Numbers
3 July 2015
Some numbers to consider as UK seeks to become the first country to ban strong encryption of internet data.
Cameron mentions terrorists. Of course. The War on Terror! We must remain vigilant, even if it trumps people's right to privacy. This is well established around the world as the governments spy on us every day in every way. Unfortunately, as Cameron's spymasters have reported to him, they cannot read all that encrypted stuff, so that's where the naughty messages are.
"Simple!" says David Cameron, not averse to using a sledgehammer to crack open peanuts, "Let's just ban encryption!"
This got me thinking about who is the bigger danger to me, terrorists or governments. Having the entire 20th century to base things on, I've gone to the calculator and looked at the numbers.
Terrorist killings are not as easy as counting up 9/11 victims, because as anyone older than 40 with a memory will tell you, terrorists have been around for a lot longer than September 2001. Sri Lanka had Tamil Tigers; Che Guevara and Fidel Castro were terrorists, as were the ANC and Nelson Mandela. (This is not to say they were all wrong, but they were all terrorists.)
Anyway, we can estimate the total number of terrorist attacks by using this database. Many people will no doubt be surprised that the number of deaths in 9/11 were surpassed on many occasions by the annual terrorist toll in the years 1980 - 2000.
Taking the average of 1000 fatal attacks per year, at an average death rate of four per attack (I'm going on the high side here) that will give us 120,000 from 1970 to 2000. As seen on the graphs, terrorist killings prior to 1970 were statistically negligible, so if I include 30,000 from the first 70 years of, that will give us a conservatively high number of deaths by terrorists in the 20th century at 150,000.
Not many, considering how many billion people lived in the 20th century. (about 10 billion)
For killings by governments, I am including all war figures, since in every case soldiers were directed by their government to fight in them. Along with that, we need to add genocides: the Holocaust, Mao's Great Leap Forward, and Stalin's purges. The totals of just WWI and II added to those genocides gives us 340 million deaths, so I'm not even going to bother to add in the many killed in Korea, Vietnam, and all of the other wars. 340 m corpses is enough to contemplate.
If we simply divide 340,000,000 by 150,000 we get 2266.7.
From this, we can estimate that your government is 2266.7 times more likely to kill you than a terrorist.
And remember, that is a conservative estimate and doesn't even begin to count the number of people executed, or killed during arrest, in the entire century.
When your Prime Minister or President points to the War on Terror as an excuse to take away freedoms, point that number out to him.
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