Entries Tagged "fear"

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Scaring the Senate Intelligence Committee

This is unconscionable:

At Tuesday’s hearing, Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California and chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, asked Mr. Blair [the Director of National Intelligence] to assess the possibility of an attempted attack in the United States in the next three to six months.

He replied, “The priority is certain, I would say”—a response that was reaffirmed by the top officials of the C.I.A. and the F.B.I.

I don’t know what “the priority is certain” actually means, but now everyone is reporting that these agencies claim there will be a terrorist attack in the U.S. during the next six months.

Posted on February 5, 2010 at 11:59 AM • View Comments

The Comparative Risk of Terrorism

Good essay from the Wall Street Journal:

It might be unrealistic to expect the average citizen to have a nuanced grasp of statistically based risk analysis, but there is nothing nuanced about two basic facts:

(1) America is a country of 310 million people, in which thousands of horrible things happen every single day; and

(2) The chances that one of those horrible things will be that you’re subjected to a terrorist attack can, for all practical purposes, be calculated as zero.

Consider that on this very day about 6,700 Americans will die…. Consider then that around 1,900 of the Americans who die today will be less than 65, and that indeed about 140 will be children. Approximately 50 Americans will be murdered today, including several women killed by their husbands or boyfriends, and several children who will die from abuse and neglect. Around 85 of us will commit suicide, and another 120 will die in traffic accidents.

[…]

Indeed, if one does not utter the magic word “terrorism,” the notion that it is actually in the best interests of the country for the government to do everything possible to keep its citizens safe becomes self-evident nonsense. Consider again some of the things that will kill 6,700 Americans today. The country’s homicide rate is approximately six times higher than that of most other developed nations; we have 15,000 more murders per year than we would if the rate were comparable to that of otherwise similar countries. Americans own around 200 million firearms, which is to say there are nearly as many privately owned guns as there are adults in the country. In addition, there are about 200,000 convicted murderers walking free in America today (there have been more than 600,000 murders in America over the past 30 years, and the average time served for the crime is about 12 years).

Given these statistics, there is little doubt that banning private gun ownership and making life without parole mandatory for anyone convicted of murder would reduce the homicide rate in America significantly. It would almost surely make a major dent in the suicide rate as well: Half of the nation’s 31,000 suicides involve a handgun. How many people would support taking both these steps, which together would save exponentially more lives than even a—obviously hypothetical—perfect terrorist-prevention system? Fortunately, very few. (Although I admit a depressingly large number might support automatic life without parole.)

Or consider traffic accidents. All sorts of measures could be taken to reduce the current rate of automotive carnage from 120 fatalities a day—from lowering speed limits, to requiring mechanisms that make it impossible to start a car while drunk, to even more restrictive measures. Some of these measures may well be worth taking. But the point is that at present we seem to consider 43,000 traffic deaths per year an acceptable cost to pay for driving big fast cars.

Kevin Drum takes issue with the analysis:

Two things. First, this line of argument—that terrorism is statistically harmless compared to lots of other activities—will never work. For better or worse, it just won’t. So we should knock it off.

Second, even in the realm of pure logic it really doesn’t hold water. The fundamental fear of terrorism is that it’s not just random or unintentional, like car accidents or (for most of us) the threat of homicide. It’s carried out by people with a purpose. The panic caused by the underwear bomber wasn’t so much over the prospect of a planeload of casualties, it was over the reminder that al-Qaeda is still out there and still eager to expand its reach and kill thousands if we ever decide to let our guard down a little bit.

So even if you agree with Campos, as I do, that overreaction to al-Qaeda’s efforts is dumb and counterproductive, it’s perfectly reasonable to be more afraid of a highly motivated group with malign ideology and murderous intent than of things like traffic accidents or hurricanes. Suggesting otherwise, in some kind of hyperlogical a-death-is-a-death sense, strikes most people as naive and clueless. It’s an argument that probably hurts the cause of common sense more than it helps.

While I agree that arguing that terrorism is statistically harmless isn’t going to win any converts, I still think it’s an important point to make. We routinely overestimate rare risks and underestimate common risks, and the more we recognize that cognitive bias, the better chance we have for overcoming it.

