Here's more from Newsweek over the weekend on the details of the breakdown in U.S. security to prevent the attempted attack on Northwest Flight 253 on Christmas Day:
Former U.S law-enforcement and intelligence officials are scathing about the U.S. government’s handling of pre-Christmas intelligence about Abdulmutallab and the prospect of a possible attack from Yemen. “The system should have been lighting up like a Christmas tree,” said Ali Soufan, a former senior FBI counterterrorism agent who spent years tracking Qaeda suspects in Yemen (and often battled with the CIA over information sharing).
When Abdulmutallab’s father visited the U.S. Embassy in Abuja, Nigeria, in November to report his concerns that his son might have been involved with Islamic extremists in Yemen, the FBI had no representative at the meeting; the FBI maintains an attaché only in Lagos on the southern coast, not in Abuja, the capital. But the CIA, which did have an officer present who wrote up a report on the meeting, never told the FBI about Abdulmutallab.
I think our anti-terrorism systems focuses too much on technology and too little on the terrorists themselves. But the latter would require us to get over these problems in aggregating information from disparate sources. So we are left with expensive, intrusive, and only weakly effective technological interventions.
Read the whole thing.
Back to the basics.
It is somewhat similar to the less is more line of thinking. We could possibly do a lot better with our national security if we simply go back to basics. Sometimes things just get too technical and dangerous people and things fall through the cracks. casino online
As Old as Lice
Edmund Layton describes similar issues as contributing to the surprise at Pearl Harbor. He feels that lack of intel sharing is a normative condition and that executive effort must be expended to have things be different.
So I think that it's likely that one Roman Legion witheld information of value from another, for silly reasons.
Effective airline security
I think our anti-terrorism systems focuses too much on technology and too little on the terrorists themselves.
Of course. And there is a very effective proven model that works the other way: the Israeli one.
However, that model requires two things:
(1) Ethnic profiling.
(2) Substantial investment in training of, and good wages paid to, airport screeners. Who then are managed as a skilled work force.
But here in the US #1 is politically verbotten; and #2, with all the millions of people running through US airports, is economically not feasable.
So we here in the US have rent-a-cop quality airport screeners checking Scandanavian grandmothers pushing babies in strollers to see if they are Islamic suicide bombers, in a properly nondiscriminatory manner.
And as to the technology they use ... well, Newark Airport was closed for six hours last Sunday after a person walked in the "out" gate while the Transportation Secuirity Agency guard supposed to be watching it decided to take off and make a personal cell phone call. Then, when people complained out it, the TSA could't spot the intruder because its security cameras weren't working.
So the TSA tried to get Continental Airlines to provide video from its cameras (private business to the rescue) but it didn't know how to reach Continental's people, in the same airport. Eventually it got the video from Continental (here it is) but it was too late, they had to close down the airport and re-search everyone in it.
So to sum this up: TSA guard disappears after deciding to take cell phone break ... TSA cameras not working ... TSA doesn't know how to reach airline people at the same location to ask for help.
The only people who actually functioned correctly were the travelers who complained, "Hey, someone went in the out gate!", and Continental.
And we expect multiple government agencies to co-ordinate rapid identificaton of people like the "underwear bomber" across bureaucracies and nations on the strength of tips??
Meanwhile, at Kennedy Airport, reporters are walking through one metal detector after happily carrying metal undetected.
Faith in technology, it's the American way.