Won't You Come Home, Tom Clancy?
by tristero
Having just finished Jane Mayer's awesomely infuriating account of America's descent into torture and murder, The Dark Side, I was struck by how mundane the really effective anti-terrorism tactics are. If you have a high-value prisoner, you don't need perverse and complex torture regimens but you do need to establish rapport. You don't need elaborate high tech monitoring, but you do need native-language speakers (if I remember Mayer's book correctly, on 9/11, the FBI had exactly 5 translators fluent in Arabic). And you need plain luck coupled with a quick mind, the two factors that thwarted the millennium attacks, for example. Of course, it also helps if you upgrade your internet phone connection from 14.4 to 28k - or even higher - and can make a pretty good google, but mostly, it's the simple ideas that make the difference.
It turns out that, in addition to torture and murder, two other anti-terrorism tactics so enamored of the right (remember Total Information Awareness, run by a former Iran/Contra criminal?) have no scientific basis and can, in fact make us less safe:Two methods the federal government wants to use to find terrorists -- "data mining" and "behavior detection" -- are dubious scientifically and have "enormous potential" for infringing on law-abiding Americans' privacy, a consortium of scientists said.
Some Transportation Safety Administration officers use behavior detection at U.S. airports.
Data mining involves searching databases for suspicious and revealing relationships and patterns. But while the technique is useful in commercial settings to detect credit card fraud, it is questionable whether data mining can detect and pre-empt terrorist attacks, the National Research Council said.
Behavior detection, used by the Transportation Security Administration and some police departments to isolate possible criminals from crowds, likewise falls short of meeting scientific standards, the group said.
"There is not a consensus within the relevant scientific community" that behavior detection is "ready for use ... given the present state of the science," the group said.
The group cautioned that "inappropriate ... responses to the terrorist threat ... can do more damage to the fabric of society than terrorists would be likely to do."
However,Behavioral observation techniques have "enormous potential for violating the reasonable expectations of privacy of individuals," the report says.
And therefore we can expect the McCain/Cheney/Palin rightwing to embrace it wholeheartedly.