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In this disturbing story, a man is arrested in the London subways as a terrorist because, well because he was acting like a computer nerd.
At least the police didn’t shoot to kill.
EDITED TO ADD: This picture was supposedly taken in the London Tube a few weeks after the first set of bombings.
EDITED TO ADD: Snopes says that the picture is a fake.
More movie-plot threats at the Department of Homeland Security: “How Terrorists Might Exploit a Hurricane.”
I had an op ed published in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune today.
Toward a Truly Safer Nation
Published September 11, 2005
Leaving aside the political posturing and the finger-pointing, how did our nation mishandle Katrina so badly? After spending tens of billions of dollars on homeland security (hundreds of billions, if you include the war in Iraq) in the four years after 9/11, what did we do wrong? Why were there so many failures at the local, state and federal levels?
These are reasonable questions. Katrina was a natural disaster and not a terrorist attack, but that only matters before the event. Large-scale terrorist attacks and natural disasters differ in cause, but they’re very similar in aftermath. And one can easily imagine a Katrina-like aftermath to a terrorist attack, especially one involving nuclear, biological or chemical weapons.
Improving our disaster response was discussed in the months after 9/11. We were going to give money to local governments to fund first responders. We established the Department of Homeland Security to streamline the chains of command and facilitate efficient and effective response.
The problem is that we all got caught up in “movie-plot threats,” specific attack scenarios that capture the imagination and then the dollars. Whether it’s terrorists with box cutters or bombs in their shoes, we fear what we can imagine. We’re searching backpacks in the subways of New York, because this year’s movie plot is based on a terrorist bombing in the London subways.
Funding security based on movie plots looks good on television, and gets people reelected. But there are millions of possible scenarios, and we’re going to guess wrong. The billions spent defending airlines are wasted if the terrorists bomb crowded shopping malls instead.
Our nation needs to spend its homeland security dollars on two things: intelligence-gathering and emergency response. These two things will help us regardless of what the terrorists are plotting, and the second helps both against terrorist attacks and national disasters.
Katrina demonstrated that we haven’t invested enough in emergency response. New Orleans police officers couldn’t talk with each other after power outages shut down their primary communications system—and there was no backup. The Department of Homeland Security, which was established in order to centralize federal response in a situation like this, couldn’t figure out who was in charge or what to do, and actively obstructed aid by others. FEMA did no better, and thousands died while turf battles were being fought.
Our government’s ineptitude in the aftermath of Katrina demonstrates how little we’re getting for all our security spending. It’s unconscionable that we’re wasting our money fingerprinting foreigners, profiling airline passengers, and invading foreign countries while emergency response at home goes underfunded.
Money spent on emergency response makes us safer, regardless of what the next disaster is, whether terrorist-made or natural.
This includes good communications on the ground, good coordination up the command chain, and resources—people and supplies—that can be quickly deployed wherever they’re needed.
Similarly, money spent on intelligence-gathering makes us safer, regardless of what the next disaster is. Against terrorism, that includes the NSA and the CIA. Against natural disasters, that includes the National Weather Service and the National Earthquake Information Center.
Katrina deftly illustrated homeland security’s biggest challenge: guessing correctly. The solution is to fund security that doesn’t rely on guessing. Defending against movie plots doesn’t make us appreciably safer. Emergency response does. It lessens the damage and suffering caused by disasters, whether man-made, like 9/11, or nature-made, like Katrina.
Wired.com just published an essay by me: “Terrorists Don’t Do Movie Plots.”
Sometimes it seems like the people in charge of homeland security spend too much time watching action movies. They defend against specific movie plots instead of against the broad threats of terrorism.
We all do it. Our imaginations run wild with detailed and specific threats. We imagine anthrax spread from crop dusters. Or a contaminated milk supply. Or terrorist scuba divers armed with almanacs. Before long, we’re envisioning an entire movie plot, without Bruce Willis saving the day. And we’re scared.
Psychologically, this all makes sense. Humans have good imaginations. Box cutters and shoe bombs conjure vivid mental images. “We must protect the Super Bowl” packs more emotional punch than the vague “we should defend ourselves against terrorism.”
The 9/11 terrorists used small pointy things to take over airplanes, so we ban small pointy things from airplanes. Richard Reid tried to hide a bomb in his shoes, so now we all have to take off our shoes. Recently, the Department of Homeland Security said that it might relax airplane security rules. It’s not that there’s a lessened risk of shoes, or that small pointy things are suddenly less dangerous. It’s that those movie plots no longer capture the imagination like they did in the months after 9/11, and everyone is beginning to see how silly (or pointless) they always were.
I’m now doing a bi-weekly column for them. I will post a link to the essays when they appear on the Wired.com site, and will reprint them in the next Crypto-Gram.
There are many, large and small, but I want to mention two that I haven’t seen discussed elsewhere.
1. The aftermath of this tragedy reflects on how poorly we’ve been spending our homeland security dollars. Again and again, I’ve said that we need to invest in 1) intelligence gathering, and 2) emergency response. These two things will help us regardless of what the terrorists are plotting, and the second helps in the event of a natural disaster. (In general, the only difference between a manmade disaster and a natural one is the cause. After a disaster occurs, it doesn’t matter.) The response by DHS and FEMA was abysmal, and demonstrated how little we’ve been getting for all our security spending. It’s unconscionable that we’re wasting our money on national ID cards, airline passenger profiling, and foreign invasions rather than emergency response at home: communications, training, transportation, coordination.
