9 Votes
Modern Counter Terrorism
Even the most stalwart liberal must recognize the need for improvements and reform in national security to address the needs of modern threats. Some will argue that measures like the Patriot Act go too far while others claim it’s not far enough. There is always the crazy balance to consider between personal freedoms and privacy against the protections offered by "police state" security and invasiveness. Such an axiom has long been a part of American heritage as Ben Franklin once said, "They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security."
Take it as a given that the Cold War is over (ignoring for a moment Russia’s present actions that may bring it back) and that it is no longer a world of democracy versus communism. There are no clear lines to draw in the sand to delineate where malice, evil and hatred lie. The fact of the matter is that those who would do our society and way of life harm walk amongst us, hidden in plain sight. For a moment, put aside opinions about the current executive administration, the legislature and the deployments of soldiers.
Food for thought:
- Tightened border control
- More authorizations for access to perform data mining on voice and data networks
- Increased judicial review of evidence prior to permitting counter-terrorist operations
- Allowing different levels of government access to intelligence – e.g. state governors or city mayors are privy to relevant information from the NSA/CIA/FBI
- Engage the public to participate through television and reward programs
- Increasingly stringent identification requirements on a national basis
- Expanding national intelligence to incorporate more local resources – e.g. EMS responders that "see inside homes" make reports
- Improving public training on awareness – e.g. teaching public servants (like EMS) what to look for or teaching threat awareness in high school
- Media campaigns designed to "convert" in-country sleeper cells away from their cause
- Reduced time restrictions for Freedom of Information Act releases to permit public scrutiny
From an ideal perspective, what sort of solutions would offer positive gains in bolstering the security of America without turning the nation into gestapo-esque police state? Furthermore, even if a solution is an effective counter-measure to domestic terrorism, why is it a bad idea to implement it?
Similarly tagged OmniNerd content:
- Russian Sub Hides in Gulf of Mexico, by VnutZ 9 months ago
- Danger of Outsourcing Electronics, by VnutZ about 5 years ago
- REAL ID to Become American Reality, by VnutZ over 5 years ago
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nazi by Anonymous
all of these things are direct violations of our constitutional rights. more people understand now that 911 was a false flag attack to make us think there are terrorists trying to hurt us. the only ones trying to hurt you are the corporations and rich people that want to make it impossible for you or your children to advanace from what we are now, slaves… well folks thats all the time i have got to go to the cotton field and play toby for a while…
more info @ www.zeitgeistmovie.com
Small Country Ideals Don't Work in a Large Country by VnutZ
So I figure I’ll go ahead and kick the discussion off with some loose thoughts. Bear in mind, I’m "thinking out loud" at the moment so this may be very Faulkner-esque in it’s stream of consciousness.
In a small country, it’s very neat and tidy to wrap counter-terrorist operations into a dedicated government agency. So you have a Utopia with a Utopian CTU headed by concerned citizens Jack Bauer and Chuck Norris. Let’s say there is a hypothetical terrorist threat to bomb Gare de Nord transit station during the height of rush hour which will cave the system in and kill roughly 5000 people while causing incredible infrastructure damage. What factors go into detecting and stopping this event?
First of all, our Utopian society is small. While even a nation the size of France or Korea is large enough to have distinct cultural differences between the geographic regions and urban/rural populations, they are still not big countries. What do you get with smaller countries? Homogenizing. People tend to be the same within their locale. Those people that are different, stand out and draw attention to themselves. Thus, in terms of finding sleeper cells or active agents, unless they are culturally identical – they’re just easier to physically identify. Homogenization also provides the incentive that if the government passes a bill regarding behaviors that everyone already adheres to … well, nobody cares. An added bonus of a small nation is that there less borders to patrol and immigrants are easier to track because there is less area for them to disappear into.
So assume that a terrorist cell did successfully infiltrate into the Utopian society and lives amongst the citizens. How next to root them out? At this stage of the scenario, observable behavior must be ignored as they appear to be functioning members of Utopia. They won’t do anything particular that draws attention for neighbors Bill and Mary-Anne. This is the stage at which Jack and Chuck become useful. Short of the terrorist making a mistake and getting into a car accident where the explosives fall out of the trunk … the only agency capable of identifying their actions as hostile are those of the government. But why?
Take bank records and money laundering as an example. A good criminal/terrorist will cover the movement of their money using various money-laundering techniques. While AML [anti-money laundering] detection systems exist at various institutions, due to privacy matters and keeping banking strategies secret, no bank is going to willingly share it’s transactional data with another bank. The government, however, can force multiple banks to provide transactional data about particular parties. Separately, the data is inconclusive. Together, the money laundering effort is evident. Chuck Norris goes in and roundhouse kicks the terrorists.
