Entries Tagged "terrorism"

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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

Decertifying "Terrorist" Pilots

This article reads like something written by the company’s PR team.

When it comes to sleuthing these days, knowing your way within a database is as valued a skill as the classic, Sherlock Holmes-styled powers of detection.

Safe Banking Systems Software proved this very point in a demonstration of its algorithm acumen—one that resulted in a disclosure that convicted terrorists actually maintained working licenses with the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration.

The algorithm seems to be little more than matching up names and other basic info:

It used its algorithm-detection software to sift out uncommon names such as Abdelbaset Ali Elmegrahi, aka the Lockerbie bomber. It found that a number of licensed airmen all had the same P.O. box as their listed address—one that happened to be in Tripoli, Libya. These men all had working FAA certificates. And while the FAA database information investigated didn’t contain date-of-birth information, Safe Banking was able to use content on the FAA Website to determine these key details as well, to further gain a positive and clear identification of the men in question.

In any case, they found these three people with pilot’s licenses:

Elmegrahi, who had been posted on the FBI Most Wanted list for a decade and was convicted of blowing up Pan Am Flight 103, killing 259 people in 1988 over Lockerbie, Scotland. Elmegrahi was an FAA-certified aircraft dispatcher.

Re Tabib, a California resident who was convicted in 2007 for illegally exporting U.S. military aircraft parts—specifically export maintenance kits for F-14 fighter jets—to Iran. Tabib received three FAA licenses after his conviction, qualifying to be a flight instructor, ground instructor and transport pilot.

Myron Tereshchuk, who pleaded guilty to possession of a biological weapon after the FBI caught him with a brew of ricin, explosive powder and other essentials in Maryland in 2004. Tereshchuk was a licensed mechanic and student pilot.

And the article concludes with:

Suffice to say, after the FAA was made aware of these criminal histories, all three men have since been decertified.

Although I’m all for annoying international arms dealers, does anyone know the procedures for FAA decertification? Did the FAA have the legal right to do this, after being “made aware” of some information by a third party?

Of course, they don’t talk about all the false positives their system also found. How many innocents were also decertified? And they don’t mention the fact that, in the 9/11 attacks, FAA certification wasn’t really an issue. “Excuse me, young man. You can’t hijack and fly this aircraft. It says right here that the FAA decertified you.”

Posted on November 23, 2009 at 2:36 PM • View Comments

Al Qaeda Secret Code Broken

I would sure like to know more about this:

Top code-breakers at the Government Communications Headquarters in the United Kingdom have succeeded in breaking the secret language that has allowed imprisoned leaders of al-Qaida to keep in touch with other extremists in U.K. jails as well as 10,000 “sleeper agents” across the islands….

[…]

For six months, the code-breakers worked around the clock deciphering the code the three terrorists created.

Between them, the code-breakers speak all the dialects that form the basis for the code. Several of them have high-value skills in computer technology. The team worked closely with the U.S. National Security Agency and its station at Menwith Hill in the north of England. The identity of the code-breakers is so secret that not even their gender can be revealed.

“Like all good codes, the one they broke depended on substituting words, numbers or symbols for plain text. A single symbol could represent an idea or an entire message,” said an intelligence source.

The code the terrorists devised consists of words chosen from no fewer than 20 dialects from Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, Yemen and Sudan.

Inserted with the words ­ either before or after them ­ is local slang. The completed message is then buried in Islamic religious tracts.

EDITED TO ADD: Here’s a link to the story that still works. I didn’t realize this came from WorldNetDaily, so take it with an appropriate amount of salt.

Posted on November 23, 2009 at 7:24 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

Beyond Security Theater

[I was asked to write this essay for the New Internationalist (n. 427, November 2009, pp. 10–13). It’s nothing I haven’t said before, but I’m pleased with how this essay came together.]

Terrorism is rare, far rarer than many people think. It’s rare because very few people want to commit acts of terrorism, and executing a terrorist plot is much harder than television makes it appear. The best defenses against terrorism are largely invisible: investigation, intelligence, and emergency response. But even these are less effective at keeping us safe than our social and political policies, both at home and abroad. However, our elected leaders don’t think this way: they are far more likely to implement security theater against movie-plot threats.

