Small Country Ideals Don't Work in a Large Country

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?

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