Entries Tagged "overreactions"

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Counterterrorism Security Cost-Benefit Analysis

“Terror, Security, and Money: Balancing the Risks, Benefits, and Costs of Homeland Security,” by John Mueller and Mark Stewart:

Abstract:The cumulative increase in expenditures on US domestic homeland security over the decade since 9/11 exceeds one trillion dollars. It is clearly time to examine these massive expenditures applying risk assessment and cost-benefit approaches that have been standard for decades. Thus far, officials do not seem to have done so and have engaged in various forms of probability neglect by focusing on worst case scenarios; adding, rather than multiplying, the probabilities; assessing relative, rather than absolute, risk; and inflating terrorist capacities and the importance of potential terrorist targets. We find that enhanced expenditures have been excessive: to be deemed cost-effective in analyses that substantially bias the consideration toward the opposite conclusion, they would have to deter, prevent, foil, or protect against 1,667 otherwise successful Times-Square type attacks per year, or more than four per day. Although there are emotional and political pressures on the terrorism issue, this does not relieve politicians and bureaucrats of the fundamental responsibility of informing the public of the limited risk that terrorism presents and of seeking to expend funds wisely. Moreover, political concerns may be over-wrought: restrained reaction has often proved to be entirely acceptable politically.

Posted on April 6, 2011 at 6:03 AM • View Comments

Good Article About the Terrorist Non-Threat

From Reason:

Know thy enemy is an ancient principle of warfare. And if America had
heeded it, it might have refrained from a full-scale “war” on terrorism whose price tag is touching $2 TRILLION. That’s because the Islamist enemy it is confronting is not some hyper-power capable of inflicting existential—or even grave—harm. It is, rather, a rag-tag band of peasants whose malevolent ambitions are far beyond the capacity of their shallow talent pool to deliver.

Posted on February 24, 2011 at 6:44 AM • View Comments

Movie-Plot Threats at the U.S. Capitol

This would make a great movie:

Rep. Dan Burton, R-Ind., renewed his call for the installation of an impenetrable, see-through security shield around the viewing gallery overlooking the House floor. Burton points out that, while guns and some bombs would be picked up by metal detectors, a saboteur could get into the Capitol concealing plastic explosives.

The House floor, he pointed out, is the only room where all three branches of government gather to hear the president speak, as President Obama will do when he delivers his State of the Union address on Jan. 25.

Burton introduced the legislation in the past, but it’s gone nowhere. He’s hoping the tragic events of Saturday could help it win more serious consideration by the Republican leadership.

“I think the risk is there,” Burton told The Washington Examiner. “The threat is more now than it has ever been.”

Posted on January 18, 2011 at 6:29 AM • View Comments

This Suspicious Photography Stuff Is Confusing

See:

Last week, Metro Transit Police received a report from a rider about suspicious behavior at the L’Enfant Plaza station and on an Orange Line train to Vienna.

The rider told Metro he saw two men acting suspiciously and videotaping platforms, trains and riders.

“The men, according to the citizen report, were trying to be inconspicuous, holding the cameras at their sides,” Metro spokesman Steven Taubenkibel says.

The rider was able to photograph the men who were videotaping and sent the photo to Metro Transit Police.

I assume the rider took that photo inconspicuously, too, which means that he’s now suspicious.

How will this all end?

EDITED TO ADD (12/27): In the comments I was asked about reconciling good profiling with this sort of knee-jerk photography=suspicious nonsense. It’s complicated, and I wrote about it here in 2007. This, from 2004, is also relevant.

Posted on December 27, 2010 at 6:12 AM • View Comments

Close the Washington Monument

Securing the Washington Monument from terrorism has turned out to be a surprisingly difficult job. The concrete fence around the building protects it from attacking vehicles, but there’s no visually appealing way to house the airport-level security mechanisms the National Park Service has decided are a must for visitors. It is considering several options, but I think we should close the monument entirely. Let it stand, empty and inaccessible, as a monument to our fears.

An empty Washington Monument would serve as a constant reminder to those on Capitol Hill that they are afraid of the terrorists and what they could do. They’re afraid that by speaking honestly about the impossibility of attaining absolute security or the inevitability of terrorism—or that some American ideals are worth maintaining even in the face of adversity—they will be branded as “soft on terror.” And they’re afraid that Americans would vote them out of office if another attack occurred. Perhaps they’re right, but what has happened to leaders who aren’t afraid? What has happened to “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself”?

