Category Archives: Politics – Intelligence Issues

Why Do We Impose the TSA on Ourselves?

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Two items exhibiting the dubious judgment of government bureaucrats caught my attention today.

The first is that Securities and Exchange Commission going to try and make a fraud case against Goldman Sachs. Inasmuch as the SEC couldn’t uncover Bernie Madoff or Stanford Financial’s sketchy affairs despite being told about them, how on earth is the agency going to prove fraud in a transaction between sophisticated investors who knew what was going on? Expect a financial settlement any day now.

Meanwhile, let’s check out another government agency’s bumbling decision-making:

More than thirty organizations across the political spectrum have filed a formal petition with the Department of Homeland Security, urging the federal agency to suspend the airport body scanner program.Leading security expert Bruce Schneier stated, “Body scanners are one more example of security theater.

Last year, the organizations asked Secretary Janet Napolitano to give the public an opportunity to comment on the proposal to expand the body scanner program. Secretary Napolitano rejected the request.

Since that time, evidence has emerged that the privacy safeguards do not work and that the devices are not very effective. “At this point, there is no question that the body scanner program should be shut down. This is the worst type of government boondoggle — expensive, ineffective, and offensive to Constitutional rights and deeply held religious beliefs,” said Marc Rotenberg, President of EPIC.

And if Bruce Schneier‘s opinion isn’t good enough for you, take heed of what a leading security expert who is constantly on the front lines says about the scanners:

A leading Israeli airport security expert says the Canadian government has wasted millions of dollars to install “useless” imaging machines at airports across the country.

“I don’t know why everybody is running to buy these expensive and useless machines. I can overcome the body scanners with enough explosives to bring down a Boeing 747,” Rafi Sela told parliamentarians probing the state of aviation safety in Canada.”That’s why we haven’t put them in our airport,” Sela said, referring to Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion International Airport, which has some of the toughest security in the world.

Sela, former chief security officer of the Israel Airport Authority and a 30-year veteran in airport security and defense technology, helped design the security at Ben Gurion.

Despite what the experts say, he wasteful airport security process that we have allowed the Transportation Security Administration to impose on us continues unabated at a substantial direct cost and an even greater indirect one.

It’s bad enough that the TSA’s procedures do virtually nothing to discourage serious terrorist threats. What’s worse is that the inspection process is really just “security theater” that makes only a few naive travelers feel safer about airline travel.

And if all that weren’t bad enough, the worst news is that once a governmental “safeguard” such as the TSA procedures are adopted, Congress has no interest in dismantling it even when it’s clear that process is ineffective, expensive and obtrusive to citizens. Stated simply, the TSA has become a jobs program for thousands of registered voters.

James Fallows sums up the absurdity of the situation well:

TSA + defense contractor + security theater vs Israeli expert + Schneier + common sense.

Hmmm, I don’t know what to believe.

Thinking about Cheney’s remarks

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dick-cheney Many Americans were repulsed by the methods former Vice-President Dick Cheney used to consolidate and exercise war powers in the Executive Branch during the administration of George W. Bush.

Unfortunately, that controversy clouds many people’s judgment on Cheney’s many noteworthy accomplishments during his 30-year career in public service. He has been an extraordinary public servant.

My sense is that Cheney based his aggressive exercise of war powers during the Bush Administration in large part on classified information regarding the risk of more attacks on U.S. citizens after the attacks of September 11, 2001, a point that Barton Gellman notes in his seminal but generally critical book on the Cheney vice-presidency, Angler: The Cheney Vice-Presidency (Penguin 2008).

Cheney’s public comments from earlier this week appear to be consistent with my impression regarding his assessment of the risk of further attacks.

Given that, when you have 25 minutes or so, take the time to watch the video below of Irwin Redlener’s recent TED lecture on how the nature of a nuclear attack threat on the United States has changed, but our generally deficient approach to preparing for one has not.

