Bruce Schneier began his career as a technical expert on cryptography. In recent years he has broadened his base and become a widely-quoted pundit on a variety of security issues. Like many such he's always articulate, often inconsistent, and rarely deep. But in a 2006 Wired magazine essay ("Refuse to be Terrorized" [1]) he hits the nail on the head as to how to respond to terrorism, or indeed to any over-hyped "threat":

The surest defense against terrorism is to refuse to be terrorized. Our job is to recognize that terrorism is just one of the risks we face, and not a particularly common one at that. And our job is to fight those politicians who use fear as an excuse to take away our liberties and promote security theater that wastes money and doesn't make us any safer.

(cf. Terrorism and Philosophy (2001-10-11), Thermodynamics of Terrorism (2002-01-15), Probabilistic Tragedy (2003-03-12, CryptoGram (2003-12-23), Criminan Behavior (2004-01-08), Weight of Evidence (2004-03-21), ...) - ^z - 2008-07-16

(correlates: PrepetitionAndPrepeating, CryptoGram, Donald Knuth, ...)