This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, January 13, 2009.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Opening the Cato Institute's two-day counterterrorism conference on Monday, the director

of Cato's information policy studies, Jim Harper. He discussed over-reaction to terrorism

what is required to avoid it.

So since 911, something has obviously gone right and the proof is in the pudding.

That is the fact that we haven't suffered successive

attacks. That being said, we don't have a good sense of what has worked for us, what has given us

this good fortune. So it's impossible to endorse any particular program or activity.

That's all a matter of study on panels at this conference and into the future.

We want to pressure terrorists everywhere they are, but we want to do so in just the right degree.

If we go too far, we end up giving them rewards, and that's a key point.

We end up giving them rewards if we overreact or

misdirect our responses. So let me turn now to a sort of taxonomy of the

rewards we give terrorism. I said I wanted this to be a publicly

accessible theory and now I've said the word taxonomy

So I'm contradicting myself in some degree

But I think you can categorize the forms of overreaction we can begin to analyze them

understand them so that we can avoid them in the future.

And the first I think most and most obvious of course is waste of blood and

treasure.

Terrorists with geopolitical aims with grievances, if we react to them by wasting our own blood and

...