Now look at communications. In a smaller nation, it’s much easier for the government to get into bed with the telecommunications industry because in many cases, it’s already nationalized as opposed to being a competitive privatized system. So you have the classic movie paranoia where a system of supercomputers scrubs phone calls, e-mail and SMS looking for patterns of keywords (very easy given that phone networks have been digitized for decades). Using the NSA’s old directive as an example, Utopia sets up its listening stations at the telecommunications borders – satellite uplinks and ingress/egress routers. This ensures that all communications monitored involve at least one foreign party since one leg of the conversation is outside Utopia. In a small country like Utopia, its somewhat reasonable to believe the commands are coming from an external location since too many terrorists within the borders makes it harder to achieve cultural invisibility. After enough "evidence" is gathered about a particular individual, Jack Bauer goes in, shoots somebody in the thigh and finds out where the rest of the bad guys are so Chuck Norris can roundhouse kick them.
And surveillance? It’s much easier in a smaller nation like Utopia because travel that deviates from normal behavior is more obviously an outlier. Even having a smaller infrastructure (trains, buses and highways) essentially constrains the mark such that following movement and recording their behavior is much easier. Tailing does not require as many agents and is less obvious which allows the mark to remain both oblivious and let their guard down. Ultimately, smaller size provides less options for hiding, less options for evading and less options for executing which dramatically simplifiy the surveillance requirements by Jack and Chuck. This allows the agency to simply be better at what they do and focus on weaknesses rather than continually play cat ’n mouse while either neglecting other weaknesses or incurring agency bloat from having to hire additional agents to fill the gaps.
On game day itself, Utopia’s agents have the advantages above giving them a leg up on the mark in efforts to thwart the action from occurring. All the while, the common citizen really doesn’t need to have any knowledge that this is transpiring around them. As Agent K spoke in the movie Men In Black, "There’s always an Arquillian Battle Cruiser, or a Corillian Death Ray, or an intergalactic plague that is about to wipe out all life on this miserable little planet, and the only way these people can get on with their happy lives is that they Do… Not… Know about it!" Such is the bliss of a small nation. And if Jack Bauer and Chuck Norris fail? Well, things are catastrophic and everyone is proportionately affected by nature of their proximity (both physical and emotional) to victims of the incident.
Sooooo … where does America fail in this? We fail because we’re enormous and diverse with a penchant towards liberty. Let’s take the previous examples for Utopia and contemplate why these successes touted by little countries as examples of their greatness simply do not apply to any nation that span multiple time zones.
We’re not homogenous. America has little pots of homogenization based on geography, but on the whole, no. And while BFE, Oklahoma might be homogenous, frankly, they’re simply not a terrorist target because they’re in the middle of BFE. Take your major metropolitan cities, however, and you might find a homogenous urban culture but that’s about where the similarities cease. You can walk through sections of Manhattan and not hear English (or Spanish) for blocks at a time. If Osama bin Laden himself were standing on the corner selling Sabrett’s hot dogs or falafels, you’d pay him your money and walk along without batting an eye. Our nation by nature lends itself to disappearing amongst the people. Furthermore, we have such a phobia of having people in our personal space that build walls and elaborate privacy mechanisms such that if your next door neighbor were cooking fertilizer bombs in his garage, you’d have no idea. People tend not to even realize there are drug labs in their neighborhoods. Combine this fact with the ease with which Mexicans and Canadians infiltrate the Rio Grande and North Dakota … it’s pretty much a given that if a terrorist wants to come to and operate out of America, it’s going to happen. Our controls pretty much keep honest people honest and force the real devious people to use a little (but only a little) ingenuity. Jack Bauer is going to need a lot of bullets and a lot of people are going to be shot in the thigh before he comes up with anything legit.
Let’s roll financial transactions and communications into the same problem for America. The very beauty of capitalism is what makes it next to impossible to get a handle on what’s going on. The money-laundering and communications-monitoring examples still stand. But magnify the problem by the sheer number of options. If I want to launder money in America, I will make use of the many mechanisms at my disposal from foreign currency exchanges, front businesses, legitimate investments, etc – but scatter them across the myriad of cash vehicles. Even better, I’ll plan my strike such that all my materials will be purchased within a few days of gameday so that I can use credit cards offered to my stolen identity for free … the actual event will be paid for on credit that’s going to default anyway. Unlike drug cartels that need to continue operating – a distinct terrorist operation is a one time deal. There is simply too much private competition for agencies to be able to have a legitimate chance of catching a well trained operative. Jack Bauer only shoots people in the thigh – he doesn’t do complex SQL queries and database optimization. The same thing exists within the communications space in terms of the volume of opportunities with which miscreants can utilize. With a population like America’s, communication volume makes finding the cells from scratch a needle in the haystack operation unless complete domestic monitoring is permitted. We’re so large, that sitting at the international gateways is fruitless as you can put the entire operation within the continental United States and conduct all communications domestically. Chuck Norris simply doesn’t know who to roundhouse kick in the ear.