2. Redundancy, and to a lesser extent, inefficiency, are good for security. Efficiency is brittle. Redundancy results in less-brittle systems, and provides defense in depth. We need multiple organizations with overlapping capabilities, all helping in their own way: FEMA, DHS, the military, the Red Cross, etc. We need overcapacity, in water pumping capabilities, communications, emergency supplies, and so on. I wrote about this back in 2001, in opposition to the formation of the Department of Homeland Security. The government’s response to Katrina demonstrates this yet again.
Peggy Noonan is opposed to the current round of U.S. base closings because, well, basically because she thinks they’ll be useful if the government ever has to declare martial law.
I don’t know anything about military bases, and what should be closed or remain open. What’s interesting to me is that her essay is a perfect example of thinking based on movie-plot threats:
Among the things we may face over the next decade, as we all know, is another terrorist attack on American soil. But let’s imagine the next one has many targets, is brilliantly planned and coordinated. Imagine that there are already 100 serious terror cells in the U.S., two per state. The members of each cell have been coming over, many but not all crossing our borders, for five years. They’re working jobs, living lives, quietly planning.
Imagine they’re planning that on the same day in the not-so-distant future, they will set off nuclear suitcase bombs in six American cities, including Washington, which will take the heaviest hit. Hundreds of thousands may die; millions will be endangered. Lines will go down, and to make it worse the terrorists will at the same time execute the cyberattack of all cyberattacks, causing massive communications failure and confusion. There will be no electricity; switching and generating stations will also have been targeted. There will be no word from Washington; the extent of the national damage will be as unknown as the extent of local damage is clear. Daily living will become very difficult, and for months—food shortages, fuel shortages.
Let’s make it worse. On top of all that, on the day of the suitcase nukings, a half dozen designated cells will rise up and assassinate national, state and local leaders. There will be chaos, disorder, widespread want; law-enforcement personnel, or what remains of them, will be overwhelmed and outmatched.
Impossibly grim? No, just grim. Novelistic? Sure. But if you’d been a novelist on Sept. 10, 2001, and dreamed up a plot in which two huge skyscrapers were leveled, the Pentagon was hit, and the wife of the solicitor general of the United States was desperately phoning him from a commercial jet that had been turned into a missile, you would have been writing something wild and improbable that nonetheless happened a day later.
And all this of course is just one scenario. The madman who runs North Korea could launch a missile attack on the United States tomorrow, etc. There are limitless possibilities for terrible trouble.
This game of “let’s imagine” really does stir up emotions, but it’s not the way to plan national security policy. There’s a movie plot to justify any possible national policy, and another to render that same policy ineffectual.
This of course is pure guessing on my part. I can’t prove it with data.
That’s precisely the problem.
Imagine you’re in charge of airport security. You have a watch list of terrorist names, and you’re supposed to give anyone on that list extra scrutiny. One day someone shows up for a flight whose name is on that list. They’re an infant.
What do you do?
If you have even the slightest bit of sense, you realize that an infant can’t be a terrorist. So you let the infant through, knowing that it’s a false alarm. But if you have no flexibility in your job, if you have to follow the rules regardless of how stupid they are, if you have no authority to make your own decisions, then you detain the baby.
EDITED TO ADD: I know what the article says about the TSA rules:
The Transportation Security Administration, which administers the lists, instructs airlines not to deny boarding to children under 12—or select them for extra security checks—even if their names match those on a list.
Whether the rules are being followed or ignored is besides my point. The screener is detaining babies because he thinks that’s what the rules require. He’s not permitted to exercise his own common sense.
Security works best when well-trained people have the authority to make decisions, not when poorly-trained people are slaves to the rules (whether real or imaginary). Rules provide CYA security, but not security against terrorism.
Looks like the DHS and TSA are finally beginning to realize that small pointy things are not a terrorist threat to aviation.
They never were.
Remember all thost stories about the terrorists hiding messages in television broadcasts? They were all false alarms:
The first sign that something was amiss came a few days before Christmas Eve 2003. The US department of homeland security raised the national terror alert level to “high risk”. The move triggered a ripple of concern throughout the airline industry and nearly 30 flights were grounded, including long hauls between Paris and Los Angeles and subsequently London and Washington.
But in recent weeks, US officials have made a startling admission: the key intelligence that prompted the security alert was seriously flawed. CIA analysts believed they had detected hidden terrorist messages in al-Jazeera television broadcasts that identified flights and buildings as targets. In fact, what they had seen were the equivalent of faces in clouds – random patterns all too easily over-interpreted.
It’s a signal-to-noise issue. If you look at enough noise, you’re going to find signal just by random chance. It’s only signal that rises above random chance that’s valuable.
And the whole notion of terrorists using steganography to embed secret messages was ludicrous from the beginning. It makes no sense to communicate with terrorist cells this way, given the wide variety of more efficient anonymous communications channels.
I first wrote about this in September of 2001.
The Register comments on the government using a border-security failure to push for national ID cards:
The Government spokesman the media could get hold of last weekend, leader of the House of Commons Geoff Hoon, said that the Government was looking into whether there should be “additional” passport checks on Eurostar, and added that the matter showed the need for identity cards because “it’s vitally important that we know who is coming in as well as going out.” Meanwhile the Observer reported plans by ministers to accelerate the introduction of the e-borders system in order to increase border security.
So shall we just sum that up? A terror suspect appears to have fled the country by the simple expedient of walking past an empty desk, and the Government’s reaction is not to put somebody at the desk, or to find out why, during one of the biggest manhunts London has ever seen, it was empty in the first place. No, the Government’s reaction is to explain its abject failure to play with the toys it’s got by calling for bigger, more expensive toys sooner. Asked about passport checks at Waterloo on Monday of this week, the Prime Minister’s spokeswoman said we do have passport checks—which actually we do, sort of. But, as we’ll explain shortly, we also have empty desks to go with them.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.
