This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, December 18th, 2008.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Over-emphasizing the terrorist threat not only can give rise to a loss of liberty at home, but it can also enhance the profile

of respectability of the terrorist groups themselves.

So how do we react appropriately to terrorism without minimizing the risk associated with it.

Jim Harper, Director of Information Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, offers a few comments.

In January, Cato will host a two-day conference shaping the Obama administration's

Counterterrorism Strategy and sign up to attend at Cato.org slash

Counterterrorism.

Well, one of the most important lenses through which to look at terrorism is the strategic

lens.

To hear some talk about terrorists, they do have huge arsenals of actual weapons and weapons of mass destruction, which is an ambiguous and mostly inaccurate term about many weapons that people put under that umbrella.

What's the weapon that they do under that umbrella.

What's the weapon that they do have, though?

It's communication.

That is, more than direct attacks,

terrorism threatens overreaction.

And terrorist communications to us,

and our communications to terrorists

are an important part of the battle.

So let's unpack briefly what the strategic logic of terrorism is.

Essentially, and it's hard to generalize because, and people too often do generalize about terrorists because there are

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