An empty Washington Monument would symbolize our lawmakers’ inability to take that kind of stand—and their inability to truly lead.

Some of them call terrorism an “existential threat” against our nation. It’s not. Even the events of 9/11, as horrific as they were, didn’t make an existential dent in our nation. Automobile-related fatalities—at 42,000 per year, more deaths each month, on average, than 9/11—aren’t, either. It’s our reaction to terrorism that threatens our nation, not terrorism itself. The empty monument would symbolize the empty rhetoric of those leaders who preach fear and then use that fear for their own political ends.

The day after Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab failed to blow up a Northwest jet with a bomb hidden in his underwear, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said “The system worked.” I agreed. Plane lands safely, terrorist in custody, nobody injured except the terrorist. Seems like a working system to me. The empty monument would represent the politicians and press who pilloried her for her comment, and Napolitano herself, for backing down.

The empty monument would symbolize our war on the unexpected,—our overreaction to anything different or unusual—our harassment of photographers, and our probing of airline passengers. It would symbolize our “show me your papers” society, rife with ID checks and security cameras. As long as we’re willing to sacrifice essential liberties for a little temporary safety, we should keep the Washington Monument empty.

Terrorism isn’t a crime against people or property. It’s a crime against our minds, using the death of innocents and destruction of property to make us fearful. Terrorists use the media to magnify their actions and further spread fear. And when we react out of fear, when we change our policy to make our country less open, the terrorists succeed—even if their attacks fail. But when we refuse to be terrorized, when we’re indomitable in the face of terror, the terrorists fail—even if their attacks succeed.

We can reopen the monument when every foiled or failed terrorist plot causes us to praise our security, instead of redoubling it. When the occasional terrorist attack succeeds, as it inevitably will, we accept it, as we accept the murder rate and automobile-related death rate; and redouble our efforts to remain a free and open society.

The grand reopening of the Washington Monument will not occur when we’ve won the war on terror, because that will never happen. It won’t even occur when we’ve defeated al Qaeda. Militant Islamic terrorism has fractured into small, elusive groups. We can reopen the Washington Monument when we’ve defeated our fears, when we’ve come to accept that placing safety above all other virtues cedes too much power to government and that liberty is worth the risks, and that the price of freedom is accepting the possibility of crime.

I would proudly climb to the top of a monument to those ideals.

A version of this essay—there were a lot of changes and edits—originally appeared in the New York Daily News.

I wish I’d come up with the idea of closing the Washington Monument, but I didn’t. It was the Washington Post’s Philip Kennicott’s idea, although he didn’t say it with as much fervor.

Posted on December 2, 2010 at 10:41 AM • View Comments

Causing Terror on the Cheap

Total cost for the Yemeni printer cartridge bomb plot: $4200.

“Two Nokia mobiles, $150 each, two HP printers, $300 each, plus shipping, transportation and other miscellaneous expenses add up to a total bill of $4,200. That is all what Operation Hemorrhage cost us,” the magazine said.

Even if you add in costs for training, recruiting, logistics, and everything else, that’s still remarkably cheap. And think of how many times that we spent in security in the aftermath.

As it turns out, this is bin Laden’s plan:

In his October 2004 address to the American people, bin Laden noted that the 9/11 attacks cost al Qaeda only a fraction of the damage inflicted upon the United States. “Al Qaeda spent $500,000 on the event,” he said, “while America in the incident and its aftermath lost—according to the lowest estimates—more than $500 billion, meaning that every dollar of al Qaeda defeated a million dollars.”

The economic strategy of jihad would go through refinement. Its initial phase linked terrorist attacks broadly to economic harm. A second identifiable phase, which al Qaeda pursued even as it continued to attack economic targets, is what you might call its “bleed-until-bankruptcy plan.” Bin Laden announced this plan in October 2004, in the same video in which he boasted of the economic harm inflicted by 9/11. Terrorist attacks are often designed to provoke an overreaction from the opponent and this phase seeks to embroil the United States and its allies in draining wars in the Muslim world. The mujahideen “bled Russia for 10 years, until it went bankrupt,” bin Laden said, and they would now do the same to the United States.

[…]

The point is clear: Security is expensive, and driving up costs is one way jihadists can wear down Western economies. The writer encourages the United States “not to spare millions of dollars to protect these targets” by increasing the number of guards, searching all who enter those places, and even preventing flying objects from approaching the targets. “Tell them that the life of the American citizen is in danger and that his life is more significant than billions of dollars,” he wrote. “Hand in hand, we will be with you until you are bankrupt and your economy collapses.”

