Entries Tagged "cameras"

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Preventing Terrorist Attacks in Crowded Areas

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.

Posted on May 4, 2010 at 1:31 PM • View Comments

Life Recorder

In 2006, writing about future threats on privacy, I described a life recorder:

A “life recorder” you can wear on your lapel that constantly records is still a few generations off: 200 gigabytes/year for audio and 700 gigabytes/year for video. It’ll be sold as a security device, so that no one can attack you without being recorded.

I can’t find a quote right now, but in talks I would say that this kind of technology would first be used by groups of people with diminished rights: children, soldiers, prisoners, and the non-lucid elderly.

It’s been proposed:

With GPS capabilities built into phones that can be made ever smaller, and the ability for these phones to transmit both sound and audio, isn’t it time to think about a wearable device that could be used to call for help and accurately report what was happening?

[…]

The device could contain cameras and microphones that activate if the device was triggered to create evidence that could locate an attacker and cause them to flee, an alarm sound that could help locate the victim and also help scare off an attacker, and a set of sensors that could detect everything from sudden deceleration to an irregular heartbeat or compromised breathing.

Just one sentence on the security and privacy issues:

Indeed, privacy concerns need to be addressed so that stalkers and predators couldn’t compromise the device.

Indeed.

Posted on April 19, 2010 at 6:30 AM • View Comments

New York and the Moscow Subway Bombing

People intent on preventing a Moscow-style terrorist attack against the New York subway system are proposing a range of expensive new underground security measures, some temporary and some permanent.

They should save their money – and instead invest every penny they’re considering pouring into new technologies into intelligence and old-fashioned policing.

Intensifying security at specific stations only works against terrorists who aren’t smart enough to move to another station. Cameras are useful only if all the stars align: The terrorists happen to walk into the frame, the video feeds are being watched in real time and the police can respond quickly enough to be effective. They’re much more useful after an attack, to figure out who pulled it off.

Installing biological and chemical detectors requires similarly implausible luck – plus a terrorist plot that includes the specific biological or chemical agent that is being detected.

What all these misguided reactions have in common is that they’re based on “movie-plot threats”: overly specific attack scenarios. They fill our imagination vividly, in full color with rich detail. Before long, we’re envisioning an entire story line, with or without Bruce Willis saving the day. And we’re scared.

It’s not that movie-plot threats are not worth worrying about. It’s that each one – Moscow’s subway attack, the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building, etc. – is too specific. These threats are infinite, and the bad guys can easily switch among them.

New York has thousands of possible targets, and there are dozens of possible tactics. Implementing security against movie-plot threats is only effective if we correctly guess which specific threat to protect against. That’s unlikely.

A far better strategy is to spend our limited counterterrorism resources on investigation and intelligence – and on emergency response. These measures don’t hinge on any specific threat; they don’t require us to guess the tactic or target correctly. They’re effective in a variety of circumstances, even nonterrorist ones.

The result may not be flashy or outwardly reassuring – as are pricey new scanners in airports. But the strategy will save more lives.

The 2006 arrest of the liquid bombers – who wanted to detonate liquid explosives to be brought onboard airliners traveling from England to North America – serves as an excellent example. The plotters were arrested in their London apartments, and their attack was foiled before they ever got to the airport.

It didn’t matter if they were using liquids or solids or gases. It didn’t even matter if they were targeting airports or shopping malls or theaters. It was a straightforward, although hardly simple, matter of following leads.

Gimmicky security measures are tempting – but they’re distractions we can’t afford. The Christmas Day bomber chose his tactic because it would circumvent last year’s security measures, and the next attacker will choose his tactic – and target – according to similar criteria. Spend money on cameras and guards in the subways, and the terrorists will simply modify their plot to render those countermeasures ineffective.

Humans are a species of storytellers, and the Moscow story has obvious parallels in New York. When we read the word “subway,” we can’t help but think about the system we use every day. This is a natural response, but it doesn’t make for good public policy. We’d all be safer if we rose above the simple parallels and the need to calm our fears with expensive and seductive new technologies – and countered the threat the smart way.

