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A Navy seal—actually a sea lion—took less than a minute to find a fake mine under a pier near San Francisco’s AT&T Park.
A dolphin quickly located a terrorist lurking in the black water before another sea lion, using a device carried in its mouth, cuffed the pretend saboteur’s ankle so authorities could reel him in.
On the New York Times Room for Debate Blog, I—along with several other people—was asked about how to prevent terrorist attacks in crowded areas. This is my response.
In the wake of Saturday’s failed Times Square car bombing, it’s natural to ask how we can prevent this sort of thing from happening again. The answer is stop focusing on the specifics of what actually happened, and instead think about the threat in general.
Think about the security measures commonly proposed. Cameras won’t help. They don’t prevent terrorist attacks, and their forensic value after the fact is minimal. In the Times Square case, surely there’s enough other evidence—the car’s identification number, the auto body shop the stolen license plates came from, the name of the fertilizer store—to identify the guy. We will almost certainly not need the camera footage. The images released so far, like the images in so many other terrorist attacks, may make for exciting television, but their value to law enforcement officers is limited.
Check points won’t help, either. You can’t check everybody and everything. There are too many people to check, and too many train stations, buses, theaters, department stores and other places where people congregate. Patrolling guards, bomb-sniffing dogs, chemical and biological weapons detectors: they all suffer from similar problems. In general, focusing on specific tactics or defending specific targets doesn’t make sense. They’re inflexible; possibly effective if you guess the plot correctly, but completely ineffective if you don’t. At best, the countermeasures just force the terrorists to make minor changes in their tactic and target.
It’s much smarter to spend our limited counterterrorism resources on measures that don’t focus on the specific. It’s more efficient to spend money on investigating and stopping terrorist attacks before they happen, and responding effectively to any that occur. This approach works because it’s flexible and adaptive; it’s effective regardless of what the bad guys are planning for next time.
After the Christmas Day airplane bombing attempt, I was asked how we can better protect our airplanes from terrorist attacks. I pointed out that the event was a security success—the plane landed safely, nobody was hurt, a terrorist was in custody—and that the next attack would probably have nothing to do with explosive underwear. After the Moscow subway bombing, I wrote that overly specific security countermeasures like subway cameras and sensors were a waste of money.
Now we have a failed car bombing in Times Square. We can’t protect against the next imagined movie-plot threat. Isn’t it time to recognize that the bad guys are flexible and adaptive, and that we need the same quality in our countermeasures?
I know, nothing I haven’t said many times before.
Steven Simon likes cameras, although his arguments are more movie-plot than real. Michael Black, Noah Shachtman, Michael Tarr, and Jeffrey Rosen all write about the limitations of security cameras. Paul Ekman wants more people. And Richard Clarke has a nice essay about how we shouldn’t panic.
This is funny:
The world has been placed on a heightened security alert following reports that New Age terrorists have harnessed the power of homeopathy for evil. “Homeopathic weapons represent a major threat to world peace,” said President Barack Obama, “they might not cause any actual damage but the placebo effect could be quite devastating.”
[…]
Homeopathic bombs are comprised of 99.9% water but contain the merest trace element of explosive. The solution is then repeatedly diluted so as to leave only the memory of the explosive in the water molecules. According to the laws of homeopathy, the more that the water is diluted, the more powerful the bomb becomes.
[…]
“A homeopathic attack could bring entire cities to a standstill,” said BBC Security Correspondent, Frank Gardner. “Large numbers of people could easily become convinced that they have been killed and hospitals would be unable to cope with the massive influx of the ‘walking suggestible.'”
It’s a little too close to reality, though.
They were afraid that they might contain pipe bombs.
This is the correct reaction:
In any case, I suspect someone somewhere just panicked at the possibility that something might explode near the President on his watch, since the whole operation has the finesse of a teenage stoner shoving his pot paraphernalia under the bed and desperately trying to clear the air with a copy of “Maxim” when he hears his parents coming home.
When asked by Gothamist, their precinct contact replied: “No, they just did this because the president was coming and they didn’t want anything on the sidewalks. You’re not supposed to lock you bike to signposts anyway, they have those new bike racks you’re supposed to use.”
I’ll bet you anything that they didn’t leave the bicycles that were locked to the racks.
Is MI5 playing a joke on us?
Female homicide bombers are being fitted with exploding breast implants which are almost impossible to detect, British spies have reportedly discovered.
[…]
MI5 has also discovered that extremists are inserting the explosives into the buttocks of some male bombers.
“Women suicide bombers recruited by Al Qaeda are known to have had the explosives inserted in their breasts under techniques similar to breast enhancing surgery,” Terrorist expert Joseph Farah claims.
They’re “known to have” this? I doubt it. More likely, they could be:
Radical Islamist plastic surgeons could be carrying out the implant operations in lawless areas of Pakistan, security sources are said to warned.
They also could be having tea with their families. They could be building killer robots with lasers shooting out of their eyes.
I love the poor Photoshop job in this article from The Sun.