A movie-plot threat is an overly specific attack scenario. Whether it’s terrorists with crop dusters, terrorists contaminating the milk supply, or terrorists attacking the Olympics, specific stories affect our emotions more intensely than mere data does. Stories are what we fear. It’s not just hypothetical stories: terrorists flying planes into buildings, terrorists with bombs in their shoes or in their water bottles, and terrorists with guns and bombs waging a co-ordinated attack against a city are even scarier movie-plot threats because they actually happened.

Security theater refers to security measures that make people feel more secure without doing anything to actually improve their security. An example: the photo ID checks that have sprung up in office buildings. No-one has ever explained why verifying that someone has a photo ID provides any actual security, but it looks like security to have a uniformed guard-for-hire looking at ID cards. Airport-security examples include the National Guard troops stationed at US airports in the months after 9/11—their guns had no bullets. The US colour-coded system of threat levels, the pervasive harassment of photographers, and the metal detectors that are increasingly common in hotels and office buildings since the Mumbai terrorist attacks, are additional examples.

To be sure, reasonable arguments can be made that some terrorist targets are more attractive than others: aeroplanes because a small bomb can result in the death of everyone aboard, monuments because of their national significance, national events because of television coverage, and transportation because of the numbers of people who commute daily. But there are literally millions of potential targets in any large country (there are five million commercial buildings alone in the US), and hundreds of potential terrorist tactics; it’s impossible to defend every place against everything, and it’s impossible to predict which tactic and target terrorists will try next.

Feeling and Reality

Security is both a feeling and a reality. The propensity for security theater comes from the interplay between the public and its leaders. When people are scared, they need something done that will make them feel safe, even if it doesn’t truly make them safer. Politicians naturally want to do something in response to crisis, even if that something doesn’t make any sense.

Often, this “something” is directly related to the details of a recent event: we confiscate liquids, screen shoes, and ban box cutters on airplanes. But it’s not the target and tactics of the last attack that are important, but the next attack. These measures are only effective if we happen to guess what the next terrorists are planning. If we spend billions defending our rail systems, and the terrorists bomb a shopping mall instead, we’ve wasted our money. If we concentrate airport security on screening shoes and confiscating liquids, and the terrorists hide explosives in their brassieres and use solids, we’ve wasted our money. Terrorists don’t care what they blow up and it shouldn’t be our goal merely to force the terrorists to make a minor change in their tactics or targets.

Our penchant for movie plots blinds us to the broader threats. And security theater consumes resources that could better be spent elsewhere.

Any terrorist attack is a series of events: something like planning, recruiting, funding, practising, executing, aftermath. Our most effective defenses are at the beginning and end of that process—intelligence, investigation, and emergency response—and least effective when they require us to guess the plot correctly. By intelligence and investigation, I don’t mean the broad data-mining or eavesdropping systems that have been proposed and in some cases implemented—those are also movie-plot stories without much basis in actual effectiveness—but instead the traditional “follow the evidence” type of investigation that has worked for decades.

Unfortunately for politicians, the security measures that work are largely invisible. Such measures include enhancing the intelligence-gathering abilities of the secret services, hiring cultural experts and Arabic translators, building bridges with Islamic communities both nationally and internationally, funding police capabilities—both investigative arms to prevent terrorist attacks, and emergency communications systems for after attacks occur—and arresting terrorist plotters without media fanfare. They do not include expansive new police or spying laws. Our police don’t need any new laws to deal with terrorism; rather, they need apolitical funding. These security measures don’t make good television, and they don’t help, come re-election time. But they work, addressing the reality of security instead of the feeling.

The arrest of the “liquid bombers” in London is an example: they were caught through old-fashioned intelligence and police work. Their choice of target (airplanes) and tactic (liquid explosives) didn’t matter; they would have been arrested regardless.

But even as we do all of this we cannot neglect the feeling of security, because it’s how we collectively overcome the psychological damage that terrorism causes. It’s not security theater we need, it’s direct appeals to our feelings. The best way to help people feel secure is by acting secure around them. Instead of reacting to terrorism with fear, we—and our leaders—need to react with indomitability.

