over 900,000 people have died as a direct result of these post-9/11 wars. This figure includes:

• U.S. military personnel and allied forces
• Opposition fighters
• Civilians (at least 312,000)

However, these numbers are likely significantly undercounted, as they don't include indirect deaths caused by disease, displacement, and loss of access to food, water, and infrastructure. Additionally, the conflicts displaced approximately 38 million people.

The costs continue to mount even as the U.S. has withdrawn from Afghanistan. Beyond the direct financial expenditures, the war has had profound secondary effects, including environmental damage that will affect regions for generations.

Never Forget

For many years after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 we told ourselves: "never forget!" Of course this was meant to remember the horror of the attacks themselves, but as a cypherpunk I believe it's important we never forget the horror that came after the physical attacks - the sustained attacks upon our privacy and liberties. Now, 25 years later, we can not expect that people will "never forget" the Before Times, because the generations keep marching on. As I write this today, 30% of Americans - 100 million of us - were not even alive to remember what the world was like before 9/11. I weep for the freedoms that many of you will never miss, because you never had a chance to experience them.

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety."

- Benjamin Franklin

America has undergone a profound transformation in the name of safety. What began as emergency measures has evolved into a permanent expansion of government power that continues to erode the very liberties we were told we were protecting. While some programs have been reformed or eliminated, many of these post-9/11 changes remain deeply embedded in our legal and social landscape.

The Surveillance State Takes Root

"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before."

- Rahm Emanuel

The most immediate transformation came with the passage of the USA PATRIOT Act just seven weeks after 9/11. This sweeping legislation, more than 300 pages long, "sailed through Congress with scant dissent" and dramatically expanded government surveillance powers. Under Section 215, the NSA and FBI collected phone, email, and online records of millions of law-abiding Americans for more than a decade. Though the USA FREEDOM Act in 2015 ended the government's bulk collection of telephone metadata, telecommunications companies now retain these records, with the government able to query specific numbers with FISA Court approval.

The PATRIOT Act also radically expanded "National Security Letter" powers, authorizing the FBI to demand records without prior court approval. These letters, accompanied by gag orders preventing recipients from speaking about them, became a powerful tool for domestic surveillance with minimal oversight.

New Agencies and New Powers

"The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help."

- President Ronald Reagan

The U.S. government underwent its "largest restructuring since 1947" with the creation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in 2003, uniting 22 different agencies under an integrated federal security apparatus. This new behemoth included agencies like the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), which implemented increasingly invasive screening procedures for air travelers.

The TSA's Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques (SPOT) program, later rebranded as "Behavioral Detection and Analysis," flagged travelers as potential security threats based on innocuous behaviors like wearing "improper attire for the location" or gazing down. Meanwhile, the Secure Flight program requires airlines to collect passenger data and transmit it to TSA before departure, creating problems with false matches that can lead to repeated delays, secondary screening, or boarding denials.

The TSA has demonstrated a consistent and alarming failure to fulfill its core mission of preventing dangerous items from passing through security checkpoints, with undercover Homeland Security "Red Teams" successfully smuggling weapons and fake explosives past TSA agents in 67 out of 70 tests - an abysmal 95% failure rate. These failures have been a recurring issue, as previous audits found screeners in Los Angeles and Chicago failed to catch 75% and 60% of fake explosives respectively in 2006.

Despite these failures, the TSA has never caught an actual terrorist; the only semi-successful post-9/11 airborne terrorists, Richard Reid (the "shoe bomber") and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (the "underwear bomber"), boarded their aircraft in foreign airports where the TSA does not operate. Meanwhile, the agency has been plagued by criminal behavior among its own employees, with background check processes so flawed that the agency "lost background questionnaires, failed to run some employee fingerprints through a national crime database and was unable to complete background checks," and incidents like a Kennedy airport screener arrested for allegedly stealing $6,000 from a passenger.

Thousands of people have been arrested at airport checkpoints since the feds took over security in February 2002, but these arrests are primarily for minor infractions rather than terrorism prevention, with the TSA's SPOT program apprehending only 1,083 criminals between 2004 and 2008 out of two billion passengers, leading critics to characterize the agency as an "awful example of government in action" that has become known for "mismanagement, dubious investments, and security failures."

Targeted Communities and Profiling

Many post-9/11 measures disproportionately affected Muslim Americans and other minority communities. The National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS) was a defunct Bush-era registry that specifically targeted Arab men. Those targeted by NSEERS were required to leave the United States through specified ports, with anyone failing to comply facing arrest and deportation. Though DHS stopped using NSEERS in 2011 after concluding it was redundant and formally removed its regulations in 2016, the program represented a "massive profiling campaign targeting individuals based on their Muslim religion and ethnicity."