Perhaps we should just give up. When this sort of hysterical nonsense becomes an actual news story, the terrorists have won.
Still experimental:
The team propose using a particle accelerator to alternately smash ionised hydrogen molecules and deuterium ions into targets of carbon and boron respectively. The collisions produce beams of gamma rays of various energies as well as neutrons. These beams are then passed through the cargo.
By measuring the way the beams are absorbed, Goldberg and company say they can work out whether the cargo contains explosives or nuclear materials. And they say they can do it at the rate of 20 containers per hour.
That’s an ambitious goal that presents numerous challenges.
For example, the beam currents will provide relatively sparse data so the team will have to employ a technique called few-view tomography to fill in the gaps. It will also mean that each container will have to be zapped several times. That may not be entirely desirable for certain types of goods such as food and equipment with delicate electronics.
Just how beams of gamma rays and neutrons affect these kinds of goods is something that will have to be determined
Then there is the question of false positives. One advantage of a machine like this is that it has several scanning modes is that if one reveals something suspicious, it can switch to another to look in more detail. That should build up a decent picture of the cargo’s contents and reduce false positives.
The notion that U.S. intelligence should have “connected the dots,” and caught Abdulmutallab, isn’t going away. This is a typical example:
So you’d need come “articulable facts” which could “reasonably warrant a determination” that the guy may be a terrorist based on his behavior. And one assumes his behavior would have to catch the attention of the authorities, correct?
Well let’s see.
- His dad, a former minister in Nigeria, informed the US embassy there that his son had been radicalized (the dad obviously had a reason for concern).
- US intelligence had been following him for a while, dubbing him “the Nigerian” (one assumes there was a reason).
- He was on a watch list (one assumes there was a reason).
- He had been banned from Britain (yup, one assumes there was a reason).
- The British intelligence service had identified him to our intelligence agencies in 2008 as a potential threat (sigh, uh, yeah, reason).
- He’d just visited Yemen, an al Qaeda hotbed (given the first 5, one can reasonably guess at the reason).
- He bought a one-way ticket to the United States in Africa through Europe (red flag 1).
- He paid cash (red flag 2).
- He checked no luggage (red flag 3).
…are those or are those not “articulable facts” which should have “reasonably warranted a determination” that this guy fit the profile of someone who is usually up too no good? No?
Kevin Drum responds to this line by line:
…the more we learn, the less this seems to be holding water. Let’s go through the list one by one:
- Jim Arkedis, a former intelligence analyst: “For the record, 99 percent of the time, walk-in sources to U.S. Embassies are of poor-to-unknown quality. That includes friends and family members who walk into the embassy and claim their relatives are potential dangers. Why? Family relations are tangled webs, and who really knows if your uncle just might want you arrested in revenge for that unsettled family land dispute.”
- This is true. But we didn’t have a name, only a tip that “a Nigerian” might be planning an attack.
- Yes. But as the LA Times puts it, he was on a list of half a million people with “suspected extremist links but who are not considered threats.”
- Yes, but not because of any suspected terrorist ties. From the New York Times: “[Home Secretary Alan] Johnson said Mr. Abdulmutallab’s application to renew his student visa was rejected in May after officials had determined that the academic course he gave as his reason for returning to Britain was fake….The rejection of the visa renewal appeared to have been part of a wider process initiated by British authorities this year when they began to crack down on so-called fake colleges that officials said had been established in large numbers across Britain in an attempt to elude tightened immigration controls.”
- No, they didn’t. From the Telegraph: “Diplomatic sources said that the Prime Minister’s spokesman had intended to refer to information gleaned by MI5 after the Christmas Day incident following an exhaustive examination of records going back through Abdulmutallab’s time in Britain up to October 2008.”
- True.
- No, it was a roundtrip ticket.
- Nigeria and Ghana (where Abdulmutallab bought his ticket) are largely cash economies. Andrew Sprung tells us that Abdulmutallab “would certainly raise no alarms by paying cash.”
- This is apparently true.
I’d go even further on point 9. I fly 240,000 miles a year, and I almost never check luggage. And that goes double when flying in or out of the Third World. And I’ve also read that he didn’t have a coat, something else that—living in Minneapolis—I regularly see.
As I keep saying, everything is obvious in hindsight. After the fact, it’s easy to point to the bits of evidence and claim that someone should have “connected the dots.” But before the fact, when there are millions of dots—some important but the vast majority unimportant—uncovering plots is a lot harder.
I wrote in 2002:
The problem is that the dots can only be numbered after the fact. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s easy to draw lines from people in flight school here, to secret meetings in foreign countries there, over to interesting tips from foreign governments, and then to INS records. Before 9/11 it’s not so easy. Rather than thinking of intelligence as a simple connect-the-dots picture, think of it as a million unnumbered pictures superimposed on top of each other. Or a random-dot stereogram. Is it a lion, a tree, a cast iron stove, or just an unintelligible mess of dots? You try and figure it out.