Surveillance? Seriously. There is soooooo much space here that if a cell got wind they were under surveillance, they can pack up and move to another state to finish the operation. Add in a little state-to-state jurisdiction nonsense and they’ll be back for gameday while Chuck Norris waits at City Hall for a meeting with somebody that’s out to lunch. The surveillance teams themselves will probably stand out more than their subjects. If anything, neighborhood watch will call in the suspicious surveillance van and have local cops detain them in yet another pissing match of jurisdiction and authority. Frankly, this has to be federal operation. It is a waste of limited budgets to train local police for the types of counter-terror training that might be necessary (chemical environments, bomb dispoal, digital forensics, etc. to name a few) which will require "special teams" that focus on these skills to come from a common pool. The sheer size of the country makes moving these teams around difficult, expensive and inevitably, their identities will also be compromised. While it can be done, it’s just not as smooth and effortless like surveillance in a small locale.
Game day. Even today, people believe 9-11 was a conspiracy or even a hoax (there was some poll a few months ago that 1 in 5 Canadians didn’t believe it happened). When you have a country so large that many people will live their entire lives without going more than 500 miles from home, events that transpire 4000 miles away simply do not affect certain citizens. Without that "personal touch" – the counter-measures themselves to prevent further incidents are more intrusive than than the original event. As such, opposition stirs, emotions rage and battles ensue over security vs liberty. America’s citizens choose statistical improbability as its principle line of defense.
None of this, however, answers the question – what can America do to thwart future terrorst acts without infringing upon the liberties with which we are accustomed?
Response by shogun_6
Until technological developments put massed forces at an advantage over the individual once again (an advantage that dissipated with recent transportation and communications developments), I would say that American options for a foolproof defense against terrorism remain limited. My best hazard at a strategy would require us to take two steps:
A) Keep anyone with the capability of reaching domestic soil (either personally or via weaponry) happy.
B) When A cannot be achieved (since nothing will keep everyone happy simultaneously), ensure that unhappy campers cannot reach you.
This is likely impossible. However, if we narrow our specification in B from ‘unhappy campers’ to ‘unhappy campers who are likely to kill you,’ feasibility increases dramatically.
Since the principal technologies responsible for the empowerment of terrorist groups (for planning, operations, recruitment, etc) are transportation and communications technology, denying ‘unhappy campers who are likely to kill you’ access to such resources, should, if I am correct, effectively accomplish B. In order to do so, I imagine that the following becomes necessary:
i) Establish a geographical zone where access to the global communications grid (via satellite, microwave, cable, or any other medium), as well as aviation and maritime transportation assets (including trade) is prohibited. Seal any land borders of said zone. ii) Enforce prohibitions with force. iii) Emplace ‘unhappy campers who are likely to kill you’ therein.Ideal Perspective... by NomadSoul
From an ideal perspective, eh? Well, okay, but you asked for it…
From an ideal perspective, the best solution to ensuring the security of any nation is a radical commitment to peace, truth, and kindness. (yeah yeah, stop laughing already, it’s true)
This means building relationships—not just between politicians—but between entire cultures, so that there is listening and understanding. In other words, asking everybody in the nation to learn everything they can about other peoples and nations, and asking them to think instead of surrendering to fear.
A commitment to peace of course means standing up for yourself (you don’t just roll over), but it also means setting limits for yourself in how you respond to threats. It means going to enormous lengths to understand why anyone would want to do you harm in the first place, and listening to their criticisms—even if they have already attacked you. That listening might even mean adjusting your own way of life, or at least making very sure that your way of life isn’t impacting theirs. And it means accepting different cultures—regardless of the injustices we see in them (i.e. helping them change by pursuasion, not by force or manipulation).
And that means fostering a culture of listening at home and abroad—but especially at home—going all out to heal internal divisons, abandon adversarial politics and worldviews, to erase economic and social inequalities—no matter how justified they might seem to be. It means checking your ego. In short, it means a hell of a long road, but it also means that when you’ve been on it for a while, nobody will want to attack you, and even if they do, the nation does not react out of fear, but has the courage and presence of mind to say: alright, you hurt us, now what seems to be the problem?—instead of bombing the crap out of them, which only perpetuates the "might is right" mentality. Only when peace is more important than our lives and ambitions will we ever truly attain it.
By the time something like a 9/11 happens, the nation has already failed countless times to understand the person who has become the enemy.
Well, that’s what would work from an ideal perspective. Unfortunately it seems like fear/hate, ignorance, and greed (on various sides) usually stand in the way of ideal solutions.