Refuse to Be Terrorized

By not overreacting, by not responding to movie-plot threats, and by not becoming defensive, we demonstrate the resilience of our society, in our laws, our culture, our freedoms. There is a difference between indomitability and arrogant “bring ’em on” rhetoric. There’s a difference between accepting the inherent risk that comes with a free and open society, and hyping the threats.

We should treat terrorists like common criminals and give them all the benefits of true and open justice—not merely because it demonstrates our indomitability, but because it makes us all safer. Once a society starts circumventing its own laws, the risks to its future stability are much greater than terrorism.

Supporting real security even though it’s invisible, and demonstrating indomitability even though fear is more politically expedient, requires real courage. Demagoguery is easy. What we need is leaders willing both to do what’s right and to speak the truth.

Despite fearful rhetoric to the contrary, terrorism is not a transcendent threat. A terrorist attack cannot possibly destroy a country’s way of life; it’s only our reaction to that attack that can do that kind of damage. The more we undermine our own laws, the more we convert our buildings into fortresses, the more we reduce the freedoms and liberties at the foundation of our societies, the more we’re doing the terrorists’ job for them.

We saw some of this in the Londoners’ reaction to the 2005 transport bombings. Among the political and media hype and fearmongering, there was a thread of firm resolve. People didn’t fall victim to fear. They rode the trains and buses the next day and continued their lives. Terrorism’s goal isn’t murder; terrorism attacks the mind, using victims as a prop. By refusing to be terrorized, we deny the terrorists their primary weapon: our own fear.

Today, we can project indomitability by rolling back all the fear-based post-9/11 security measures. Our leaders have lost credibility; getting it back requires a decrease in hyperbole. Ditch the invasive mass surveillance systems and new police state-like powers. Return airport security to pre-9/11 levels. Remove swagger from our foreign policies. Show the world that our legal system is up to the challenge of terrorism. Stop telling people to report all suspicious activity; it does little but make us suspicious of each other, increasing both fear and helplessness.

Terrorism has always been rare, and for all we’ve heard about 9/11 changing the world, it’s still rare. Even 9/11 failed to kill as many people as automobiles do in the US every single month. But there’s a pervasive myth that terrorism is easy. It’s easy to imagine terrorist plots, both large-scale “poison the food supply” and small-scale “10 guys with guns and cars.” Movies and television bolster this myth, so many people are surprised that there have been so few attacks in Western cities since 9/11. Certainly intelligence and investigation successes have made it harder, but mostly it’s because terrorist attacks are actually hard. It’s hard to find willing recruits, to co-ordinate plans, and to execute those plans—and it’s easy to make mistakes.

Counterterrorism is also hard, especially when we’re psychologically prone to muck it up. Since 9/11, we’ve embarked on strategies of defending specific targets against specific tactics, overreacting to every terrorist video, stoking fear, demonizing ethnic groups, and treating the terrorists as if they were legitimate military opponents who could actually destroy a country or a way of life—all of this plays into the hands of terrorists. We’d do much better by leveraging the inherent strengths of our modern democracies and the natural advantages we have over the terrorists: our adaptability and survivability, our international network of laws and law enforcement, and the freedoms and liberties that make our society so enviable. The way we live is open enough to make terrorists rare; we are observant enough to prevent most of the terrorist plots that exist, and indomitable enough to survive the even fewer terrorist plots that actually succeed. We don’t need to pretend otherwise.

EDITED TO ADD (11/14): Commentary from Kevin Drum, James Fallows, and The Economist.

Posted on November 13, 2009 at 6:52 AM • View Comments

FBI/CIA/NSA Information Sharing Before 9/11

It’s conventional wisdom that the legal “wall” between intelligence and law enforcement was one of the reasons we failed to prevent 9/11. The 9/11 Comission evaluated that claim, and published a classified report in 2004. The report was released, with a few redactions, over the summer: “Legal Barriers to Information Sharing: The Erection of a Wall Between Intelligence and Law Enforcement Investigations,” 9/11 Commission Staff Monograph by Barbara A. Grewe, Senior Counsel for Special Projects, August 20, 2004.

