www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/11/the_war_on_the.html
Architecture and Anti-Terrorist Paranoia November 01, 2007 The War on the Unexpected We've opened up a new front on the war on terror. It's an attack on the unique, the unorthodox, the unexpected; If you act different, you might find yourself investigated, questioned, and even arrested -- even if you did nothing wrong, and had no intention of doing anything wrong. The problem is a combination of citizen informants and a CYA attitude among police that results in a knee-jerk escalation of reported threats. This isn't the way counterterrorism is supposed to work, but it's happening everywhere. It's a result of our relentless campaign to convince ordinary citizens that they're the front line of terrorism defense.
The person he says it to -- a policeman, a security guard, a flight attendant -- now faces a choice: ignore or escalate. Even though he may believe that it's a false alarm, it's not in his best interests to dismiss the threat. But if he escalates, he'll be praised for "doing his job" and the cost will be borne by others. And the person he escalates to also escalates, in a series of CYA decisions. And before we're done, innocent people have been arrested, airports have been evacuated, and hundreds of police hours have been wasted. This story has been repeated endlessly, both in the US and in other countries. Someone -- these are all real -- notices a funny smell, or some white powder, or two people passing an envelope, or a dark-skinned man leaving boxes at the curb, or a cell phone in an airplane seat; the police cordon off the area, make arrests, and/or evacuate airplanes;
Of course, by then it's too late for the authorities to admit that they made a mistake and overreacted, that a sane voice of reason at some level should have prevailed. What follows is the parade of police and elected officials praising each other for doing a great job, and prosecuting the poor victim -- the person who was different in the first place -- for having the temerity to try to trick them. For some reason, governments are encouraging this kind of behavior. It's not just the publicity campaigns asking people to come forward and snitch on their neighbors;
new law protecting people who turn in their travel mates based on some undefined "objectively reasonable suspicion," whatever that is. If you ask amateurs to act as front-line security personnel, you shouldn't be surprised when you get amateur security. The first is to stop urging people to report their fears. People have always come forward to tell the police when they see something genuinely suspicious, and should continue to do so. But encouraging people to raise an alarm every time they're spooked only squanders our security resources and makes no one safer.
realistically assess, not automatically escalate, citizen tips. In criminal matters, law enforcement is experienced in separating legitimate tips from unsubstantiated fears, and allocating resources accordingly; we should expect no less from them when it comes to terrorism. Equally important, politicians need to stop praising and promoting the officers who get it wrong. And everyone needs to stop castigating, and prosecuting, the victims just because they embarrassed the police by their innocence.
causes its own form of terror, and encourages people to be even more alarmist in the future. We need to spend our resources on things that actually make us safer, not on chasing down and trumpeting every paranoid threat anyone can come up with. com EDITED TO ADD (11/1): Some links didn't make it into the original article.
The only effective Americans on that day were the security amateurs. The shoe bomber was stopped by amateurs before the professionals deployed any million dollar sniffers or had us all walking in our socks through airports. The professionals have completely failed to secure the airline employee side of airport security. The idea that we should relax and trust the experts is ludicrous. We're all going to have to put up with some false alarms.
November 1, 2007 05:15 AM I wonder if the solution is not to discourage people from reporting their fears, but to sharply escalate. The more false reports, the more resources will be squandered and the harder it will be for front-line officials to escalate. It will either break the "report your neighbor" system or force officials to develop better threat assessments on the front-line.
November 1, 2007 05:29 AM Bruce, terror awareness campaigns in the UK are nothing new. Something many Americans forget is that we had 30 years of IRA bombings before 9/11 which is kind of ironic given that most of the IRA's money came from the US.
November 1, 2007 06:17 AM Tom:"I wonder if the solution is not to discourage people from reporting their fears, but to sharply escalate." At the rate things are going, raising false reports might earn yourself an all expenses paid for vacation to scenic Cuba.
November 1, 2007 06:17 AM "Someone -- these are all real -- notices a funny smell... Surely you've burned chilis before - the "funny smell" you get is more like a cloud of choking gas. "Funny smells" happen in your nose: burning chilis you can feel in your lungs. And that's just a couple of peppers in a frying pan in my kitchen - if a Thai restaurant is burning enough chilis to last it a year (and I can assure you a Thai restaurant in Soho will get through a heck of a lot of chili sauce in a year), that's going to produce quite a lot of choking gas. It would come as quite a shock to someone who walks through it unawares. I agree that the response was an over-reaction, but was an over-reaction to harmless (if you don't have asthma) asphyxiating gas, not an over-reaction to a funny smell.
November 1, 2007 06:31 AM Keith, did the passengers on Flight 93 need a "if you see something suspicious campaign?" Did the passengers that stopped the shoe bomber need that? Or were ordinary people capable of judging when the circumstances were severe enough to warrant direct action? It's the so-called experts that are leading the fear-monger campaign that gets MIT students captured in front of MP5 machine guns.
November 1, 2007 06:48 AM On 9/11, the amateurs were no better than the professionals at detecting the attacks, or we wouldn't have lost the World Trade Center and a huge fraction of my local fire department: the passengers on the planes that hit the World Trade Center didn't guess "we should fight the terrorists." The amateurs took effective last-minute action during the attack, but only after hearing of the successful attacks. How to handle an actual in-progress terrorist attack is a different question from how to tell an actual terrorist from either a kid with a stupid sense of humor, or an innocent doing something like making a phone call to a friend, or taking out his recycling. The stupid kid: some teenage schmuck on a train I was on a few months ago pulled the cord of his headphones partway out of his backpack, put it down, and proceeded to shout something about a "suspicious package". The train sat there for a few minutes as the train crew worked their way back to our car. Then another passenger picked the pack up, tossed it onto the platform, and called out an all clear, and we went on our way. I don't know if the schmuck got his bag back from the lost-and-found, had it destroyed by the police, or some other random teenager enjoyed the free MP3 player.
November 1, 2007 06:49 AM @SteveJ : I think that's exactly Bruce's point: Security assessment by amateurs. I'm pretty sure professional security personnel would not be tipped off by Thai chilli sauce.
You're describing a positive feedback loop without any dampening, so that noise will dominate and mask any genuine signal. In economic terms, the cost of all error has been externalized, so there is no incentive to be accurate or minimize false positives; in fact error directly leads to additional positive reinforcement, resulting in news coverage, promotions, additional budget and fancy new gear. The main problem is that the people who suffer and are inconvenienced by this are not the ones who stand to reap the benefits from the process, and they have little recourse to...
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