Boxcutters, Garage Door Clickers and a Virus.

• Author: Magnuson, Stew
• Position: Editor's Notes

It has been two decades since 9/11 and like many people, the anniversary snuck up on me. I suspect many readers are asking themselves: has it really been 20 years?

As a journalist who has been reporting on defense and homeland security technology for the past two decades, there are three things to me that represent the last 20 years--box-cutters, garage door openers and a virus.

These three objects--along with the intangible human will --have helped shape recent U.S. history.

It has been said that a "failure of imagination" led to 9/11--that no Americans foresaw that airliners could be taken over by a bunch of fanatics using only boxcutters. They didn't have explosives or guns--only rudimentary knives found in arts and crafts stores that escaped the attention of airport screeners.

Of course, the 9/11 attackers had a bit more than boxcutters. They had a plan. They had some training on how to fly jets. But at the end of the day, the weapon used to take over the airliners was a sharp edge--something that dates back to the days of the cavemen.

And, they had human will. The attackers went down believing their heinous acts were justified.

Every action has a reaction, and what a reaction there was to 9/11.

The "failure of imagination" and boxcutters led lawmakers to imagine all sorts of scenarios where terrorists could attack the homeland and to allocate billions of dollars to protect us against some of these perceived threats.

It led to the creation of the Department of Homeland Security to administer these programs.

In DHS' early years, I covered many programs Congress mandated to thwart every plot that ever appeared in a Tom Clancy novel or James Bond movie. Many of them were colossal wastes of taxpayer dollars. It took a long time for the government to learn that using big data was more practical than, for example, scanning every one of the 7 million shipping containers entering the United States for an improvised nuclear bomb.

DHS has its critics, but there hasn't been an attack on the scale of 9/11 for 20 years. But the extremist ideology--and the human will to carry out terrorist attacks--remains.

Another reaction to the hijacking of airplanes with boxcutters was the invasion of Afghanistan, and later Iraq. And that's where garage door openers entered the scene.

Along with reporting on homeland security technology, I wrote about the scourge of roadside bombs. There were some three dozen identified methods of setting off an improvised...