We've opened up a new front on the war on terror. It's an attack on the unique, the unorthodox, the unexpected; it's a war on different. 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. "If you see something, say something" is how the ads read in the
The problem is that ordinary citizens don't know what a real terrorist threat looks like. They can't tell the difference between a bomb and a tape dispenser, electronic name badge, CD player, bat detector, or trash sculpture; or the difference between terrorist plotters and imams, musicians, or architects. All they know is that something makes them uneasy, usually based on fear, media hype, or just something being different.
Even worse: after someone reports a "terrorist threat," the whole system is biased towards escalation and CYA instead of a more realistic threat assessment.
Watch how it happens. Someone sees something, so he says something. 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. If he's wrong, it'll cost him his career. But if he escalates, he'll be praised for "doing his job" and the cost will be borne by others. So he escalates. 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
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; they're asking certain professions to pay particular attention: truckers to watch the highways, students to watch campuses, and scuba instructors to watch their students. The
If you ask amateurs to act as front-line security personnel, you shouldn't be surprised when you get amateur security.
We need to do two things. 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.
We don't want people to never report anything. A store clerk's tip led to the unraveling of a plot to attack
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.
Causing a city-wide panic over blinking signs, a guy with a pellet gun, or stray backpacks, is not evidence of doing a good job: it's evidence of squandering police resources. Even worse, it 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.
Ad campaigns:
http://www.mta.info/mta/security/index.html
http://www.manchestereveningnews.co.uk/news/s/1000/...
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/04/...
Administration comments:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/...
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/...
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?...
Incidents:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/6387857.stm
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/09/...
http://www.lineofduty.com/content/view/84004/128/
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/05/...
http://www.startribune.com/462/story/826056.html
http://dir.salon.com/story/tech/col/smith/2004/07/...
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2006/10/...
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/10/...
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20441775/
http://www.thisisbournemouth.co.uk/...
http://alternet.org/rights/50939/
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/04/...
http://www.mercurynews.com/breakingnews/ci_7084101?...
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/city_region/...
http://www.postgazette.com/pg/06081/674773.stm
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/04/...
CYA:
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/02/...
Public campaigns:
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/12/...
http://www.winnipegfirst.ca/article/2007/09/24/...
http://www.underwatertimes.com/print.php?...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_TIPS
Law protecting tipsters:
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/07245/813550-37.stm
Successful tips:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/...
http://www.pe.com/localnews/publicsafety/stories/...
This essay originally appeared in Wired.com:
http://www.wired.com/politics/security/commentary/...
Some links didn't make it into the original article. There's this creepy "if you see a father holding his child's hands, call the cops" campaign:
http://www.bloggernews.net/18108
There's this story of an iPod found on an airplane:
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?...
There's this story of an "improvised electronics device" trying to get through airport security:
http://www.makezine.com/blog/archive/2007/09/...
This is a good essay on the "war on electronics."
http://www.cnet.com/surveillance-state/...
3 comments:
THE Police as a class aspire as do we all, to lavish daily expressions of servile respect; un-questioning admiration esp from the nubile of all genders; and, abject compliance from the others, unattractive. Encouraging people to indulge in /fear/ & operate as snitches, thus, is a way of raising the ante all round; and, it serves co-optation, by giving the lower moral- and intellectual-orders an excited feeling of being (at least in America) "in on some REAL big shit, Man!"
IN The end, the police themselves undergo psychological individual inflation; they fall then into an atmosphere of hysterical /participation mystique/; and, the consequence is that, corporately, they conduct themselves /en masse/ as a unwieldy & violent, stupid, poly-jursidictional animal.
THE Following two bits was strung together by me earlier in the year:
http://bodwyn.wordpress.com/2007/04/15/a-tale-from-the-american-heart-land-of-police-procedures-gone-awry/#more-195
http://bodwyn.wordpress.com/2007/04/15/death-in-the-amboy-winters-night/
THEY Are tedious to go over in detail, I daresay; but, the important point is that an emotionallty-distrait man of the low psychological class was first of all encouraged to surrender after a domestic stand-off; and then, on coming out, he was 'tasered' by a uniformed hot-head lurking in the dark at the house-corner, in on the 'siege' & quite evidently resentful at having been drawn away from his computerful of child-pornography on a holiday-eve, by alarums & excursions.
THE Betrayed man in a rage ran back into his home, opened fire with the ubiquitous 'deer-rifle' to be found everywhere here & needlessly wounded two cops; whereat, he was then was gut-shot and let bleed to death; whilst the police in agony of grief & outrage escorted their wounded colleagues to the regional casualty-department, to the sickly wail of the bagpipes & wailing and rending their garments.
THE Point is that all of this taser-play goes on now because of Homeland Security (/sic/)-funded heart-land police-equipment upgrades -- all of it a sordid result of the 'cover yer arse!' mentality, so common here to in the American system of "organized irresponsibilty."
Thanks whoever this malign craze has not yet arrived here.
But, it has arrived here in Britain.
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