Less than ten years ago, two respected research engineers wrote a book about privacy and telecommunications. In large measure, that book, by Whitfield Diffie and Susan Landau, focused on cryptography -- the science of encrypting information -- and the Clinton administration's insistence on installing "escrow" devices, or backdoors into encryption systems, that only it could access.

There is an unquestionable need for clear thinking about suicide bombing. But thinking is muddied by the powerful emotions of horror and repulsion it properly stirs. Suicide bombing, as anthropologist Talal Asad notes, is not the most deadly weapon even in conflicts where it is endemic. Rather, the suicide attack is among the most effective ways of attaining another goal: the production of terror though the prospect of uncontrolled and indiscriminate violence. Reckoning with suicide bombing, therefore, means not just taking account of the tactic itself, but also the reactions it purposefully provokes.