Entries Tagged "terrorism"

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The Abdulmutallab Dots that Should Have Been Connected

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.

  1. 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).
  2. US intelligence had been following him for a while, dubbing him “the Nigerian” (one assumes there was a reason).
  3. He was on a watch list (one assumes there was a reason).
  4. He had been banned from Britain (yup, one assumes there was a reason).
  5. The British intelligence service had identified him to our intelligence agencies in 2008 as a potential threat (sigh, uh, yeah, reason).
  6. He’d just visited Yemen, an al Qaeda hotbed (given the first 5, one can reasonably guess at the reason).
  7. He bought a one-way ticket to the United States in Africa through Europe (red flag 1).
  8. He paid cash (red flag 2).
  9. 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:

  1. 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.”
  2. This is true. But we didn’t have a name, only a tip that “a Nigerian” might be planning an attack.
  3. 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.”
  4. 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.”
  5. 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.”
  6. True.
  7. No, it was a roundtrip ticket.
  8. 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.”
  9. 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.

Posted on January 25, 2010 at 7:09 AM • View Comments

Fixing Intelligence Failures

President Obama, in his speech last week, rightly focused on fixing the intelligence failures that resulted in Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab being ignored, rather than on technologies targeted at the details of his underwear-bomb plot. But while Obama’s instincts are right, reforming intelligence for this new century and its new threats is a more difficult task than he might like. We don’t need new technologies, new laws, new bureaucratic overlords, or—for heaven’s sake—new agencies. What prevents information sharing among intelligence organizations is the culture of the generation that built those organizations.

The U.S. intelligence system is a sprawling apparatus, spanning the FBI and the State Department, the CIA and the National Security Agency, and the Department of Homeland Security—itself an amalgamation of two dozen different organizations—designed and optimized to fight the Cold War. The single, enormous adversary then was the Soviet Union: as bureaucratic as they come, with a huge budget, and capable of very sophisticated espionage operations. We needed to defend against technologically advanced electronic eavesdropping operations, their agents trying to bribe or seduce our agents, and a worldwide intelligence gathering capability that hung on our every word.

In that environment, secrecy was paramount. Information had to be protected by armed guards and double fences, shared only among those with appropriate security clearances and a legitimate “need to know,” and it was better not to transmit information at all than to transmit it insecurely.

Today’s adversaries are different. There are still governments, like China, who are after our secrets. But the secrets they’re after are more often corporate than military, and most of the other organizations of interest are like al Qaeda: decentralized, poorly funded and incapable of the intricate spy versus spy operations the Soviet Union could pull off.

Against these adversaries, sharing is far more important than secrecy. Our intelligence organizations need to trade techniques and expertise with industry, and they need to share information among the different parts of themselves. Today’s terrorist plots are loosely organized ad hoc affairs, and those dots that are so important for us to connect beforehand might be on different desks, in different buildings, owned by different organizations.

Critics have pointed to laws that prohibited inter-agency sharing but, as the 9/11 Commission found, the law allows for far more sharing than goes on. It doesn’t happen because of inter-agency rivalries, a reliance on outdated information systems, and a culture of secrecy. What we need is an intelligence community that shares ideas and hunches and facts on their versions of Facebook, Twitter and wikis. We need the bottom-up organization that has made the Internet the greatest collection of human knowledge and ideas ever assembled.

The problem is far more social than technological. Teaching your mom to “text” and your dad to Twitter doesn’t make them part of the Internet generation, and giving all those cold warriors blogging lessons won’t change their mentality—or the culture. The reason this continues to be a problem, the reason President George W. Bush couldn’t change things even after the 9/11 Commission came to much the same conclusions as President Obama’s recent review did, is generational. The Internet is the greatest generation gap since rock and roll, and it’s just as true inside government as out. We might have to wait for the elders inside these agencies to retire and be replaced by people who grew up with the Internet.

A version of this op-ed previously appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle.

I wrote about this in 2002.

EDITED TO ADD (1/17): Another opinion.

Posted on January 16, 2010 at 7:13 AM • View Comments

Ray McGovern on Intelligence Failures

Good commentary from former CIA analyst Ray McGovern:

The short answer to the second sentence is: Yes, it is inevitable that “certain plots will succeed.”