This essay originally appeared in the New York Daily News.

Posted on April 7, 2010 at 8:52 AM • View Comments

Security Cameras in the New York City Subways

The New York Times has an article about cameras in the subways. The article is all about how horrible it is that the cameras don’t work:

Moreover, nearly half of the subway system’s 4,313 security cameras that have been installed—in stations and tunnels throughout the system—do not work, because of either shoddy software or construction problems, say officials with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which operates the city’s bus, subway and train system.

I certainly agree that taxpayers should be upset when something they’ve purchased doesn’t function as expected. But way down at the bottom of the article, we find:

Even without the cameras, officials said crime in the transit system had dropped to a record low. In 1990, the system averaged 47.8 crimes a day, compared with 5.3 so far this year. “The subway system is safer than it’s ever been,” said Kevin Ortiz, an authority spokesman.

No data on how many crimes were solved by cameras, but we know from other studies that their effect on crime is minimal.

Posted on March 31, 2010 at 1:24 PM • View Comments

Acrobatic Thieves

Some movie-plot attacks actually happen:

They never touched the floor—that would have set off an alarm.

They didn’t appear on store security cameras. They cut a hole in the roof and came in at a spot where the cameras were obscured by advertising banners.

And they left with some $26,000 in laptop computers, departing the same way they came in—down a 3-inch gas pipe that runs from the roof to the ground outside the store.

EDITED TO ADD (4/13): Similar heists.

Posted on March 24, 2010 at 1:51 PM • View Comments

Nose Biometrics

Really:

Since they are hard to conceal, the study says, noses would work well for identification in covert surveillance.

The researchers say noses have been overlooked in the growing field of biometrics, studies into ways of identifying distinguishing traits in people.

“Noses are prominent facial features and yet their use as a biometric has been largely unexplored,” said the University of Bath’s Dr Adrian Evans.

“Ears have been looked at in detail, eyes have been looked at in terms of iris recognition but the nose has been neglected.”

The researchers used a system called PhotoFace, developed by researchers at the University of the West of England, Bristol and Imperial College, London, for the 3D scans.

Posted on March 10, 2010 at 1:47 PM • View Comments

More on the Al-Mabhouh Assassination

Interesting essay by a former CIA field officer on the al-Mabhouh assassination:

The truth is that Mr. Mabhouh’s assassination was conducted according to the book—a military operation in which the environment is completely controlled by the assassins. At least 25 people are needed to carry off something like this. You need “eyes on” the target 24 hours a day to ensure that when the time comes he is alone. You need coverage of the police—assassinations go very wrong when the police stumble into the middle of one. You need coverage of the hotel security staff, the maids, the outside of the hotel. You even need people in back-up accommodations in the event the team needs a place to hide.

I found this conclusion incredible:

I can only speculate about where exactly the hit went wrong. But I would guess the assassins failed to account for the marked advance in technology.

[…]

Not completely understanding advances in technology may be one explanation for the assassins nonchalantly exposing their faces to the closed-circuit TV cameras, one female assassin even smiling at one…. The other explanation—the assassins didn’t care whether their faces were identified—doesn’t seem plausible at all.

Does he really think that this professional a team simply didn’t realize that there were security cameras in airports and hotels? I think that the “other explanation” is not only plausible, it’s obvious.

The number of suspects is now at 27, by the way. And:

Also Monday, the sources said the UAE central bank is working with other nations to track funding and 14 credit cards—issued mostly by a United States bank—used by the suspects in different places, including the United States.

We’ll see how well these people covered their tracks.

EDITED TO ADD (3/3): Speculation that it’s Egypt or Jordan. I don’t believe it.

EDITED TO ADD (3/5): More commentary on the tactics. Speculation that it was Mossad.

Posted on March 2, 2010 at 5:55 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.