The report concludes otherwise:

“The information sharing failures in the summer of 2001 were not the result of legal barriers but of the failure of individuals to understand that the barriers did not apply to the facts at hand,” the 35-page monograph concludes. “Simply put, there was no legal reason why the information could not have been shared.”

The prevailing confusion was exacerbated by numerous complicating circumstances, the monograph explains. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court was growing impatient with the FBI because of repeated errors in applications for surveillance. Justice Department officials were uncomfortable requesting intelligence surveillance of persons and facilities related to Osama bin Laden since there was already a criminal investigation against bin Laden underway, which normally would have preempted FISA surveillance. Officials were reluctant to turn to the FISA Court of Review for clarification of their concerns since one of the judges on the court had expressed doubts about the constitutionality of FISA in the first place. And so on. Although not mentioned in the monograph, it probably didn’t help that public interest critics in the 1990s (myself included) were accusing the FISA Court of serving as a “rubber stamp” and indiscriminately approving requests for intelligence surveillance.

In the end, the monograph implicitly suggests that if the law was not the problem, then changing the law may not be the solution.

James Bamford comes to much the same conclusion in his book, The Shadow Factory: The NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America: there was no legal wall that prevented intelligence and law enforcement from sharing the information necessary to prevent 9/11; it was inter-agency rivalries and turf battles.

Posted on November 12, 2009 at 2:26 PM • View Comments

John Mueller on Zazi

I have refrained from commenting on the case against Najibullah Zazi, simply because it’s so often the case that the details reported in the press have very little do with reality. My suspicion was, that as in in so many other cases, he was an idiot who couldn’t do any real harm and was turned into a bogeyman for political purposes.

However, John Mueller—who I’ve written about before—has done the research:

Recalls his step-uncle affectionately, Zazi is “a dumb kid, believe me.” A high school dropout, Zazi mostly worked as doughnut peddler in Lower Manhattan, barely making a living. Somewhere along the line, it is alleged, he took it into his head to set off a bomb and traveled to Pakistan where he received explosives training from al-Qaeda and copied nine pages of chemical bombmaking instructions onto his laptop. FBI Director Robert Mueller asserted in testimony on September 30 that this training gave Zazi the “capability” to set off a bomb.

That, however, seems to be a substantial overstatement—not unlike the Director’s 2003 testimony assuring us that, although his agency had yet to identify an al-Qaeda cell in the U.S., such unidentified entities nonetheless presented “the greatest threat,” had “developed a support infrastructure” in the country, and were able and intended to inflict “significant casualties in the US with little warning.”

An overstatement because, upon returning to the United States, Zazi allegedly spent the better part of a year trying to concoct the bomb he had supposedly learned how to make. In the process, he, or some confederates, purchased bomb materials using stolen credit cards, a bone-headed maneuver guaranteeing that red flags would go up about the sale and that surveillance videos in the stores would be maintained rather than routinely erased.

However, even with the material at hand, Zazi still apparently couldn’t figure it out, and he frantically contacted an unidentified person for help several times. Each of these communications was “more urgent in tone than the last,” according to court documents.

Clearly, if Zazi was able eventually to bring his alleged aspirations to fruition, he could have done some damage, though, given his capacities, the person most in existential danger was surely the lapsed doughnut peddler himself.

As I said in 2007:

Terrorism is a real threat, and one that needs to be addressed by appropriate means. But allowing ourselves to be terrorized by wannabe terrorists and unrealistic plots—and worse, allowing our essential freedoms to be lost by using them as an excuse—is wrong.

[…]

I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t have all the facts in any of these cases. None of us do. So let’s have some healthy skepticism. Skepticism when we read about these terrorist masterminds who were poised to kill thousands of people and do incalculable damage. Skepticism when we’re told that their arrest proves that we need to give away our own freedoms and liberties. And skepticism that those arrested are even guilty in the first place.