None of this would work if we don’t help them by terrorizing ourselves. I wrote this after the Underwear Bomber failed:

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.

Posted on November 29, 2010 at 6:52 AM • View Comments

Securing the Washington Monument

Good article on security options for the Washington Monument:

Unfortunately, the bureaucratic gears are already grinding, and what will be presented to the public Monday doesn’t include important options, including what became known as the “tunnel” in previous discussions of the issue. Nor does it include the choice of more minimal visitor screening—simple wanding or visual bag inspection—that might not require costly and intrusive changes to the structure. The choice to accept risk isn’t on the table, either. Finally, and although it might seem paradoxical given how important resisting security authoritarianism is to preserving the symbolism of freedom, it doesn’t take seriously the idea that perhaps the monument’s interior should be closed altogether—a small concession that might have collateral benefits.

[…]

Closing the interior of the monument, the construction of which was suspended during the Civil War, would remind the public of the effect that fears engendered by the current war on terrorism have had on public space. Closing it as a symbolic act might initiate an overdue discussion about the loss of even more important public spaces, including the front entrance of the Supreme Court and the west terrace of the Capitol. It would be a dramatic reminder of the choices we as a nation have made, and perhaps an inspiration to change our ways in favor of a more open, risk-tolerant society that understands public space always has some element of danger.

EDITED TO ADD (11/15): More information on the decision process.

Posted on November 10, 2010 at 7:09 AM • View Comments

The End of In-Flight Wi-Fi?

Okay, now the terrorists have really affected me personally: they’re forcing us to turn off airplane Wi-Fi. No, it’s not that the Yemeni package bombs had a Wi-Fi triggering mechanism—they seem to have had a cell phone triggering mechanism, dubious at best—but we can imagine an Internet-based triggering mechanism. Put together a sloppy and unsuccessful package bomb with an imagined triggering mechanism, and you have a new and dangerous threat that—even though it was a threat ever since the first airplane got Wi-Fi capability—must be immediately dealt with right now.

Please, let’s not ever tell the TSA about timers. Or altimeters.

And, while we’re talking about the TSA, be sure to opt out of the full-body scanners and remember your sense of humor when a TSA officer slips white powder into your suitcase and then threatens you with arrest.

EDITED TO ADD (11/8): We’re banning toner cartridges over 16 ounces.

Additionally, toner and ink cartridges that are over 16 ounces will be banned from all U.S. passenger flights and planes heading to the United States, she said. That ban will also apply to some air cargo shipments.

Other new rules include:

  • International mail packages sent to the U.S. must be screened individually and certified to have come from an established postal shipper;
  • Cargo shippers, such as UPS, Federal Express, and DHL, have been encouraged to report cargo manifests to Homeland Security faster, prior to departure, to aid in identifying risky cargo based on current intelligence.

There’s some impressive magical thinking going on here.

Posted on November 8, 2010 at 10:21 AM • View Comments

Cargo Security

The New York Times writes:

Despite the increased scrutiny of people and luggage on passenger planes since 9/11, there are far fewer safeguards for packages and bundles, particularly when loaded on cargo-only planes.

Well, of course. We’ve always known this. We’ve not worried about terrorism on cargo planes because it isn’t very terrorizing. Packages aren’t people. If a passenger plane blows up, it affects a couple of hundred people. If a cargo plane blows up, it just affects the crew.

Cargo that is loaded on to passenger planes should be subjected to the same level of security as passenger luggage. Cargo that is loaded onto cargo planes should be treated no differently from cargo loaded into ships, trains, trucks, and the trunks of cars.

Of course: now that the media is talking about cargo security, we have to “do something.” (Something must be done. This is something. Therefore, we must do it.) But if we’re so scared that we have to devote resources to this kind of terrorist threat, we’ve well and truly lost.

EDITED TO ADD (10/30): The plot—it’s still unclear how serious it was—wasn’t uncovered by any security screening, but by intelligence gathering:

Intelligence officials were onto the suspected plot for days, officials said. The packages in England and Dubai were discovered after Saudi Arabian intelligence picked up information related to Yemen and passed it on to the U.S., two officials said.

This is how you fight through terrorism: not by defending against specific threats, but through intelligence, investigation, and emergency response.

Posted on October 30, 2010 at 9:41 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.