And Kevin illustrates another cognitive bias: we fear risks deliberately perpetrated by other people more than we do risks that occur by accident. And while we fear the unknown—the “reminder that al-Qaeda is still out there and still eager to expand its reach and kill thousands if we ever decide to let our guard down a little bit”—more than the familiar, the reality is that automobiles will kill over 3,000 people this month, next month, and every month from now until the foreseeable future, irrespective of whether we let our guard down or not. There simply isn’t any reasonable scenario by which terrorism even approaches that death toll.

Yes, the risks are different. Your personal chance of dying in a car accident depends on where you live, how much you drive, whether or not you drink and drive, and so on. But your personal chance of dying in a terrorist attack also depends on these sorts of things: where you live, how often you fly, what you do for a living, and so on. (There’s also a control bias at work: we underestimate the risk in situations where we’re in control, or think we’re in control—like driving—and overestimate the risks in situations where we’re not in control.) But as a nation we get to set our priorities, and decide how to spend our money. No one is suggesting we ignore the risks of terrorism—and making people feel safe is a good thing to do—but it makes no sense to focus so much effort and money on it when there are far worse risks to Americans.

Jeffrey Rosen wrote about this last year. And similar sentiments from Baroness Murphy of the British House of Lords.

Remember, the terrorists want us to be terrorized, and they’ve chosen this tactic precisely because we have all these cognitive biases that magnify their actions. We can fight back by refusing to be terroroized.

Posted on January 12, 2010 at 6:15 AM • View Comments

Post-Underwear-Bomber Airport Security

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.

Posted on January 7, 2010 at 1:18 PM • View Comments

David Brooks on Resilience in the Face of Security Imperfection

David Brooks makes some very good points in this New York Times op-ed from last week:

All this money and technology seems to have reduced the risk of future attack. But, of course, the system is bound to fail sometimes. Reality is unpredictable, and no amount of computer technology is going to change that. Bureaucracies are always blind because they convert the rich flow of personalities and events into crude notations that can be filed and collated. Human institutions are always going to miss crucial clues because the information in the universe is infinite and events do not conform to algorithmic regularity.

[…]

In a mature nation, President Obama could go on TV and say, “Listen, we’re doing the best we can, but some terrorists are bound to get through.” But this is apparently a country that must be spoken to in childish ways. The original line out of the White House was that the system worked. Don’t worry, little Johnny.

When that didn’t work the official line went to the other extreme. “I consider that totally unacceptable,” Obama said. I’m really mad, Johnny. But don’t worry, I’ll make it all better.

[…]

For better or worse, over the past 50 years we have concentrated authority in centralized agencies and reduced the role of decentralized citizen action. We’ve done this in many spheres of life. Maybe that’s wise, maybe it’s not. But we shouldn’t imagine that these centralized institutions are going to work perfectly or even well most of the time. It would be nice if we reacted to their inevitable failures not with rabid denunciation and cynicism, but with a little resiliency, an awareness that human systems fail and bad things will happen and we don’t have to lose our heads every time they do.

There’s a pervasive belief in this society that perfection is possible. So if something bad occurs, it can never be because we just got unlucky. It must be because something went wrong and someone is at fault, and therefore things must be fixed. Sometimes, though, this simply isn’t true. Sometimes it’s better not to fix things: either there is no fix, or the fix is more expensive than living with the problem, or the side effects of the fix are worse than the problem. And sometimes you can do everything right and have it still turn out wrong. Welcome to the real world.

EDITED TO ADD (1/8): Glenn Greenwald on “The Degrading Effects of Terrorism Fears.”

Posted on January 6, 2010 at 10:27 AM • View Comments

Matt Blaze on the New "Unpredictable" TSA Screening Measures

Interesting:

“Unpredictable” security as applied to air passenger screening means that sometimes (perhaps most of the time), certain checks that might detect terrorist activity are not applied to some or all passengers on any given flight. Passengers can’t predict or influence when or whether they are be subjected to any particular screening mechanism. And so, the strategy assumes, the would-be terrorist will be forced to prepare for every possible mechanism in the TSA’s arsenal, effectively narrowing his or her range of options enough to make any serious mischief infeasible.

