The terror threat

While the debate rages over the success of our anti-terror strategy abroad and the wisdom of interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq I think that one area where far more consensus exists is that is our domestic approach to combating terror is little short of a mess. It's a strategy that is costly, ineffective, stokes fear and infringes unnecessarily upon our civil liberties. It has been flawed from its inception and is a joke on virtually every level.

About five weeks after the Sept. 11. terror attacks Congress passed the Aviation and Transportation Security Act that created the Transportation Security Administration, which effectively turned the responsibility for airline screening over to the government from private firms. Much like the current economic mess Congress passed legislation out of the need to be perceived as doing something -- anything -- about terrorism and security even if it ultimately proved counter-productive.

The apparent logic behind the move was that government screeners would be more vigilant and effective than their profit-motivated counterparts in the private sector. This is the same government, mind you, that mailed visa approval letters to the 9/11 hijackers six months after the attacks were committed.

The results are not surprising:

Despite six years of patting down passengers, [the TSA] hasn't reported uncovering a single terrorist. No wonder it latched onto the nonsense about liquid bombs. Ferreting out and confiscating everyday substances not only makes work for 43,000 screeners, it also fools us into thinking this protects us.

It's all a dog and pony show. You show up, get your ID checked, take off your shoes and walk through a metal detector while a bunch of uniformed people that look like members of a Jerry Springer audience scan your stuff. Doesn't exactly inspire much confidence, but in truth it wouldn't matter whether it was the feds or the private sector running things since it is the very process itself that is most flawed.

A potential terrorist gets searched

The TSA is part of the Department of Homeland Security, created about 15 months after 9/11. Of all the cabinet departments this one perhaps most richly deserves to go on the chopping block. Its very name is an insult that conjures up something more likely to be found in a police state than the ostensibly freedom-loving United States of America. After all isn't defending the country the job of the, you know, Department of Defense? This Orwellian sounding amalgamation of various government agencies is described by The New Republic as a "man made disaster" full of waste and inefficiencies that rise to a level embarrassing even for government:

The most recent survey by the U.S. Office of Personnel Management on the job satisfaction of federal employees in 36 agencies ranked Homeland Security last or near last in every category. Meanwhile, officials from the Pentagon who have tried to do business with DHS complained to me of organizational chaos at the department. Homeland Security employees, they said, are often unaware of overlapping initiatives championed by their colleagues, and even by [DHS head Michael] Chertoff himself.

...John Mueller--a political scientist and author of Overblown: How Politicians and the Terrorism Industry Inflate National Security Threats, and Why We Believe Them--has compared federal homeland security expenditures since September 11 with the expected lives saved as a result of the increased spending and concluded that the annual cost ranged from $64 million to $600 million per life saved. By contrast, the federal government's standard regulatory goal for cost-effective prevention measures is $1 to $10 million per life saved.

It's absolutely ridiculous. In the name of homeland defense we're spending millions everywhere from South Dakota to Tennessee. And for what? What are the odds that Osama bin Laden could even locate Memphis without the use of google maps? It's enough to make one suspect that the real purpose of the DHS is more to dispense pork than fight terrorists.

The simple truth of the matter, however, is that the threat posed by terrorism is overblown and that we can't rely on the government to stop it. In the scheme of things terrorism really isn't that big of a deal in terms of lives lost in the U.S. The combined death toll of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and the 9/11 attacks is 2,980 or 7% of the number of fatalities caused by car accidents in the U.S. in 2003. Your odds of getting killed by a terrorist attack here in the U.S. -- especially if you live outside a major metropolis -- are about the same as getting attacked by a shark.

That's not to say that terrorism isn't a legimate threat. It is. But having the DHS shovel out millions of taxpayer dollars so that the people of Sioux Falls can better ward off Al Qaeda is absurd. The better approach is to find where their bases are overseas and kill them. That's where JDAMs and the Navy Seals come in handy.

That's not to say that such an approach will prevent all terrorists from arriving in the U.S. But domestically the solution is not to rely on the government or police but the people. After all, the chances of government security personnel intersecting with terrorists at the precise moment of an attack are remote (similarly this is why citizens should be allowed to carry guns since the police can't be everywhere). As The New Republic notes the most potent defense we can offer is a vigilant population:

According to policing scholar Dennis Kenney of John Jay College of Criminal Justice, the prevention technologies DHS likes to fund have never been effective in revealing plots before they are hatched and tend to lead to information overload. Instead, Kenney says, "the best police department doesn't have the best technologies; it has good community relations with citizens who want to tell them what's going on." Kenney notes that the New York police uncovered a post-September 11 subway bombing plot because of a tip and arrested the suspects when they arrived at the station. During the Clinton administration, the Justice Department prevented abortion clinic bombings by winning the trust of pro-lifers, who then turned over their members at the radical fringe. And Kenney notes that the Colombian police, in one of the most striking terrorism successes of the past few years, have learned the same lesson: "Fifteen years ago, the military had no way of knowing where to strike; now they have information coming to the Colombian police from the community about where the farc terrorists and narco-terrorists are, because the police have built community trust."

And when the terrorists strike the people can also play a crucial role as demonstrated by the passengers of United flight 93. This also illustrates another principle, which is that the best defenses are those that the terrorists don't see. On Sept. 11 the terrorists figured out how to beat every obvious security measure. If you can see it you can study it and figure out a way to defeat it. What they did not count on was the passengers rising up against them.

It seems, however, that we haven't learned that lesson. Instead we install more cameras, subject an ever expanding list of items to search and seizure at our airports and build barriers to defeat car bombs and other explosive devices. Each time we do that we trade a little bit more of our freedom for security.

Whatever happened to the land of the free and the home of the brave?