The problem with these arrests is that the crimes have not happened yet. So these cases involve trying to divine what people will do in the future. They involve trying to guess as to people’s motives and abilities. They often involve informants with questionable integrity, and my worry is that in our zeal to prevent terrorism, we create terrorists where there weren’t any to begin with.

Mueller writes:

It follows that any terrorism problem within the United States principally derives from homegrown people like Zazi, often isolated from each other, who fantasize about performing dire deeds. Penn State’s Michael Kenney has interviewed dozens of officials and intelligence agents and analyzed court documents, and finds homegrown Islamic militants to be operationally unsophisticated, short on know-how, prone to make mistakes, poor at planning, and severely hampered by a limited capacity to learn. Another study documents the difficulties of network coordination that continually threaten operational unity, trust, cohesion, and the ability to act collectively. And the popular notion these characters have the capacity to steal or put together an atomic bomb seems, to put it mildly, as fanciful as some of the terrorists’ schemes.

By contrast, the image projected by the Department of Homeland Security continues to be of an enemy that is “relentless, patient, opportunistic, and flexible,” shows “an understanding of the potential consequence of carefully planned attacks on economic transportation, and symbolic targets,” seriously threatens “national security,” and could inflict “mass casualties, weaken the economy, and damage public morale and confidence.” That description may fit some terrorists—the 9/11 hijackers among them. But not the vast majority, including the hapless Zazi.

EDITED TO ADD (11/9): This is the Michael Kenney paper that Mueller cites.

Posted on November 9, 2009 at 12:15 PM • View Comments

The Problems with Unscientific Security

From the Open Access Journal of Forensic Psychology, by a whole list of authors: “A Call for Evidence-Based Security Tools“:

Abstract: Since the 2001 attacks on the twin towers, policies on security have changed drastically, bringing about an increased need for tools that allow for the detection of deception. Many of the solutions offered today, however, lack scientific underpinning.

We recommend two important changes to improve the (cost) effectiveness of security policy. To begin with, the emphasis of deception research should shift from technological to behavioural sciences. Secondly, the burden of proof should lie with the manufacturers of the security tools. Governments should not rely on security tools that have not passed scientific scrutiny, and should only employ those methods that have been proven effective. After all, the use of tools that do not work will only get us further from the truth.

One excerpt:

In absence of systematic research, users will base their evaluation on data generated by field use. Because people tend to follow heuristics rather than the rules of probability theory, perceived effectiveness can substantially differ from true effectiveness (Tversky & Kahneman, 1973). For example, one well-known problem associated with field studies is that of selective feedback. Investigative authorities are unlikely to receive feedback from liars who are erroneously considered truthful. They will occasionally receive feedback when correctly detecting deception, for example through confessions (Patrick & Iacono, 1991; Vrij, 2008). The perceived effectiveness that follows from this can be further reinforced through confirmation bias: Evidence confirming one’s preconception is weighted more heavily than evidence contradicting it (Lord, Ross, & Lepper, 1979). As a result, even techniques that perform at chance level may be perceived as highly effective (Iacono, 1991). This unwarranted confidence can have profound effects on citizens’ safety and civil liberty: Criminals may escape detection while innocents may be falsely accused. The Innocence Project (Unvalidated or improper science, no date) demonstrates that unvalidated or improper forensic science can indeed lead to wrongful convictions (see also Saks & Koehler, 2005).

Article on the paper.

Posted on November 5, 2009 at 6:11 AM • View Comments

Detecting Terrorists by Smelling Fear

Really:

The technology relies on recognising a pheromone – or scent signal – produced in sweat when a person is scared.

Researchers hope the ”fear detector” will make it possible to identify individuals at check points who are up to no good.

Terrorists with murder in mind, drug smugglers, or criminals on the run are likely to be very fearful of being discovered.

Seems like yet another technology that will be swamped with false positives.

And is there any justification to the hypothesis that terrorists will be more afraid than anyone else? And do we know why people tend to feel fear? Is it because they’re up to no good, or because of more benign reasons—like they’re scared of something? This link from emotion to intent is very tenuous.

Posted on November 3, 2009 at 6:12 AM • View Comments

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Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.