But terrorist organizations—especially those employing suicide bombers—have very different goals and incentives from those of smugglers, fare beaters and tax cheats. Groups like Al Qaeda aim to cause widespread disruption and terror by whatever means they can, even at great cost to individual members. In particular, they are willing and able to sacrifice—martyr—the very lives of their solders in the service of that goal. The fate of any individual terrorist is irrelevant as long as the loss contributes to terror and disruption.

Paradoxically, the best terrorist strategy (as long as they have enough volunteers) under unpredictable screening may be to prepare a cadre of suicide bombers for the least rigorous screening to which they might be subjected, and not, as the strategy assumes, for the most rigorous. Sent on their way, each will either succeed at destroying a plane or be caught, but either outcome serves the terrorists’ objective.

The problem is that catching someone under a randomized strategy creates a terrible dilemma for the authorities. What do we do when we detect a bomb-wielding terrorist whose device was discovered through the enhanced, randomly applied screening procedure?

EDITED TO ADD (1/5): In this blog post, a reader of Andrew Sullivan’s blog argues that the terrorist didn’t care if he blew the plane up or not, that he went back to his seat instead of detonating the explosive in the toilet precisely because he wanted his fellow passengers to see his attempt—just in case it failed.

Posted on January 5, 2010 at 11:41 AM • View Comments

Emotional Epidemiology

This, from The New England Journal of Medicine, sounds familiar:

This is the story line for most headline-grabbing illnesses—HIV, Ebola virus, SARS, typhoid. These diseases capture our imagination and ignite our fears in ways that more prosaic illnesses do not. These dramatic stakes lend themselves quite naturally to thriller books and movies; Dustin Hoffman hasn’t starred in any blockbusters about emphysema or dysentery.

When the inoculum of dramatic illness is first introduced into society, the public psyche rapidly becomes infected. Almost like an IgE-mediated histamine release, there is an immediate flooding of fear, even if the illness—like Ebola—is infinitely less likely to cause death than, say, a run-in with the Second Avenue bus. This immediate fear of the unknown was what had all my patients demanding the as-yet-unproduced H1N1 vaccine last spring.

As the novel disease establishes itself within society, a certain amount of emotional tolerance is created. H1N1 infection waxed and waned over the summer, and my patients grew less anxious. There was, of course, no medical basis for this decreased vigilance. Unusual risk groups and atypical seasonality should, in fact, have raised concern. By late summer, the perceived mysteriousness of H1N1 had receded, and the number of messages on my clinic phone followed suit.

But emotional epidemiology does not remain static. As autumn rolled around, I sensed a peeved expectation from my patients that this swine flu problem should have been solved already. The fact that it wasn’t “solved,” that the medical profession seemed somehow to be dithering, created an uneasy void. Not knowing whether to succumb to panic or to indifference, patients instead grew suspicious.

Posted on December 9, 2009 at 6:43 AM • View Comments

Fear and Public Perception

This 1996 interview with psychiatrist Robert DuPont was part of a Frontline program called “Nuclear Reaction.”

He’s talking about the role fear plays in the perception of nuclear power. It’s a lot of the sorts of things I say, but particularly interesting is this bit on familiarity and how it reduces fear:

You see, we sited these plants away from metropolitan areas to “protect the public” from the dangers of nuclear power. What we did when we did that was move the plants away from the people, so they became unfamiliar. The major health effect, adverse health effect of nuclear power is not radiation. It’s fear. And by siting them away from the people, we insured that that would be maximized. If we’re serious about health in relationship to nuclear power, we would put them in downtown, big cities, so people would see them all the time. That is really important, in terms of reducing the fear. Familiarity is the way fear is reduced. No question. It’s not done intellectually. It’s not done by reading a book. It’s done by being there and seeing it and talking to the people who work there.

So, among other reasons, terrorism is scary because it’s so rare. When it’s more common—England during the Troubles, Israel today—people have a more rational reaction to it.

My recent essay on fear and overreaction.

