[Infowarrior] - Schneier: The War on the Unexpected (Good Read)

[Richard Forno]

(agree 110% with his sentiments...........rf)

The War on the Unexpected

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2007/11/the_war_on_the.html

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 New York City subways.
"If you suspect something, report it" urges another ad campaign in
Manchester, UK. The Michigan State Police have a seven-minute video.
Administration officials from then-attorney general John Ashcroft to DHS
Secretary Michael Chertoff to President Bush have asked us all to report any
suspicious activity.

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 a 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 U.S. and in other
countries. Someone -- these are all real -- notices a funny smell, or some
white powder, or two people passing an envelope, or a dark-skinned man
leaving boxes at the curb, or a cell phone in an airplane seat; the police
cordon off the area, make arrests, and/or evacuate airplanes; and in the end
the cause of the alarm is revealed as a pot of Thai chili sauce, or flour,
or a utility bill, or an English professor recycling, or a cell phone in an
airplane seat.

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 U.S. wanted meter readers and
telephone repairmen to snoop around houses. There's even a new law
protecting people who turn in their travel mates based on some undefined
"objectively reasonable suspicion," whatever that is.

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 Fort Dix last May, and in March an alert
Southern California woman foiled a kidnapping by calling the police about a
suspicious man carting around a person-sized crate. But these incidents only
reinforce the need to realistically asses, not automatically escalate,
citizen tips. In criminal matters, law enforcement is experienced in
separating legitimate tips from unsubstantiated fears, and allocating
resources accordingly; we should expect no less from them when it comes to
terrorism.

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.

This essay originally appeared in Wired.com

EDITED TO ADD (11/1): 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, this story of an iPod found on an airplane, and this story
of an "improvised electronics device" trying to get through airport
security. This is a good essay on the "war on electronics."