Or: the simplest ways of killing people tend to be the most effective.

A raft of articles came out during Defcon showing that security vulnerabilities exist in some pacemakers, vulnerabilities which could allow attackers to load a pacemaker with arbitrary code. This is obviously worrying if you have a pacemaker implanted. It is equally self-evident that it is better to live in a world where pacemakers cannot be hacked. But how much worse is it to live in this unfortunately hackable world? Are pacemaker hackings likely to become the latest crime spree?

Electrical grid hackings provide a sobering example. Despite years of warning that the American electrical grid is vulnerable to cyber-attacks, the greatest threat to America’s electricity infrastructure remains… squirrels.

Hacking, whether it’s of the electricity grid or of pacemakers gets all the headlines. Meanwhile fatty foods and squirrels do all the real damage.

(Last year, 610,000 Americans died of heart disease and 0 died of hacked pacemakers.)

For all the media attention that novel cyberpunk methods of murder get, they seem to be rather ineffective for actual murder, as demonstrated by the paucity of murder victims. I think this is rather generalizable. Simple ways of killing people are very effective but not very scary and so don’t garner much attention. On the other hand, particularly novel or baroque methods of murder cause a lot of terror, even if almost no one who is scared of them will ever die of them.

I often demonstrate this point by comparing two terrorist organizations: Al Qaeda and Daesh (the so-called Islamic State). Both of these groups are brutally inhumane, think nothing of murder, and are made up of some of the most despicable people in the world. But their methodology couldn’t be more different.

Al Qaeda has a taste for large, complicated, baroque plans that, when they actually work, cause massive damage and change how people see the world for years. 9/11 remains the single deadliest terror attack in recorded history. This is what optimizing for terror looks like.

On the other hand, when Al Qaeda’s plans fail, they seem almost farcical. There’s something grimly amusing about the time that Al Qaeda may have tried to weaponize the bubonic plague and instead lost over 40 members when they were infected and promptly died (the alternative theory, that they caught the plague because of squalid living conditions, looks only slightly better).

(Had Al Qaeda succeeded and killed even a single westerner with the plague, people would have been utterly terrified for months, even though the plague is relatively treatable by modern means and would have trouble spreading in notably flea-free western countries.)

Daesh, on the other hand, prefers simple attacks. When guns are available, their followers use them. When they aren’t, they’ll rent vans and plough them into crowds. Most of Daesh’s violence occurs in Syria and Iraq, where they once controlled territory with unparalleled brutality. This is another difference in strategy (as Al Qaeda is outward facing, focused mostly on attacking “The West”). Focusing on Syria and Iraq, where the government lacks a monopoly on violence and they could originally operate with impunity, Daesh racked up a body count that surpassed Al Qaeda’s.

While Daesh has been effective in terms of body count, they haven’t really succeeded (in the west) in creating the lasting terror that Al Qaeda did. This is perhaps a symptom of their quotidian methods of murder. No one walked around scared of a Daesh attack and many of their murders were lost in the daily churn of the news cycle – especially the ones that happened in Syria and Iraq.

I almost wonder if it is impossible for attacks or murders by “normal” means to cause much terror beyond those immediately affected. Could hacked pacemakers remain terrifying if as many people died of them as gunshots? Does familiarity with a form of death remove terror, or are some methods of death inherently more terrible and terrifying than others?

(It is probably the case that both are true, that terror is some function of surprise, gruesomeness, and brutality, such that some things will always terrify us, while others are horrible, but have long since lost their edge.)

Terror for its own sake (or because people believe it is the best path to some objective) must be a compelling option to some, because otherwise everyone would stick to simple plans whenever they think violence will help them achieve their aims. I don’t want to stereotype too much, but most people who going around being terrorists or murders typically aren’t the brightest bulbs in the socket. The average killer doesn’t have the resources to hack your pacemaker and the average terrorist is going to have much better luck with a van than with a bomb. There are disadvantages to bombs! The average Pastun farmer or disaffected mujahedeen is not a very good chemist and homemade explosives are dangerous even to skilled chemists. Accidental detonations abound. If there wasn’t some advantage in terror to be had, no one would mess around with explosives when guns and vans can be easily found.

(Perhaps this advantage is in a multiplier effect of sorts. If you are trying to win a violent struggle directly, you have to kill everyone who stands in your way. Some people might believe that terror can short-circuit this and let them scare away some of their potential opponents. Historically, this hasn’t always worked.)

In the face of actors committed to terror, we should remember that our risk of dying by a particular method is almost inversely related to how terrifying we find it. Notable intimidators like Vladimir Putin or the Mossad kill people with nerve gasses, polonium, and motorcycle delivered magnetic bombs to sow fear. I can see either of them one day adding hacked pacemakers to their arsenal.

If you’ve pissed off the Mossad or Putin and would like to die in some way other than a hacked pacemaker, then by all means, go get a different one. Otherwise, you’re probably fine waiting for a software update. If, in the meantime, you don’t want to die, maybe try ignoring headlines and instead not owning a gun and skipping French fries. Statistically, there isn’t much that will keep you safer.

Coda

Our biases make it hard for us to treat things that are easy to remember as uncommon, which no doubt plays a role here. I wrote this post like this – full of rambles, parentheses, and long-winded examples – to try and convey the difficult intuition, that we should discount as likely to effect us any method of murder that seems shocking, but hard. Remember that most crimes are crimes of opportunity and most criminals are incompetent and you’ll never be surprised to hear the three most common murder weapons are guns, knives, and fists.