The PATRIOT Act's "over-broad definition of domestic terrorism" has been used to target political and religious activities, undermining "the principles of free speech, due process, and equal protection under the law." While initially targeting mainly non-citizens, cases like those of citizens Jose Padilla and Yaser Esam Hamdi demonstrated that these threats were not confined to those lacking American citizenship.

The Ratchet Effect of Security Measures

Many of the most invasive security programs have been quietly abandoned after proving ineffective. In 2004, DHS scrapped its Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System II, which was designed to assign a terrorism risk score to every commercial air passenger. The Multistate Anti-Terrorism Information Exchange, a data-mining and information sharing system, ceased operations in 2005. Fusion Centers, which collect and analyze intelligence from local, state, and federal agencies, were "roundly criticized in a bipartisan 2012 U.S. Senate investigation" that found they had "yielded little, if any, benefit to federal counterterrorism intelligence efforts" while releasing reports that were "useless or corrosive of civil liberties".

Despite these terminations, the "ratchet effect" of government expansion means many provisions remain. Many provisions of the PATRIOT Act are still in effect, including those that allow expanded surveillance. The government's response to 9/11 created "marked expansions of government that have weakened constraints on government and eroded our liberties," many of which are now "so integrated into daily life that we no longer recognize them."

The Chilling Effect on Democracy

Perhaps most troubling is the indirect chilling effect on fundamental rights. The new paradigm encouraged arrests for minor infractions like "spitting on the sidewalk" or immigration offenses, increased surveillance of religious and dissident groups, and ramped up use of laws barring even benign support for organizations said to engage in terrorism. These changes put pressure on activities long thought to be protected by the First Amendment.

While the number of people directly affected by these changes was small, "the indirect chilling effect on free speech, association rights and religious freedom was impossible to measure." The PATRIOT Act contained provisions that would "chill or even criminalize people's legitimate expressions of their political views," fundamentally altering the relationship between citizens and their government.

Who Won the War on Terror?

According to the 9/11 Commission Report and other official investigations, al-Qaeda spent under $500,000 to plan and execute the September 11 attacks. The United States spent $8.8 trillion in response. That means we spent $17.6 million for every dollar al-Qaeda spent. The asymmetry is absurd.

We spent that money killing people, destroying infrastructure, (and then rebuilding it!) in foreign lands when we could have instead spent it uplifting the lives of our fellow citizens and improving our infrastructure domestically.

Al-Qaeda won the War on Terror and it wasn't even close.

The Taliban returned to power following the U.S. military withdrawal, which was completed on August 30, 2021, after nearly 20 years of conflict. This power shift was significant because the Taliban and al-Qaeda have maintained a long-standing relationship since the 1990s.

Following the Taliban's return to power, al-Qaeda has been able to:

• Operate training camps in at least a dozen provinces across Afghanistan
• Reestablish a presence in the country after being significantly weakened during the U.S. military campaign
• Work alongside Taliban forces, with some al-Qaeda fighters embedding in Taliban units

President George W. Bush addressed Congress just days after the attacks:

Americans are asking: Why do they hate us?

They hate what we see right here in this chamber - a democratically elected government. Their leaders are self-appointed. They hate our freedoms - our freedom of religion, our freedom of speech, our freedom to vote and assemble and disagree with each other.

It was so appealing to believe this bullshit at the time, and in hindsight the aftermath of how it was used to shoot ourselves in the foot is appalling. We curtailed many of our own freedoms in response to people who supposedly hated our freedoms!

The War on Terror was not a war against people, it was a war against an ideology rooted in hatred and violence. Violence begets violence, and our disproportionate response only resulted in multiplying the number of people who got sucked into that ideology. America failed to kill terrorism - it arguably achieved the opposite by fueling the flames.

Looking Forward

As we reflect upon the well-intentioned but misguided response to 9/11, we must ask ourselves difficult questions about the balance between liberty and security.

Ceding freedom is a one-way street; no authority that is granted expanded powers should ever be expected to give them up.

"Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program."

- Milton Friedman

The true measure of our response to 9/11 will not be found in the security measures implemented, but in whether we can reclaim the liberties that were sacrificed out of fear. Only by understanding the full scope of what we've lost can we hope to restore what was once taken for granted: a nation where freedom, not fear, guides our policies and our lives.

"If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea."

- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

I'm not writing this to prescribe a specific course of action. I don't think the problem with the trajectory of our country is any one particular decision. I think the problem is the subtle degradation of our ethos over many generations - the racheting of authoritarianism that clamps down another notch as each generation passes away and fails to instill a yearning for freedom in its children. Some day, as tends to happen with the rise and fall of every empire, a breaking point will be reached.

Never forget.