Like most blog posts, this one isn’t terribly detailed. It provides five general criteria for creating a good terrorist plot, then suggests an inexpensive way of realizing these criteria. The suggestion: a series of coordinated sniper attacks around the nation (apparently Steven’s father came up with the idea during the DC sniper attacks in 2002).

Random shootings seem like a highly effective way of creating terror on the cheap, but perhaps there’s an even better idea out there. Steven thinks so, and ends his post by asking his readers for additional ideas. Reading over the comments, I didn’t see any great suggestions. Many of the comments posted, however, expressed outrage that he was openly giving ideas to terrorists. This is silly.

Steven’s idea is very simple. Any serious terrorist group could come up with it (and I’m sure other equally effective ideas) completely on their own. The fact that such terrorist acts have not taken place suggests that there simply aren’t that many people with the means to travel to the US who want to terrorize us. Also, when acts of terrorism do occur, it’s important to realize that they were thought up using just the sort of dry economic reasoning Steven suggests. What’s the cheapest way to create havoc? How can one time acts of violence create long term damage?

Despite years of foreign policy and media attention paid toward terrorism, most of it continues to give terrorists exactly what they want. It feeds our fear of terrorism and willingness to overreact, and empowers our government to waste our resources. Blog posts like Steven Levitt’s show us that there are other ways of discussing these issues. I just hope he doesn’t get fired.

Update: Levitt’s post had generated over 500 comments. As I said before, the times website desperately needs some sort of comment ranking system a la slashdot.