Posted on November 27, 2009 at 8:25 AM • View Comments

A Useful Side-Effect of Misplaced Fear

A study in the British Journal of Criminology makes the point that drink-spiking date-raping is basically an urban legend:

Abstract. There is a stark contrast between heightened perceptions of risk associated with drug-facilitated sexual assault (DFSA) and a lack of evidence that this is a widespread threat. Through surveys and interviews with university students in the United Kingdom and United States, we explore knowledge and beliefs about drink-spiking and the linked threat of sexual assault. University students in both locations are not only widely sensitized to the issue, but substantial segments claim first- or second-hand experience of particular incidents. We explore students’ understanding of the DFSA threat in relationship to their attitudes concerning alcohol, binge-drinking, and responsibility for personal safety. We suggest that the drink-spiking narrative has a functional appeal in relation to the contemporary experience of young women’s public drinking.

In an article on the study in The Telegraph, the authors said:

Among young people, drink spiking stories have attractive features that could “help explain” their disproportionate loss of control after drinking alcohol, the study found.

Dr Burgess said: “Our findings suggest guarding against drink spiking has also become a way for women to negotiate how to watch out for each other in an environment where they might well lose control from alcohol consumption.”

[…]

“As Dr Burgess observes, it is not scientific evidence which keeps the drug rape myth alive but the fact that it serves so many useful functions.”

Basically, the hypothesis is that perpetuating the fear of drug-rape allows parents and friends to warn young women off excessive drinking without criticizing their personal choices. The fake bogeyman lets people avoid talking about the real issues.

Posted on November 17, 2009 at 5:58 AM • View Comments

Public Reactions to Terrorist Threats

Interesting research:

For the last five years we have researched the connection between times of terrorist threats and public opinion. In a series of tightly designed experiments, we expose subsets of research participants to a news story not unlike the type that aired last week. We argue that attitudes, evaluations, and behaviors change in at least three politically-relevant ways when terror threat is more prominent in the news. Some of these transformations are in accord with conventional wisdom concerning how we might expect the public to react. Others are more surprising, and more disconcerting in their implications for the quality of democracy.

One way that public opinion shifts is toward increased expressions of distrust. In some ways this strategy has been actively promoted by our political leaders. The Bush administration repeatedly reminded the public to keep eyes and ears open to help identify dangerous persons. A strategy of vigilance has also been endorsed by the new secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano.

Nonetheless, the breadth of increased distrust that the public puts into practice is striking. Individuals threatened by terrorism become less trusting of others, even their own neighbors. Other studies have shown that they become less supportive of the rights of Arab and Muslim Americans. In addition, we found that such effects extend to immigrants and, as well, to a group entirely remote from the subject of terrorism: gay Americans. The specter of terrorist threat creates ruptures in our social fabric, some of which may be justified as necessary tactics in the fight against terrorism and others that simply cannot.

Another way public opinion shifts under a terrorist threat is toward inflated evaluations of certain leaders. To look for strong leadership makes sense: crises should impel us toward leadership bold enough to confront the threat and strong enough to protect us from it. But the public does more than call for heroes in times of crisis. It projects leadership qualities onto political figures, with serious political consequences.

In studies conducted in 2004, we found that individuals threatened by terrorism perceived George W. Bush as more charismatic and stronger than did non-threatened individuals. This projection of leadership had important consequences for voting decisions. Individuals threatened by terrorism were more likely to base voting decisions on leadership qualities rather than on their own issue positions or partisanship. You did read that correctly. Threatened individuals responded with elevated evaluations of Bush’s capacity for leadership and then used those inflated evaluations as the primary determinant in their voting decision.

These findings did not just occur among Republicans, but also among Independents and Democrats. All partisan groups who perceived Bush as more charismatic were also less willing to blame him for policy failures such as faulty intelligence that led to the war in Iraq.

[…]

A third way public opinion shifts in response to terrorism is toward greater preferences for policies that protect the homeland, even at the expense of civil liberties, and active engagement against terrorists abroad. Such a strategy was advocated and implemented by the Bush administration. Again, however, we found that preferences shifted toward these objectives regardless of one’s partisan stripes and, as well, outside the U.S.

Nothing surprising here. Fear makes people deferential, docile, and distrustful, and both politicians and marketers have learned to take advantage of this.

Jennifer Merolla and Elizabeth Zechmeister have written a book, Democracy at Risk: How Terrorist Threats Affect the Public. I haven’t read it yet.

Posted on November 16, 2009 at 6:39 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.