It’s certainly possible that intelligence missed something that could have alerted them. And there have been reports saying that a misspelling of Abdulmutallab’s name caused the Department of State to miss an alert. (I’ve also heard, although I can’t find a link, that some database truncated his name because it was too long for the database field.) And I’m sure that a lot of the money we’re wasting on full body scanners and other airport security measures could be much better spent increasing our intelligence and investigation capabilities. But be careful before you claim something that’s obvious after the fact should have been obvious before the fact.
Excellent commentary from The Register:
As the smoke clears following the case of Umar Farouk Abdul Mutallab, the failed Christmas Day “underpants bomber” of Northwest Airlines Flight 253 fame, there are just three simple points for us Westerners to take away.
First: It is completely impossible to prevent terrorists from attacking airliners.
Second: This does not matter. There is no need for greater efforts on security.
Third: A terrorist set fire to his own trousers, suffering eyewateringly painful burns to what Australian cricket commentators sometimes refer to as the “groinal area”, and nobody seems to be laughing. What’s wrong with us?
In the headlong rush to “fix” security after the Underwear Bomber’s unsuccessful Christmas Day attack, there’s been far too little discussion about what worked and what didn’t, and what will and will not make us safer in the future.
The security checkpoints worked. Because we screen for obvious bombs, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab—or, more precisely, whoever built the bomb—had to construct a far less reliable bomb than he would have otherwise. Instead of using a timer or a plunger or a reliable detonation mechanism, as would any commercial user of PETN, he had to resort to an ad hoc and much more inefficient homebrew mechanism: one involving a syringe and 20 minutes in the lavatory and we don’t know exactly what else. And it didn’t work.
Yes, the Amsterdam screeners allowed Abdulmutallab onto the plane with PETN sewn into his underwear, but that’s not a failure, either. There is no security checkpoint, run by any government anywhere in the world, designed to catch this. It isn’t a new threat; it’s more than a decade old. Nor is it unexpected; anyone who says otherwise simply isn’t paying attention. But PETN is hard to explode, as we saw on Christmas Day.
Additionally, the passengers on the airplane worked. For years, I’ve said that exactly two things have made us safer since 9/11: reinforcing the cockpit door and convincing passengers that they need to fight back. It was the second of these that, on Christmas Day, quickly subdued Abdulmutallab after he set his pants on fire.
To the extent security failed, it failed before Abdulmutallab even got to the airport. Why was he issued an American visa? Why didn’t anyone follow up on his father’s tip? While I’m sure there are things to be improved and fixed, remember that everything is obvious in hindsight. After the fact, it’s easy to point to the bits of evidence and claim that someone should have “connected the dots.” But before the fact, when there are millions of dots—some important but the vast majority unimportant—uncovering plots is a lot harder.
Despite this, the proposed fixes focus on the details of the plot rather than the broad threat. We’re going to install full-body scanners, even though there are lots of ways to hide PETN—stuff it in a body cavity, spread it thinly on a garment—from the machines. We’re going to profile people traveling from 14 countries, even though it’s easy for a terrorist to travel from a different country. Seating requirements for the last hour of flight were the most ridiculous example.
The problem with all these measures is that they’re only effective if we guess the plot correctly. Defending against a particular tactic or target makes sense if tactics and targets are few. But there are hundreds of tactics and millions of targets, so all these measures will do is force the terrorists to make a minor modification to their plot.
It’s magical thinking: If we defend against what the terrorists did last time, we’ll somehow defend against what they do next time. Of course this doesn’t work. We take away guns and bombs, so the terrorists use box cutters. We take away box cutters and corkscrews, and the terrorists hide explosives in their shoes. We screen shoes, they use liquids. We limit liquids, they sew PETN into their underwear. We implement full-body scanners, and they’re going to do something else. This is a stupid game; we should stop playing it.
But we can’t help it. As a species, we’re hardwired to fear specific stories—terrorists with PETN underwear, terrorists on subways, terrorists with crop dusters—and we want to feel secure against those stories. So we implement security theater against the stories, while ignoring the broad threats.
What we need is security that’s effective even if we can’t guess the next plot: intelligence, investigation, and emergency response. Our foiling of the liquid bombers demonstrates this. They were arrested in London, before they got to the airport. It didn’t matter if they were using liquids—which they chose precisely because we weren’t screening for them—or solids or powders. It didn’t matter if they were targeting airplanes or shopping malls or crowded movie theaters. They were arrested, and the plot was foiled. That’s effective security.
Finally, we need to be indomitable. The real security failure on Christmas Day was in our reaction. We’re reacting out of fear, wasting money on the story rather than securing ourselves against the threat. Abdulmutallab succeeded in causing terror even though his attack failed.
If we refuse to be terrorized, if we refuse to implement security theater and remember that we can never completely eliminate the risk of terrorism, then the terrorists fail even if their attacks succeed.
This essay previously appeared on Sphere, the AOL.com news site.
EDITED TO ADD (1/8): Similar sentiment.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.