As Dick Cheney says, fighting those who would levy such an attack on the U.S. is “a tough, mean, dirty, nasty business.”

Here’s hoping that the Obama Administration is up to the task.

Security theater

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tsa While considering the abject vacuity of the presidential candidates’ positions on the major issues this election season, I started thinking about some minor issues that might make a difference in my vote.

For example, if either major candidate came out in favor of dismantling the "security" apparatus that the federal government has foisted upon us to make airline travel an aggravation, at best, and an ordeal most of the time, then that candidate would probably get my vote.

Alas, neither candidate has proposed such a dismantling.

Nevertheless, don’t miss this clever-but-serious Jeffrey Goldberg/Atlantic.com article on the utter uselessness of the Transportation Safety Administration’s airport security procedures (prior post here).

Inasmuch as the only two airport-security measures that really matter — fortified cockpit doors and the awareness of the flying public as to what a hijacking can mean — have been in place virtually since the attacks of September 11, 2001, Goldberg zeroes in on the wasteful airport security process that we have allowed the TSA to impose on us at a substantial direct cost and an even greater indirect one.

Moreover, that process does virtually nothing to discourage serious terrorist threats. Rather, the inspection process is "security theater" that simply makes a few naive travelers feel safer about airline travel.

Finally, if all that weren’t bad enough, the worst news is that once a governmental "safeguard" such as the TSA apparatus is adopted, few politicians are interested in dismantling it even when it’s clear that process is ineffective, expensive and obtrusive.

That’s food for thought as we get ready to endure implementation of the next round of governmental regulation of business.

Myths of the war

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dhs_threat_new-tbn_1.jpgMy nephew Richard and I had a good laugh about the new Homeland Security Threat Level on the left that resulted from Michael Chertoff’s ill-advised warning regarding the terror threat from earlier in the week. But kidding aside, following on this earlier post regarding James Fallows’ Atlantic Monthly piece, this Steve Chapman RCP op-ed provides a level-headed analysis of the actual threat of an attack from Islamic fascists and the counterproductive nature of the Bush Administration’s characterization of the conflict as a global “war on terror.” Check it out.

Tax simplification made simple

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flat%20tax.jpgOne of the more distressing aspects of the Bush Administration’s distractions is the abandonment of the movement toward income tax simplification. In this lucid EconTalk session, Alvin Rabushka of Stanford University’s Hoover Institution lays out the case for the flat tax, which he has been advocating with colleague Robert Hall since 1981. Rabuska’s plan would reform the current system that is based on the 66,000 page U.S. Tax Code with a single rate and no deductions other than personal exemptions, and each individual tax return would be the size of a postcard. This is a common sense reform that is long overdue for many reasons, including one that Russ Roberts makes: “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if all the talented people who currently help rich people avoid taxes were instead encouraged to something productive?” Check out Rabushka’s talk.

Judge Posner: The FBI should not be in
the counterterrorism business

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fbisealwmed.jpgProlific Seventh Circuit Judge Richard Posner has become one of the nation’s leading experts on domestic intelligence issues (see previous posts here, here and here) and is the author of Uncertain Shield: The U.S. Intelligence System in the Throes of Reform ( Rowman & Littlefield 2006). In this Wall Street Journal ($) op-ed, Judge Posner says that it’s time to quit placing the round peg of the Federal Bureau of Investigation into the square hole of counterterrorism:

Is it the case that the FBI is “incapable of effective counterterrorism,” as an editorial in this newspaper wondered? Does the country need “to debate again whether domestic antiterror functions should be taken from the FBI and given to a new agency modeled after Britain’s MI5”?
The answer to both questions is yes. [. . .]
For prosecutors and detectives, success is measured by arrests, convictions and sentences. That is fine when the object is merely to keep the crime rate within tolerable limits. But the object of counterterrorism is prevention. Terrorist attacks are too calamitous for the punishment of the terrorists who survive the attack to be an adequate substitute for prevention.
Detecting terrorist plots in advance so that they can be thwarted is the business of intelligence agencies. The FBI is not an intelligence agency, and has a truncated conception of intelligence: gathering information that can be used to obtain a conviction. A crime is committed, having a definite time and place and usually witnesses and often physical evidence and even suspects. This enables a criminal investigation to be tightly focused. Prevention, in contrast, requires casting a very wide investigative net, chasing down ambiguous clues, and assembling tiny bits of information (hence the importance of information technology, which plays a limited role in criminal investigations).
The bureau lacks the tradition, the skills, the patience, the incentive structures, the recruitment criteria, the training methods, the languages, the cultural sensitivities and the career paths that national-security intelligence requires. All the bureau’s intelligence operations officers undergo the full special-agent training. That training emphasizes firearms skills, arrest techniques and self-defense, and the legal rules governing criminal investigations. None of these proficiencies are germane to national-security intelligence. What could be more perverse than to train new employees for one kind of work and assign them to another for which they have not been trained?

Read the entire op-ed. Despite my reservations about creating another governmental agency with the power to spy on citizens, what Judge Posner advocates makes a lot of sense.

Posner on domestic intelligence

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posner6.jpgSeventh Circuit Judge Richard Posner has carved out a niche as an expert on intelligence issues (see previous posts here and here), and his new book on intelligence issues — Uncertain Shield: The U.S. Intelligence System in the Throes of Reform ( Rowman & Littlefield 2006) — will be published next week.
In this Opinion Journal op-ed, Judge Posner notes that the Bush Administration continues to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic by burying domestic intelligence operations in the FBI, which is a criminal-investigation agency, rather than a domestic intelligence agency that is focused on intelligence gathering:

[B]urying our principal assets for detecting terrorist plots that unfold within the U.S. in a criminal-investigation agency–the FBI–is unsound. We are the only major country that does this. The U.K.’s domestic intelligence agency, MI5, works closely with Scotland Yard, Britain’s counterpart to the FBI. But it is not part of Scotland Yard.

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Attempting to pin down Atta in Prague

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Mohamed_Atta.jpgEdward Jay Epstein (previous post here) is the author of a new book on Hollywood, The Big Picture (Random House, 2005), and is in the process of writing a book on the 9/11 Commission. In this fascinating Opinion Journal piece, Mr. Epstein explains the maddening difficulties of tracking down the truth of whether 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta met with an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague during April, 2001. Particularly interesting is the following excerpt, which describes Czech intelligence agent Jiri Ruzek’s troubling experience in dealing with the American intelligence community:

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Is this all you’ve got?

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fitzgerald.jpgThis OpinionJournal editorial does an excellent job of sizing up Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald‘s indictment (pdf here) yesterday of Vice-President Cheney’s Chief of Staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby:

Sometime in May 2003, or slightly before, Nicholas Kristof, a columnist for the New York Times, was informed of Joe Wilson’s 2002 trip to Niger to investigate claims that Saddam Hussein had attempted to buy yellowcake there. Mr. Kristof wrote a column, and Mr. Libby began to ask around, to determine why a Democratic partisan had been sent on such a sensitive mission in the run-up to the Iraq war. He allegedly learned in the course of his inquiries that Mr. Wilson’s wife worked for the CIA.

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The latest suicide bomber?

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Hinrichsbrd.jpgMaybe it’s due to the distraction of Texas-OU week or perhaps it’s just a sign of the times, but the fact that a suicide bomber nearly entered the University of Oklahoma’s football stadium last Saturday night while 84,000 people were watching OU thrash Kansas State sure seems to be flying a bit under the main radar screens, at least outside of Oklahoma. The bomber — Joel Hinrichs III — detonated an explosive device while sitting on a bench about 100 yards from the stadium after he apparently rushed off upon being required to have his backpack searched at the gate. This Counterterrorism blog post does a good job of summarizing the background and implications of the event, as does the TigerHawk in this post.