A more helpful answer would address the question as to how we might best minimize their prospects for success. And to do this, sorry to say, there is no getting around the necessity to address the root causes of terrorism or, in the vernacular, “why they hate us.”

If we don’t go beyond self-exculpatory sloganeering in attempting to answer that key question, any “counter terrorism apparatus” is doomed to failure. Honest appraisals would tread on delicate territory, but any intelligence agency worth its salt must be willing/able to address it.

Delicate? Take, for example, what Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the “mastermind” of 9/11, said was his main motive. Here’s what the 9/11 Commission Report wrote on page 147. You will not find it reported in the Fawning Corporate Media (FCM):

“By his own account, KSM’s animus toward the United States stemmed…from his violent disagreement with U.S. foreign policy favoring Israel.”

This is not the entire picture, of course. Other key factors include the post-Gulf War stationing of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, widely seen as defiling the holy sites of Islam.

Add Washington’s propping up of dictatorial, repressive regimes in order to secure continuing access to oil and natural gas—widely (and accurately) seen as one of the main reasons for the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Not to mention the Pentagon’s insatiable thirst for additional permanent (sorry, the term is now “enduring”) military bases in that part of the world.

[…]

The most effective step would be to release the CIA Inspector General report on intelligence community performance prior to 9/11. That investigation was run by, and its report was prepared by an honest man, it turns out.

It was immediately suppressed by then-Acting DCI John McLaughlin—another Tenet clone—and McLaughin’s successors as director, Porter Goss, Michael Hayden, and now Leon Panetta.

Accountability is key. If there is no accountability, there is total freedom to screw up, and screw up royally, without any thought of possible personal consequences.

Not only is it certain that we will face more terrorist attacks, but the keystone-cops nature of recent intelligence operations … whether in using cell phones in planning kidnappings in Italy, or in allowing suicide bombers access to CIA bases in Taliban-infested eastern Afghanistan … will continue. Not to mention the screw-up in the case of Abdulmutallab.

Posted on January 15, 2010 at 7:22 AM • View Comments

Airplane Security Commentary

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?

Posted on January 13, 2010 at 2:55 PM • View Comments

The Power Law of Terrorism

Research result #1: “A Generalized Fission-Fusion Model for the Frequency of Severe Terrorist Attacks,” by Aaron Clauset and Frederik W. Wiegel.

Plot the number of people killed in terrorists attacks around the world since 1968 against the frequency with which such attacks occur and you’ll get a power law distribution, that’s a fancy way of saying a straight line when both axis have logarithmic scales.

The question, of course, is why? Why not a normal distribution, in which there would be many orders of magnitude fewer extreme events?

Aaron Clauset and Frederik Wiegel have built a model that might explain why. The model makes five simple assumptions about the way terrorist groups grow and fall apart and how often they carry out major attacks. And here’s the strange thing: this model almost exactly reproduces the distribution of terrorists attacks we see in the real world.

These assumptions are things like: terrorist groups grow by accretion (absorbing other groups) and fall apart by disintegrating into individuals. They must also be able to recruit from a more or less unlimited supply of willing terrorists within the population.

Research Result #2: “Universal Patterns Underlying Ongoing Wars and Terrorism,” by Neil F. Johnson, Mike Spagat, Jorge A. Restrepo, Oscar Becerra, Juan Camilo Bohorquez, Nicolas Suarez, Elvira Maria Restrepo, and Roberto Zarama.

In the case of the Iraq war, we might ask how many conflicts causing ten casualties are expected to occur over a one-year period. According to the data, the answer is the average number of events per year times 10­-2.3, or 0.005. If we instead ask how many events will cause twenty casualties, the answer is proportional to 20­-2.3. Taking into account the entire history of any given war, one finds that the frequency of events on all scales can be predicted by exactly the same exponent.

Professor Neil Johnson of Oxford University has come up with a remarkable result regarding these power laws: for several different wars, the exponent has about the same value. Johnson studied the long-standing conflict in Colombia, the war in Iraq, the global rate of terrorist attacks in non-G7 countries, and the war in Afghanistan. In each case, the power law exponent that predicted the distribution of conflicts was close to the value ­2.5.

This doesn’t surprise me; power laws are common in naturally random phenomena.

Posted on January 12, 2010 at 1:46 PM • 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

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.